Once a certain man gave a dirham to his wife to buy rice and she went to the rice-seller. Seeing her beauty and loveliness, the seller told her that he would give her not only rice but also good sugar, if she agreed to stay with him for an hour. The lady agreed. He then asked his slave to pack her a dirham’s worth of sugar with a privy signal of wrapping only stones and dust in her napkin. He willed to meet her for the second time again.
When she returned home, she went to pick the cooking pot while her husband found only earth and stones. Soon she realized the rice-seller’s trick and told him that it was her folly to have dropped the dirham in the market street and decided to collect the earth from the place and sieve it at home through her sharp-minded husband to find the dirham. But mistakenly she brought him the cooking pot in place of the sieve. He then started sifting the clay until his face was covered with dust and his wife then took back the sieve and inserted a new dirham inside the clay to keep things under control.