Then the millet trader having gone to his village, and divided the goods with the chena cultivator, sowed the millet in the chena, and remained there.
North-western Province.
The story about Lattī’s husband occurs in The Orientalist, vol. i, p. 62, the dead girl’s name being Kaluhāmī. Her father was a Gamarāla, and the man who carried off the things for her was a beggar.
This part of the story is also given, with slight variations, in Tales of the Sun, Southern India (Kingscote and Naṭēśa Sāstrī), p. 135 ff.
In Folklore in Southern India (Naṭēśa Sāstrī), p. 131 ff., the rogue did not pretend to be married to the woman’s daughter, but represented to her that her parents were living in the other world in a very miserable state, without proper clothing, and without the means of purchasing food. She handed over to him the clothing, jewels, and cash in the house, and he went off at once with them. The ending of the incident is the same as in Ceylon.
In The Indian Antiquary, vol. xviii, p. 120, there is a story from Southern India, by Paṇḍita Naṭēśa Sāstrī, in which a youth obtained work under an appā[4] (or “hopper”) woman, giving his name as “Last Year.” When he absconded with her cash-box she gave the alarm in the village by saying, “Last Year (he) stole and took my box,” and was thought to be out of her mind.
In The Orientalist, vol. ii, p. 182, the incident of the cakes pounded in the mortar is related. After eating part of the pounded cakes, the traveller was about to enter the corn-store in which the woman had concealed her lover. On the woman’s stopping him, the husband’s suspicions being aroused he examined the corn-store, and finding the man in it, beat him well, and his own wife also.
[1] Amu (Paspalum scrobiculatum), the Tamil Varaku, a small grain cultivated in jungle clearings. [↑]