Leader of the Roost
Once young Nasruddin took his father’s chickens to market in a large wicker basket. “Don’t open the basket until you get there,” his father had instructed. Halfway there, Nasruddin grew concerned that the basket was too hot for the fowls, and so he let them out.
Immediately upon being set free, the chickens scattered in every direction but that of the market. Instead of trying to capture the birds, Nasruddin seized the rooster by the neck and admonished him, “You have the good sense to know when to crow at sunrise, but you can’t keep your flock together to take a simple family walk to the market! What kind of leader of the roost are you‽”
In my introduction to the book, I likened my attempt to marshal the material of the Nasruddin book to this story, in which Nasruddin blames the head of the flock of chickens he just released all by himself.
In calling this project “unruly” and in blaming the nominal head (rooster) of the flock, Nasruddin, for his own jokes, I wrote, “Don’t blame me — Nasruddin started it.”
This artful dodge was my way of pointing a crooked finger (reference to another story earlier in that section of the book) at the Mullah — jokingly obscuring my own personal part in the research and study required in bringing forth the 365+ Nasruddin stories and jests into a modern idiom.
Blame the rooster. Who else could be responsible for the whole mess I’ve gotten myself into‽
