Reading Notes: Persian Tales, Part A - The Boy Who Became a Bulbul
The Boy Who Became a Bulbul
My Thoughts:
Okay, immediately my first question with this story is: why did the father and son agree to the stepmother's suggestion??? I have a stepfather, and imagine if I went out shopping with my mom one day and he was like "Hey, whoever spends more money today, that person should chop off the other person's head." And we agreed??? So that is my first question, and it was stuck with me throughout the whole story.
And then the son loses the challenge, through some trickery on his father's part (gross, by the way), and then he takes his son's head home to his wife and asks her to cook it? I don't want to judge a culture, I'm just confused about how everybody is all so casual about this. Except the sister, who freaks out and goes to the mullah, who tells her not to eat the soup and gives her some instructions for what to do with the remains of her brother. She buries his bones and marks the spot with a reed plant, and every Thursday evening she waters the spot while repeating a surah from the Quran, and seven weeks later a bulbul (a nightingale) appears in the spot to sing to her. He swipes some needles from a tailor and some candy from a sweets-maker, tricking the stepmother into swallowing the needle and giving the sister the candy. I think that, in a way, it's sweet that the brother-turned-bulbul gives his sister a gift like that, rewarding her for grieving him and bringing him back in her way. What I wonder is what happened to the father, because the bulbul seemed to only punish the stepmother, though I would argue that his father is just as guilty, because he agreed to the challenge in the first place, and then cheated his son later, and literally decapitated him. It was an interesting story, if a little shocking.
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| A baby bulbul (Source: Pinterest) |
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