Short Story

The Clay Mother-in-law is a folk tale famous in Tamil Nadu . This tale was translated into English by A.K. Ramanujan. This is a story of a submissive and loyal woman who used to consult her mother-in-law for all types of household tasks.

Her mother-in-law was quite old and finally died one day. Now the woman had no one to give instructions. She started asking silly questions about the measurement of amount of rice she would cook to her husband.

Her husband could not bear her silly questions. Hence he made a clay statue of his mother for his wife. However she took open fingers of the clay statue as measure and started cooking more food. This made the rice bag get empty quickly which enraged her husband. Being furious, he threw his wife and the statue out of his home.

Having nowhere to go, the sorrowful and hopeless wife went to forest. When it grew dark she was frightened and hence climbed a tree with the statue. Under the tree, some thieves came to take rest along with a big loot. She mistook them to be devils and being scared, the statue slipped off her hands and fell on the thieves. The thieves got frightened and ran away leaving the looted money.

She remain on the tree till next morning and found the loot. She went back to home. Initially her husband scolded her for returning back. However when she told him about the loot, both of them went to the forest. They collected all the money and things and returned back to home happily.

At home, her husband asked her to bring a big vessel from the neighbours for measurement and also warned her not to tell anybody about the loot. Wife agreed and went to her neighbour’s house. However the latter became suspicious and pasted tamarind gel in the bottom of the vessel to know what exactly are the going to measure.

The wife came back to home with the vessel. After measuring the loot, she gave back it to the neighbours. However a rare gem got stuck to the bottom of the vessel. Hence the neighbours compelled the lady to tell everything and the latter narrated the whole story.

Hearing the story, the neighbours made plan to do the same. Neighbour’s husband made a sculpture and asked his wife to go to the same place and do the same. When the thieves came, neighbour husband’s wife threw the sculpture on them. This time, the thieves did fear but they hid themselves behind the tree to find out who has done this.

Assuming that the thieves have run away, neighbour husband’s wife come down and was caught. She was beaten and tied to the tree. The next morning, neighbour husband went to forest to collect the loot. However, on contrary he found his wounded wife and no loot at all.

The story ends.