A husband loves his younger wife best, and the younger wife treats the elder cruelly — sets her to all the menial work, stints her food, and at last tears out the single tuft of hair on her head and drives her from the house. Bald and cast off, the elder wife walks into the forest, where every small kindness she shows on the road is answered with a blessing: the cotton plant, the plantain tree, the Brahmani bull's shed and the tulasi plant each give her a gift, and the muni in the forest gives her long jet-black hair, beauty, and a basket that never empties. She comes home rich and beautiful, and repays cruelty with kindness — but her younger wife, hearing how it was done, hurries to the forest to take the same road, and learns that a blessing taken greedily, and a second plunge taken against instruction, undoes itself.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Stories:
00:35 The Bald Wife
A note on what is not read here. This part tells its tale whole and uncut. The shelf as a whole makes no claim to completeness: five tales from the five source collections are excluded whole under the house law, and two items are held for the owner's ruling by name; all are named in the shelf's exclusion register, not silently dropped, and nothing excluded here touches this part.
From Folk-Tales of Bengal by Lal Behari Day (1883), public domain; told in a modern in-house rendering.
Music: instrumental opening and closing theme.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
