The Greengrocer and the Parrot

Bald Like Me

There was a greengrocer who had a parrot, a sweet-voiced green talking parrot.(Perched) on the bench, it would watch over the shop (in the owner’s absence) and talk finely to all the traders.In addressing human beings it would speak (like them); it was (also) skilled in the song of parrots.(Once) it sprang from the bench and flew away; it spilled the bottles of rose-oil.Its master came from the direction of his house and seated himself on the bench at his ease as a merchant does.(Then) he saw the bench was full of oil and his clothes greasy; he smote the parrot on the head: it was made bald by the blow.For some few days it refrained from speech; the greengrocer, in repentance, heaved deep sighs,Tearing his beard and saying, “Alas! the sun of my prosperity has gone under the clouds.Would that my hand had been broken (powerless) at that moment! How (ever) did I strike (such a blow) on the head of that sweet-tongued one?”He was giving presents to every dervish, that he might get back the speech of his bird.After three days and three nights, he was seated on the bench, distraught and sorrowful, like a man in despair,Showing the bird every sort of marvel (in the hope) that maybe it would begin to speak.Meanwhile a bare-headed dervish, clad in a jawlaq (coarse woollen frock), passed by, with a head hairless as the outside of bowl and basin.Thereupon the parrot began to talk, screeched at the dervish and said, “Hey, fellow!How were you mixed up with the bald, O baldpate? Did you, then, spill oil from the bottle?”The bystanders laughed at the parrot’s inference, because it deemed the wearer of the frock to be like itself.

Masnavi I.247–262 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926

First attested

1278The text is Masnavi I.247–262. The oldest dated copy Nicholson used is the Konya manuscript, his G, "dated 677 a.h." — 1278, five years after Rūmī's death — which he judged in April 1930 "the most authoritative text of the Mathnawí". He translated Book I in 1926, before adopting G, and his 1930 volume lists in an appendix where G differs from that text. It records three readings of G inside this passage: at I.255 "at the moment when I struck (such a blow)", at I.258 "every sort of hidden (unfamiliar) thing", and at I.260 that the parrot "cried to the dervish, as rational persons (might have done)". Book I carries no date of its own; Book II opens by dating its own start to A.H. 662 (1263–64), after a delay, so Book I was finished by then.

A parrot spills the rose-oil, is struck bald, and hails a passing bald dervish as a fellow oil-spiller.

Masnavi I.247–323, the second tale of Book I, straight after the king and the handmaiden. A greengrocer's talking parrot, left to mind the shop, flies off its bench and spills the rose-oil; the grocer strikes it bald, and it stops speaking. He gives presents to every dervish in the hope of its speech, and when a bare-headed dervish passes, the parrot speaks at last — to ask whether he too spilled oil. The lines here, I.247–262, are the whole tale, from the talking parrot on its bench to the bystanders' laughter. Rūmī then draws the moral in his own voice (I.263) and widens it into a long warning against judging prophets and saints by oneself, against the hypocrite who joins the sincere at prayer "for quarrelling's sake", and against impostors who "give the title of Ahmad (Mohammed) to Bu Musaylim" (I.321).