Bigamy is banned in India, but a singular agreement reached between a bigamist and the two women he married - hiding each other's existence - has grabbed the headlines of the local media.
The man, a computer engineer, will divide his time, the two apartments he owns and his salary between his two wives, who have given him one child each.
From Monday to Wednesday she will live in one family, from Thursday to Saturday in the other, on Sunday she will be "single", with no obligations towards either.
Only if he breaks the rules will his first wife report him by bringing him before a magistrate.
The agreement was also ratified by a mediator of the Gwalior family court, the lawyer Harish Dewan, who specified that he accepted it because, even if bigamy is prohibited by law in India, the man has not been reported for this crime.
The first wife, married in 2018, worked in the same company as her husband, in Gurgaon, near Delhi: after two years together, only a few months pregnant, at the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 she returned to live with her parents in Gwalior, where her husband he never reached her again. In the meantime, he had married another colleague, who was also pregnant: the new relationship was discovered by his first wife earlier this year, when she finally went looking for her husband, now without news.
After the bitter surprise, the agreement between the three was reached in a few weeks: «I can't object to anything», declared the mediator, «my task is to harmoniously resolve the disputes. The first wife wanted guarantees on child maintenance and did not want to send her husband to trial; the other did not want to give up her partner and preferred the Solomonic solution».
(Unioneonline/L)
