The papagayu bedri, pasturinyu bedri or green parrot is one of the oldest and most mysterious symbols in Kristang culture, and is shared with many other Portuguese-descended creole cultures and ethnicities across the world, including in Sri Lanka, India, West Africa and Brazil. As described by researcher K. David Jackson in “Flying with the Papagaio Verde (Green Parrot): An Indo-Portuguese Folkloric Motif in South and Southeast Asia” (pp. 178-179),
Sung from Diu to Macao, the papagaio verde is a popular and agile motif: it flies in from afar to teach maxims, play the rogue, criticize or insult, sing to a lover, or beat its wings and sing dance tunes. Variants of quatrains on the theme of the green parrot sung in Creole Portuguese have been collected throughout Luso-Asian communities by linguists, folklorists and ethnographers, and remain part of folk traditions performed in Daman, Malacca and Macao.
Modern reimaginings of the green parrot include this same critical role as an arbiter or doorkeeper of fate or destiny in the short stories ‘Island End‘ and ‘There is no word for gay in the Kristang language‘ by current Kabesa Tuan Raja Naga Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang. As a major Kristang cultural symbol, the green parrot thus represents paradigm-shifting or shattering change, transformation, growth, exodus and/or movement, and often as a result signals either endings or beginnings or both at the same time with a strong note of finality, terminality or completion. The green parrot is also therefore very much associated with the Kristang core values of saudadi and elisia and with tremendous, paradoxical and overpowering beauty, bittersweetness, loss and strength, especially those experienced when knowing something is final and/or terminal, but also simultaneously recognising the new opportunities and changes that that ending will bring.
Green Parrots are finally also strongly associated with Tuan Jaazi Jaasir Mahsom s/o Mazhardeen, the 16th Kabesa and 0th Ka-Kabesa Vadros, who has a very strong personal affinity to Gaia Themselves, the living universe, and parrots and lovebirds as they represent Gaia and the living universe, and who is also the current holder of the Green Parrot magnamakara magnaarchetype that is tied to the protection of the Republic of Singapore.