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It makes an interesting case for families of choice, it does…
That, or it makes Fundamentalist Mormons seem almost normal by comparison.
Bima. Arjuna. Yudistira. Nakula. Sahadeva. The five brothers Pandava.
Except that none are the biological sons of Pandu. See, Pandu - who was himself not the biological son of his acknowledged father, but that’s an even more complicated story - was cursed: he had inadvertently killed a sage as the sage was copulating in the forest, and the sage cursed Pandu with his dying breath that should Pandu ever attempt to have sex with a woman, he would die in the attempt.
At that, Pandu and his two wives became ascetics, which, without modern advances in fertility and insemination technology, made having children a bit difficult. Thanks to some of those ever-so-quaint old-school laws, though, “the sons of my wife are my sons,” and because of a neat little trick that one of his wives had picked up before she married, both of his wives were able to have divine children that were commonly acknowledged as Pandu’s sons.
And that’s not even the most Jerry Springer part of it.
By the interesting confluence of the wishes of women, all five of these brothers communally marry the same woman. They had been ordered by “their” mother (she being the surviving wife after Pandu’s lustful death) to share everything they acquired equally among themselves, and the wife herself had desired five specific qualities in a husbands in a previous lifetime, and because it would have been difficult to find one man that had all five of those qualities at once, she lucked out in encountering these five brothers, each of whom had one of the qualities she was seeking.
Of course, none of the children survived. That would have been too Springer for Springer.
Family configurations go all kinds of ways. One can wonder whose family values fall under the generic headings of “Family Values” or “Traditional Marriage.”
I was just chatting with a new friend in Europe, and we were wondering: what will happen if all the pious get into the afterlife, should there an afterlife be, and find that they spent their whole lives backing the wrong horse, as it were?