A 55-year-old grandfather of three stands accused of eloping with the 22-year-old fiancée of his teenage son and taking his family’s savings and gold jewelry with him.

They say the heart wants what it wants, and in the case of an Indian man, if this happens to be his son’s fiancée, then so be it! Shakeel, a 55-year-old father of six from Rampur, a village in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, recently shocked his family by running away with Ayesha (pseudonym), a 22-year-old woman from a neighboring village, who was initially supposed to marry his son. According to Shabbana, Shakeel’s wife, he had insisted on arranging the marriage of their son, Aman (pseudonym), to Ayesha, despite her protests concerning financial reasons and their child’s young age (17). Still, despite Shabbana and Aman’s opposition, he remained adamant about the marriage until one day when he called from Delhi to tell his family that he had married Ayesha himself.

Photo: Unsplash

“The woman who was supposed to be my daughter-in-law has now become my husband’s wife,” Shabbana lamented in an interview with Indian journalists.

Shakeel reportedly visited Ayesha often under the pretext of making wedding preparations, but his wife claims to have suspected their affair from the very beginning. However, when he confronted her husband about it, he allegedly responded with verbal and even physical abuse. Still, the woman continued gathering evidence, and when he showed Aman texts between Shakeel and Ayesha, the 17-year-old told his father that the wedding was off.

Last month, after leaving for Delhi on work-related business, the 55-year-old called his family to let them know that he had married Ayesha, his son’s fiancée. What he didn’t tell them was that he had taken the family savings (more than 200,000 rupees ($2,400) and jewelry as well. Theft carries a potential sentence of up to three years behind bars, but local police told the Times of India newspaper that no formal complaint has been filed, so they couldn’t take any action against Shakeel.

Interestingly, just a couple of months ago, we featured a similar story of an Indian man who eloped with his soon-to-be mother-in-law just 9 days before he was supposed to marry her daughter. You know what they say, all is fair in love and war…