In plain words
Fearful thunder was roaring. Tulasīdās was very happy to be coming home, impatient to see his wife as soon as he could. When he came home the door was locked. The woman next door told him: "Sir, she has gone to her mother's house." By then it was past ten o'clock. In those days, in the villages, people ate and went to sleep at seven. They thought of ten or eleven o'clock as the middle of the night. Today people think ten, eleven, twelve o'clock is all dinner time. Heedless of this rain, the thunder and the lightning, he walked back to his wife's parents' house. In his eagerness he knocked rather loudly on the door. This wife knew. She thought this madman might turn up at any time. Without sending her mother to the door she went herself and opened it. As she looked, he was streaming with water from head to foot. Outside the rain was pouring down. When the lightning flashed his face could be seen. An anger she could not hold back burst out in the wife. Because her sleep had been broken, and because she knew his behaviour was not on the right path, she grew angrier still. She opened her mouth, and loudly: "You slave of lust! In this pitch darkness, in this rain, could you not be patient for a single day? If even an atom of the infatuation you have for this body, made of excrement, urine, stench, flesh and blood, had been on Rāma, how blessed you would have been!": so she scolded him. Could you not give an atom of it to Rāma? Is this the worth of a man? Is this the way a householder lives his Dharma? Such straight words sank deep into his heart. He stayed no longer. In a moment his mind changed. He took his wife as his guru. He turned back at once. That night, back through the pitch darkness and this pouring rain, with no care left at all for his life, he reached Prayāg.
He spent his time in this Prayāg. "It is true: all my life, calling it humanness, I tried to live like dogs and jackals. Has my life come only for this pleasure? No, no. The words my wife spoke are most sacred words. Śrī Rāma entered into her very self and had her give me this teaching," he thought. "All that I longed for is enjoyed before my very eyes by many animals and beasts, donkeys, dogs, monkeys, jackals, all of them.