‘I’m Forced To Share My Husband With My Mother’

From piercing your body parts like in the Hindu Thaipusam Festival in India to dancing with the dead in Madagascar, humans follow some of the weirdest traditions.

But it cannot get any weirder than what you are about to read. A tribe in Bangladesh called the Mandi tribe has a custom in which the daughters share their husbands with their mothers.

Can’t believe it? Here is a first person account of a 30-year-old Bangladeshi woman who had to share her husband with her mother: As a child in rural Bangladesh, Orola Dalbot, 30, liked growing up around her mother’s second husband, Noten. Her father had died when she was very young, and her mother had remarried. Noten was handsome, with a broad smile.

“I thought my mother was lucky,” Orola says. “I hoped I’d find a husband like him.” When she hit puberty, however, Orola learned the truth she least expected: She was already Noten’s wife. Her wedding had occurred when she was three years old, in a joint ceremony with her mother. Following tradition in the matrilineal Mandi tribe, the mother and daughter had married the same man. “I wanted to run away when I found out,” says Orola, sitting in the sunbaked courtyard of her family home in north-central Bangladesh.

“I was shaking with disbelief.” Orola’s mother, Mittamoni, now 51, told her that she must accept it. Among the Mandi, a remote hill tribe in Bangladesh and India, widows who wish to remarry must choose a man from the same clan as their dead husband. The only single males, however, are often much younger. So the custom evolved that a widow would offer one of her daughters as a second bride to take over her duties – including sex – when the daughter came of age.

“My mother was only 25 when my father died. She wasn’t ready to be single,” says Orola, swathed in a vibrant blue pashmina. The tribe offered Noten, then 17, as Mittamoni’s new husband, on the condition that he marry Orola, too. “I was too small to remember the wedding—I had no idea it had taken place,” Orola says. Devastated to discover that she was expected to share her own mother’s husband, she says: “My mother already had two children with him. I wanted a husband of my own.”

In recent years, many observers assumed the mother-daughter marriage custom had died out. Catholic missionaries have converted 90 percent of the tribe’s 25,000 Bangladeshi members, and many old Mandi practices are now taboo. Yet, while there are no official figures, one local leader claims there are “numerous” families who still follow the mother-daughter custom but people stay quiet about it. Today, Orola Dalbot is the mother of three children with Noten: a 14-yearold boy, a 7-year-old girl, and an 19-month-old girl. (Orola’s mother has a son and daughter with Noten.) The family lives in a cluster of mud houses in a village with no running water. The nearest town consists of a single row of ramshackle stalls selling cooking oil and candles.

Orola and Mittamoni jointly own a few acres of land, from which they make a modest living cultivating pineapples and bananas. The three-way marital arrangement grew tense when Noten began sleeping with Orola when she was 15. “My mother knew it was inevitable that we’d have sex. But he quickly began to prefer me over her, and she hated it,” Orola says. She even mentioned how her mother once slipped some wild herbs into her food to make her vomit. “While I was ill, she seized the chance to spend the night with Noten. She really loved him.”

The rivalry ruined their motherdaughter bond. “She stopped being my mother. I couldn’t turn to her for advice anymore. I felt betrayed and abandoned,” Orola says. But the point of co-marriage is not simply to satisfy the husband’s sexual needs. The point of daughters marrying the same man as their mothers is to help guarantee two things: first, that the family has a fertile young woman to produce children to add to its wealth, and second, that the wife’s clan holds onto its power, as her daughter protects her property when she dies.

This story was originally published by Abigail Haworth in Marie Claire. Pictures by Eric Rechsteiner