NEW DELHI. The bride dies during the wedding ceremony and is immediately replaced by her younger sister: the incredible wedding, reported by the Daily Mail newspaper, took place yesterday in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The families of the couple, Surabhi and Manoj Kumar, after the tragic heart attack that led to Surabhi’s sudden death while he was exchanging wreaths with Manoj, immediately agreed to restore the ancient tradition of marrying the bride’s sister if this was dying. The chronicles tell of Surabhi’s mother who asked, screaming in despair, to find a solution to end the wedding anyway and proposed her youngest daughter Nisha to future consu-in-laws.
The incident caused a flurry of negative reactions on social media: according to the stories, the corpse of the deceased young woman was held without any respect in a room, until the end of the wedding procession; only then were the funeral rites started. The media recalled the death of another bride at the beginning of the year in Odisha, who was also struck down by a heart attack during the “bidaai”, the farewell to her parents’ home. But in that case there had been no replacement bride.