Tragedy from a Parrot's View

Colorful parrot bird.

Source: Pixbay.

People often overlook me because I am simply a parrot. Most people would prefer that parrots spout off meaningless sayings so they can laugh and clap in my face. Unfortunately for these people, I am much more wise than your average bird. I have saved a woman from adultery for weeks upon weeks. Unfortunately, I could not save her from death. Let me explain.

Back before my owner, Miemun, picked me out, my life consisted of living in this market. It had always been my dream that someone would come in and choose to buy me. I suppose my owner at this point knew I was going to be special because he made me extremely expensive, too expensive for most people to purchase. However, somehow I had caught the attention of Miemun as he walked by me one day. Even he, an extremely wealthy man, decided that I was too expensive to purchase that day.

Miemun was interested in owning me, I could see it in his eyes. However, when the marketer told him my price, he began to walk away. I knew I had to act quickly, so I began to give him advice. Acting in my most humble manner, I told him of my predictions of the caravans of Cabul coming to purchase spikenard. I only knew this because I had just overheard another conversation. After Miemun heard this, he purchased me and all of the spikenard in the entire market. He ended up selling this for a vast amount of money, so he began to trust me.

To keep me company, Miemun purchased another bird, a sharuk that I became good acquaintances with. The sharuk was not quite as wise as me, but I still enjoyed being in his company.

Not long after I began living at his home, Miemun left for a pilgrimage for weeks and months. While he was gone, his wife, Khojisteh, fell in love with another prince from another land. What was I to do? Miemun had purchased me just as I had always dreamed. My loyalty now could only be to him. I had watched Khojisteh seek advice from the sharuk. The sharuk, understanding the implications of what Khojisteh was saying, implored her not to go to the prince. He told her that she must avoid this kind of betrayal. Khojisteh then killed the sharuk in order to keep him quiet about her adultery. I knew in this moment that I must be smart about the way I kept her home.

For weeks, I was able to tell her stories to prevent her from leaving. Story after story, I kept her all night and told her stories so that she wouldn't go meet her new lover. I told her tales with themes intended to steer her into making the right decision. Every night I would begin a story as a warning of what could happen if she went to visit her lover. She would sit by my cage and listen intently, hanging on to every word like they were her life or death. By no accident, when I finished my story, the sun would begin to rise and she would no longer have time to leave.

Every night, I would hope that my story would encourage her to stay faithful to her husband, my master, Miemun. But every night, she would come back saying she was going to leave again, so I would have to come up with another anecdote to keep her at home.

When her husband got home, I had no choice but to tell him the truth about what happened while he was away. As I had grown close to Khojisteh during his leave, I didn't want to tell him, but how am I supposed to explain a dead sharuk? On top of being a rather wise parrot, I am also honest to a fault. When Miemun asked what happened, I told him the whole story, leaving out no details. I had gotten good at telling stories, mind you.

Miemun was furious. He went into a rage and began to yell at his wife, questioning how she could be so unfaithful to him during his absence. He killed her right there on the spot. I saw it all with my own eyes. As loyal as I was to Miemun, I had gotten extremely close with Khojisteh. After all, we had spent every night of his absence together. She trusted me and I trusted her. We became best friends.

After slaughtering his wife, Miemun came to me and apologized for what I had witnessed. He thanked me for my honesty but he needed to tell me something. He said that during his leave, he too had taken another lover. He needed to get rid of Khojisteh as soon as possible so that his mistress could come and move in with us. He knew he wouldn't get in trouble with the law for killing an adulterous wife. He then explained how he had set up this other prince to come seduce Khojisteh so that he could catch them together. He said it was never his intention that I keep her away from her lover. He actually wanted it to happen.

Author's Note

In Tales of a Parrot, the story is written from a third-person perspective. The whole story is written from a third-person point of view. This version of the story remains close to the original but I did rewrite the ending. I spun the end of the story to really create a villain out of Miemun instead of out of Khojisteh. This was mainly because at the end of the original story, I did not think that all loose ends were tied up so I wanted to do that for them. While the husband did kill his wife in the original story, he in no way actually set her up to fall in love with another man or have another lover himself.

The reason that I rewrote the story was because I was interested in the wisdom of the parrot. He was not only smart enough to think about how to get Miemun to purchase him at the market but also how to keep his wife from visiting her lover. I thought the story from the parrot's point of view would be an interesting angle on the story. I also found the relationship between Khojisteh and the parrot could be an interesting portion of the story. I thought about the fact that for weeks they spent all night together while the parrot told her stories and I assumed that after that amount of time spent together, they would definitely become pretty close.

Bibliography: "Tales of a Parrot" by Ziya' al-Din Nakhshabi.