The bride has been displayed in her seven dresses, and the stranger from Bassora sits in the alcove where the hunchbacked groom should be — while the groom himself is kept waiting in the dark by a visitor he will not forget: an Ifrit who grows from mouse to cat to dog to buffalo to bar him from the bridal chamber. Bedreddin takes his bride in honour, and falls asleep in her arms; but the jinn who carried him to Cairo must carry him home before dawn, and the dawn overtakes them on the way. He wakes at the gate of Damascus in nothing but his shirt, and is taken in by a cook with a past. In Cairo, a turban, a purse of a thousand dinars and a paper sewn into a cap tell the Vizier who his daughter's husband truly was — and a son is born who will ask, one day, who his father is. Part Three of Five.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
A note on what is not read here. In Payne's book this tale is told by the Vizier Jaafer inside "The Three Apples". That frame tale is not read in this programme: a husband's murder of his wife is its plot engine, and it is excluded whole under this shelf's rule that violent tales are excluded, never softened. No completeness is claimed for that stretch of the book. Within Part Three itself, one brief passage of the wedding night — the bride's unveiling and what followed, in the source's explicit terms — has been passage-cut at scripting and bridged in a few plain words, on this shelf's standing practice for such passages; the marriage, and that the bride conceived a son, are told as the tale tells them, and nothing else is cut.
Chapters:
00:52 Introduction
01:54 Noureddin Ali of Cairo and His Son Bedreddin Hassan — Part Three
Fresh in-house rendering from John Payne's translation, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (1882–84).
Parts Four and Five are still to come, and will complete the tale.
Narrated by Lulu.
Music: "Imperial Violin Masquerade" — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt at the tale's mid-point break.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
