The Woman Pre-eminent in Cunning1
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The Woman Pre-eminent in Cunning1
At that time, [while he was absent], the Heṭṭi girl who was married [to him] one day went to the well to bring [water]. When she was going, a beard-cutting Barber man having stayed on the path and seen this beautiful woman, laughed. Thereupon the woman, not looking completely on that hand, looked at him with the roguish eye (hora aehin), and went to the village.
On the following day also, the Barber having come, just as before laughed. At that time also the woman, just as before, looked with the roguish eye, and went away.
The woman on the following day also came in order to go for water. That day also, the Barber having stayed on the path laughed. That day the woman having spoken to the Barber, asked, “What did you laugh for when I was coming? Why?”
The Barber said, “I did not laugh at anything whatever but because of the affection which you caused.”
Thereupon the woman asked, “Were you inclined to come with me?” The Barber said, “Yes.”
Thereupon the Barber went home, and grief having bound him because he could not do [according to] the words which this woman said, he remained unable to eat cooked rice also.
At that time the Barber woman asked, “What are you staying [in this way] for, not eating cooked rice, without life in your body?”
The Barber said, “I thought of taking in marriage such and such a Heṭṭi woman. Owing to it the Heṭṭi woman said, ‘When the Great King has gone, when the Second King has come to Ceylon, when the flower of the creeperless jasmine has blossomed, having cut twenty, having stabbed thirty, having pounded three persons into one, when two dead sticks are becoming knocked into one, come mounted on the back of two dead ones.’ Because I cannot do it I remain in grief.”
Thereupon the Barber having gone in that manner, while he was there yet two [other] persons heard that those two are talking. When they heard—there is a custom in that country. The custom indeed is [this]: There is a temple [kōvila] in the country. Except that they give [adulterers, or perhaps only offenders against caste prohibitions in such cases as this?] as demon offerings (bili) for the temple, they do not inflict a different punishment [on them]. Because of it, seizing these two they took them for the purpose of giving [them as] demon offerings for the temple.
Thereupon the Heṭṭi woman having done in that very manner, the Heṭṭiyā came. Well then, she having made the woman [appear] a good woman, [her husband], taking charge of her, came calling her to the house, and she remained [there] virtuously (hon̆da seyin).
This story was related by a woman in the North-central Province, to a man whom I sent to write down some stories at a village at which I had been promised them. Her name, given as Sayimanhāmī (Lady Simon), and expressions she used, show that she probably belonged originally to the Western Province.
It is difficult to understand how the condemned persons escaped. The interesting fact of the tale is the reference to the presentation of human offerings at a temple devoted to either one of the demons or the goddess Kālī. The Sinhalese expression, deviyan wahansē, deity, given in the text, might be applied to either.
In the Kathā Sarit Sāgara (Tawney), vol. i, p. 91, it is related in one story that “whenever a man is found at night with another man’s wife, he is placed with her within the inner chamber of the Yaksha’s (Maṇibhadra) temple.” In the morning the man was punished by the King; the country in which this occurred is not stated, but it was far from Tāmraliptā. When a merchant and a woman were so imprisoned, the merchant’s wife, hearing of it, went at night with offerings, and was permitted to enter. She changed clothes with the woman, and sent her out; and in the morning, as the woman in the temple was found to be the merchant’s own wife, the King dismissed the case, and freed the merchant “as it were from the mouth of death.” Thus the usual punishment appears to have been death, as in the Sinhalese tale.