Dear Micks,
Here is a short story by a fellow member of the Everyman Writers' Lab in Cheltenham. Unfortunately the formatting has altered but the story is still very good.
Charlie x
The Parliament of Birds
By
Swithin Fry
I was at a business conference in Singapore, and, thank God, I had this particular Sunday morning to myself. Well, I say myself but the day before I had agreed to meet up with one of the other delegates. She was a journalist for the BBC and told me she wanted to find a bird market she had been told about. That didn’t sound so interesting...but she was, so I agreed to accompany her.
We met in the hotel lobby. It was early, but already sultry and hot. The concierge pestered us to get a taxi, but I insisted, despite his disapprovingly clicking tongue, that he call us a pedal rickshaw. When it came, I wasn’t so sure. The market was on the edge of Chinatown, and as we wobbled and clanked our way out of the high-rise surrealism of the business town into Chinatown’s dusty bustle, my friend told me that a second-hand book she had found in the Arab quarter had sparked her interest in this bird market.
The book was called The Conference of the Birds. Written in 1177 by the great Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, it’s a poem novel of about 4,500 lines, telling a great mythical journey made by a flurry of 30 birds convened from all over the world. Leading the flock is a hoopoe, that wondrous and majestic, pink-feathered bird with its splendid, jet black head plume. As the birds arrive, and swoop to the ground, the sound of their whirring wing beats crash all around like a torrent. The book, she said, is also known as The Bird Parliament. It’s an allegorical Sufi tale of a sheikh or master leading his pupils to enlightenment. Besides being one of the most beautiful examples of Persian poetry, the book relies on a clever word play between the words Simorgh -- a mysterious bird in Iranian mythology similar to the phoenix -- and "si morgh" -- meaning "thirty birds" in Persian.
As we bumped and swayed together behind the sweating taxi man, my friend opened her rucksack and pulled out her worn copy. There and then, above the noise of the horns, shouts and the grinding of gears, she read me these verses:
’It was in China/late one moonless night/
The Simorgh first appeared to human sight/
He let a feather float/
and rumours of its fame spread everywhere...
’Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw/
and be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:/
Rays that have wander’d into Darkness wide/
Return and back until your Sun subside’
As she finished reading, so we arrived at the bird market. It was on a junction busy with hootings and
gesticulations as four roads converged with no apparent right of way. Set on a spare patch of open ground, the market didn’t look too promising: there were barely a dozen wooden bird cages hooked on racks with a few local
men sitting around talking. We even wondered if we were in right place until my friend spotted a sign in English asking people not to photograph the birds too close up. Perhaps we were too early, we thought, so we wandered off to find breakfast. Not far off was the Tiong Shan Eating House where we could sit in the cool of an open
window and keep a good view of the bird market. I ordered the typical Chinese breakfast of pork, curry and rice, while my friend fancied the more unusual goat’s cheese on toast with onion and currant jam with radicchio.
A few people gathered at the market as we ate, no tourists but elderly Chinese, mainly men, carrying cages concealed under bright, floral fabric covers. We went back over and stood watching for a while before catching the eye of one old man who gestured for us to join him at his table. He had been drinking some coffee from a tin mug, and as he put it down, he explained that he was a retired civil servant. My journalist friend had a recorder which he spied and said he didn’t want to give his name. Why not, I asked. My wife doesn’t like any publicity, he said. He pointed out his bird, its ornate, carved cage hanging alongside all the others. The bird was tiny yet had big, white, staring eyes, just like all the other birds hanging there. The old man said he lived in a tower block which had no garden, but the singing bird gave him considerable pleasure. He used to have two, he added, until one day, rushing to close the window in a sudden rainstorm, he damaged one of the cages and its bird flew away through the gap. It made him very sad, he said, he had owned it for ten years. The one which remained, he conceded, was a far, far better singer though. I asked how much the birds were selling for, to be told this was less a marketplace and more, he thought about the word carefully, a parliament of birds. Every Sunday morning the birds were brought down from their tower block eries so they could just talk to one another. I said I hadn’t thought of birds in that way yet looking at the rows of cages with the birds chatting animatedly to each other, I realised they were doing just the same as the old men, having a respite from a perhaps solitary life. The old man picked up a piece of material and showed us how he had to cover the cage when the bird was moulting. My wife doesn’t like the mess, he said. So we went back to talking about the cage, bought he remembered with great clarity, in Hong Kong at a spot overlooking the bay. He still had the vista in his mind’s eye. I asked about what he did all day. He said he filled his days sometimes at his local library but more often than not, just listening to
his bird, enjoying its company. My friend noticed a sign about a birds’ singing competition. Did he ever enter? Oh no, he said. If I won, the photographers would be there, and it might end up in the papers. His wife wouldn’t like that. I asked him why one caged bird had been placed so far away from the others. It’s like people, he said.
Sometimes new people are shy and too timid to join in the conversation, and it’s the same with the birds. So the new ones are left on the edge and slowly brought in. Sure enough, as we watched, one bird was inched further into the party. Just then, despite it being so sultry, it started to rain. My bird man and his friends were putting the floral covers back on the cages and gathering them up into bulging shopping bags. As he placed the cage with the bird in front of us, I couldn’t help noticing how the shape of the cage mirrored the tall tower blocks. When the cover was on, the old man said we could photograph it now, if we wanted: his bird couldn’t see us with the cloth on, so it wouldn’t be frightened. As he picked up the bag and turned to go, I was still wondering why his wife seemed less than supportive of what seemed a rather pleasant and benign pastime, so I asked whether his wife had any interests of her own. Any hobbies? The man grinned sheepishly, then smiled. Singing, he said. More than anything else, my wife loves to sing.
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