I read today about a chap in India who has 14 wives. He managed to marry each one without the others knowing, using friends to stand in for his father and uncle at each of the wedding ceremonies. They now live in 14 different houses.

What he did was naughty and wrong and you shouldn’t try it at home, but you have to admire his chutzpah, if they have chutzpah in India. The mind boggles as to how he manages each of his 14 relationships. Imagine having to perform that ‘sorry, but I have to go away’ speech every single day. Take Wife 1 for example:

‘Oh, my perfect husband, do you have to go away?’

‘Yes, dearest wife, but after two short weeks I’ll be back in your arms.’

‘But you only returned from your previous trip last night.’

‘The life of a travelling salesman is indeed demanding.’

‘And when you return from this business trip, can we spend time together?’

‘Of course, my sweet lotus blossom. Get the Kama Sutra down from the shelf in preparation for a perfect night of passion. After which I’ll be gone for another fortnight, I’m afraid.’

‘The wife’s fate is indeed to suffer terribly for her husband’s career.’

And repeat with Wives 2, 3 and so on.

I don’t know about yours, but I really enjoyed our wedding. We got married in the village of Mrs Pobaan’s birth, not far from Khampaeng Phet. I was welcomed into the bosom of her family in a touching ceremony that was attended by a couple of hundred happy, friendly people. Mrs Pobaan wore the traditional costume of her folk. A lot of pigs were roasted, a fair amount of beer was drunk, and both Mrs Pobaan and I were called upon to make speeches – mine being greeted with polite applause by an audience who didn’t understand a word of it. Apart from the joyous atmosphere, my abiding memories are of how hot it was in a suit and how sore my cheeks were from all the smiling.

The years since our wedding have been full of happiness, too. As faithful followers of this column will already know, Mrs Pobaan is a loving, beautiful, clever and brave woman – all the things any man could want in a wife. We support each other in everything we do. Our happiness is so complete that, if I had to observe it from the outside, I would feel nauseous from the sickly sweetness of it all.

So, it’s all good. But that doesn’t mean I’d want to do it 14 times. Surely you can have too much of a good thing? I fully accept that winning 14,000 baht in the lottery would be better than winning one thousand. And living for many years is surely to be preferred over ducking out early. But I don’t think marriages really follow this ‘the more the merrier’ rule, which the Indian chap seems to have used as his mantra. To my mind, marriages are more like ice creams. One well-loaded cone may be a refreshing confection to be enjoyed as part of a healthy, calorie-controlled diet, but 14 ice creams, basically, is going to make you throw up like a cat with fur-balls.

The other day, I’m sitting in a bar with a friend and the conversation turns to tales of the ‘believe it or not’ sort. I tell him the story of the serial bridegroom.

‘That’s weird,’ he says. ‘You couldn’t make that up.’

I agree politely, but really, he’s wrong. You could make it up. For every story I read in the paper about extraordinary goings-on, however peculiar they are, I could easily make something up that’s a lot more extraordinary. I could invent a man in India with 15 wives, for example. Not much weirder than the real fellow, but my story would win on a photo finish. If that’s not odd enough, what about the woman in Brazil who keeps fish in her bra, or the crocodile in Queensland that gives birth to a fully-functional DVD player including the cables, or the twins in Japan who drown in separate tragic shampoo accidents, and both on a Wednesday? Pretty extraordinary, eh? And all made up by me in the time it takes to type them out.

Fact is stranger than fiction, I hear people say. Let’s examine that hypothesis in a little more detail. Let’s take one well-known fictional movie and consider how strange it is. A spaceship is returning to Earth with twenty million tons of ore. The hibernating crew wake up and land the ship on a planetoid. The one played by John Hurt finds some big eggs. One hatches and a slimy spider crab leaps out and clings to his face. Back in the ship, it bleeds acid. Hurt gets a touch of indigestion. Before he can reach for the Rennies, a skinned meerkat bursts from his chest and scuttles off. It grows up, develops metal teeth and eats most of the crew. Ash is decapitated with a fire extinguisher, revealing that his head is full of yoghurt, so he’s obviously an android. As the ship explodes, Ripley escapes in the shuttle and blasts the Alien into space. She and the cat go back to sleep. The cat is called Jones.

Alien is fiction, and possibly quite tame by today’s standards. In the light of this, what supporting evidence do we have that fact is stranger than fiction? Come on, come on, I’m waiting. I haven’t got all day. Mmm? I thought as much. When it comes to deciding which is stranger, in the fiction corner we have a bionic chipmunk bursting out of John Hurt’s T-shirt, while in the fact corner we have some Indian bloke going for the world record for the most in-laws.

I think this shows that, actually, you can make it up. Fiction is stranger than fact. I rest my case.

Kuhn Pobaan’s

by-the-way

What’s the strangest true story you’ve ever come across? Email your amazing facts to kuhn.pobaan@gmail.com.