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- The story about The Carpenter's Unfaithful Wife is about a man who believes that his wife is not being true. So, he tells her that he is going out of town for a couple of days. Excited, his wife gets dressed up and goes to tell her lover to come over that night, since her husband will be gone. The husband returns while she's away and hides under the bed. The lover arrives and seats himself on the bed. When the wife comes in, she sees her husband's feet sticking out from under the bed. So, she comes up with a plan. Gesturing toward her husband's feet, she tells her lover that she had gotten terrible news from the temple: her husband was to die in six months. She claims that the only way to save him is to have sex with another man, therefore passing the curse to him. They then proceed to become intimate. The foolish carpenter then comes out from under the bed and treats the two like heroes.
- I like this story simply because it is amusing. However, it is too bad that it essentially rewards deceitful behavior. On the other hand, considering this is a very patriarchal culture, in which women are forced to be essentially slaves to the will of their husbands, it is a fitting sort of revenge. The situation begs several questions. Did the wife have any choice in who she married? How old was she when she married? What is the nature of her marriage? Does the husband live up to his responsibility towards her? Depending on the answers to some of these questions, her choice to take a lover and therefore exert some control over her own life is more understandable.
Bibliography: The Panchatantra by Krishna Dharma. Web source.
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