Actually it has all been a lot of fuss about nothing. If Malik had taken the advice of the honourable members of the All India Muslim personal Law Board (AIMPLB) he could have just married Sania without bothering to divorce or shell out Rs 15,000. In Hyderabad alone, he could have taken four, not just two, brides without taking the trouble to divorce anyone. It is after all the city most frequented by aging Arabs hunting for young brides they can marry and divorce at will. As the pun doing the rounds on the SMS circuit said about the Sania-Ayesh-Shoaib triangle: "sabka Maalik ek"
In the modern democratic secular republic of India, personal laws governing the Muslim community are so retrograde that if you are a man anything goes. If you are a woman than, well, you are at the mercy of man. Here's what Qasim Rasool Ilyas, the spokesman of the AIMPLB, told me in the context of the Shoaib-Sania Tamasaha: "There is no curb on the man's right to take more than one wife. It is what is ordained in the Sharia. So Shoaib Akhtar need not have divorced that girl Ayesha."