The Ungrateful Wife

A Brahman, devoted to his wife despite constant conflict with his family, left home with her rather than continue the daily strife. When she died of thirst in the middle of a forest journey, his grief was so total that a heavenly voice offered him a way to save her: give up half of his own remaining life through a sacred vow, and she would live again.

He did so without hesitation, and she rose, alive. But rather than gratitude reshaping her, the second chance simply revealed more clearly who she already was: while resting in a garden, she fell for a crippled stranger, secured his devotion through a manipulative threat, and gradually maneuvered her husband into carrying the stranger along with them in a basket, using arguments he was too devoted to see through.

At a well along their road, she and her new companion pushed the Brahman in and left him for dead, then presented themselves to a king as a devoted wife who had carried her disabled husband to safety -- a story so convincing that the king rewarded her with land and honor.

But the Brahman survived, found by a passing holy man, and eventually reached the same city -- where his wife, without a flicker of hesitation, denounced him to the king as an impostor threatening her life. Facing execution, the Brahman asked only that she return what belonged to him: the very half-life he had given her through the sacred vow. Forced to repeat the words in front of the king, she fell dead on the spot, and the truth finally came out.

What the tale preserves is not a simple story of betrayal, but a harder truth: sacrifice given out of love does not obligate gratitude in return, and a person's character, once freed from crisis, tends to show itself exactly as it always was.