The Good Husband and the Bad Wife

In a remote village lived a Brahmin whose kindness and charity were proverbial—and a wife whose ill nature was just as well known. Heaven had joined them, so they shared one roof though their tempers never matched. Every day he tasted her sharpness. If he invited another Brahmin to dinner, she somehow drove the guest away.

One fine summer morning a friend accepted the Brahmin’s invitation. The husband asked his wife to have dinner ready earlier than usual and went to the river to bathe. The guest, not feeling well, stayed for a hot bath at the house and sat in the outer verandah. Because this man seemed a special friend of her lord, the wife did not dare insult him to his face; she invented a plan to make him leave of his own accord.

She set a heavy wooden pestle against the wall and pretended to worship it. When the guest asked why, she claimed that her husband used it to kill the people he invited to meals as an offering to a goddess. Today, she said, the visitor himself would be the victim. Pretending to pity him, she urged him to escape by the back door before her husband returned.

Terrified, the guest ran through the backyard and out of the village. Before the husband returned, his wife cleared away the signs of her pretended ceremony. When he asked where the guest had gone, she claimed that the visitor had demanded her pestle—the one she had brought as her dowry forty years before—and had run away when she refused.

The kind-hearted Brahmin declared he would rather lose the pestle than lose his guest. He seized the heavy wood and ran after his friend, crying aloud, “Oh Brahmin! Stop, please, and take the pestle!”

Seeing the husband race after him brandishing the pestle only confirmed the wife’s lie. “You and your pestle may go where you please!” shouted the guest. “Never more will you catch me in your house!” And he fled on without looking back.

About this story

“The Good Husband and the Bad Wife” is one of the shorter tales in Tales of the Sun; or, Folklore of Southern India, published in 1890 by Mrs. Howard Kingscote and Pandit Natesa Sastri, who between them gathered and corrected the stories.

The joke depends on this household’s contrasting attitudes to hospitality: the husband values feeding a visiting Brahmin, while the wife wants the visitor gone. The heavy wooden pestle, used for pounding grain, is said in the story to have come with her dowry forty years before. Nobody is hurt; the humour lies in the guest seeing the generous husband as a killer.

Read the original: Kingscote and Natesa Sastri, Tales of the Sun, 1890 (Project Gutenberg #37002)

Reading guidance: ages 9–12. No one is injured, but the trick includes a frightening false claim of ritual murder.

A closer reading

The pestle has three meanings in quick succession: a household tool, an alleged murder weapon, and a gift the husband is willing to surrender. The object itself never changes. The wife’s two incompatible stories give the two men different explanations for the same chase, and each explanation seems confirmed by what they see.

The title tells us whom to approve before the action begins, but the mechanism of the joke is more precise than a rule about good husbands or bad wives. One person controls the information shared between two others. The guest’s escape is understandable given the warning he received; he is not foolish merely because the reader knows more than he does.

Try this with the story

Draw the pestle once and add three speech bubbles: what the wife tells the guest, what she tells her husband, and what the husband shouts during the chase. Explain why the husband’s generous words fail to reassure a person expecting an attack.

Talk about it

• Why did the guest run even faster when the husband chased him?
• Why do you think the wife invented such a frightening story instead of just being rude?
• If you were the husband, how would you try to win your friend back?

Related stories

• Mr. Won’t-Give and Mr. Won’t-Leave — a stingy couple invent a pretend quarrel to get rid of a hungry guest
• The Gardener’s Cunning Wife — another quick-thinking wife whose invention fools her own husband