A Marriage for the Dogs

Weddings often have surprises.

If you go to enough ceremonies, you’ll see some funny things. A flower girl will refuse to walk down the aisle. A bridesmaid will pass out. A groom will shout “I don’t,” kiss the priest instead of the bride, and skip toward the door while giggling like a schoolgirl.

Maybe that last one was just my friend Dennis. (Well, now Denise.)

Regardless, madcap antics often surround the exchange of nuptials. But nowhere have such shenanigans reached the level attained by a recent wedding in India. A 7-year-old girl in the country’s eastern state of Bihar married a dog.

(Disclosure: This is a tale I could not invent; I wouldn’t have even known about it if not for Manic Mom, who suggested in her comment on my last post that I address this odd topic. And I would not have made time to write this tonight if not for my ardent supporter Jay Lassiter, whose affirming insistence that I write more often has kicked my ass into action. Just this once.)

Back to our story. That was NOT a typo—a girl truly married a dog. And not one of those fancy Westminster Kennel Club types, either … it was just some random stray.

This pairing seemed like a swell idea to the girl’s family, which agreed to the wedding because—again, I’m not making this up—the ritual would do away with the “evil eye” that cursed her because her upper teeth came in before her lower teeth.

For the record, let me thank my parents publicly for not raising me in the Indian state of Bihar.

I’m not one to criticize other cultures, or argue that one society’s superstition is any more “valid” than another’s. But I’m really going to need some help with this one. If you have any insight, please educate us—how, precisely, does marrying a dog deny a tooth-induced evil eye? And, I hesitate to ask, does removing this curse require a consummation of the marriage?

Whatever the answer, it takes a cur-ageous girl to marry a dog. Either that, or the bride’s mother was a real bitch.

All this makes me wonder which teeth came in to prompt this kind of madness. Was it the molars? The incisors?

Nope. It was clearly the canines.