(Illustration by Manan A.)

Once, there was a certain Persian merchant who kept a parrot that he had procured from India, in a cage. Being about to travel to Hindustan on business, he asked the parrot if he had any message to send to his kinsmen in that country. The parrot desired him to tell them,

“If you see parrots of my family there, tell them that I am trapped in a cage here and that I miss them very much. Ask them whether it was fair that they were free to fly anywhere, while I was slowly dying here in captivity.”

The merchant promised to deliver this message, and on reaching Hindustan, duly delivered it to the first flock of parrots he saw. On hearing it one of them at once fell down dead. The merchant was annoyed with his own parrot for having sent such a fatal message, and on his return home sharply rebuked his parrot for doing so. But the parrot no sooner heard the merchant’s tale than he too fell down dead in his cage.

The merchant, after lamenting his death, took his corpse out of the cage and threw it away; but, to his surprise, the corpse immediately recovered life, and flew away, explaining that the Hindustani parrot had only feigned death to suggest this way of escaping from confinement in a cage.

A folk story sourced from Rumi’s Mathnawi.

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