Everybody enjoys being a role model, and Aishwarya Rai must have had quite a massive share of this kind of enjoyment. But whether she also covets the position of role model for the happy older wife is a delicate question. Ms Rai may be a little older than her newly-wed husband, Abhishek Bachchan, but that was not a particularly celebrated facet of their gorgeously coy wedding. Yet facts, as any lawman worth his salt would insist, are facts. The lack of fanfare regarding Ms Rai’s and Mr Bachchan’s respective ages did not prevent two judges hearing a case of dowry death in the Supreme Court from holding Ms Rai up as an example in order to demolish the defence counsel’s presentation. A young woman in Jharkhand had hanged herself seven months after her wedding in April, 2000, allegedly because of torture over dowry. The defence claimed that she had killed herself because she found the marriage incompatible as she was older than her husband. By this logic, perhaps someone could have added, there should have been a suicide epidemic among husbands, in India at least.

The cheap trick in the defence counsel’s argument was to push the blame on to the victim by invoking one convention in order to obscure another. Laws and penalties notwithstanding, dowry remains a stubborn custom, and murders and suicides as a result of torture for dowry are shockingly common. In this particular case, the wife’s age was a counter that the defence played hopefully, since in the majority of traditional Indian marriages brides are younger than their grooms. Behind the unusual spin to the tragically common story, however, is the media. Without its heady presentation of filmland’s most talked-about wedding, the judges may have been left without their memorable example, and the Jharkhand bride’s story left unnoticed among numberless others.