Real estate is now hideously expensive here and our first stop for the day is at the home of a Parsi who lives atop some of the most costly land in the world. Malabar Hill features a famous park; rare open space in a city of twenty million. But beside the park is a much larger area of green, and it is private Parsi space.
Smita Crishna’s penthouse is style I’ve rarely seen in Punjabi-dominated, show-off-your-wealth-as-distastefully-as-possible Delhi. With subtle colour schemes, beautiful art and sexual sculpture, it’s obviously old money. The balcony is a dream. My eyes soar over Mumbai’s Miami-like strip of highrise, palm trees and traffic; they loop over the turgid grey sea and its rust-bucket ships and sweep back over the slums that spread like stains around skyscrapers and crumbling colonial mansions. And then I peer down for a bird’s-eye view of death in the scrub below.
The Parsis maintained mystery in their funeral rituals until their church body, or Punchayat, began selling off land here. Apartments like this expose those secrets, for straight below us, behind fifteen-feet thick walls and beneath banyan scrub are four concrete concentric structures that look like wide dirt-filled wells. The British called them dakhmas, ‘the towers of silence’. I have no idea why, as they look nothing like towers. Three are empty, the fourth is not. Inside I can see the shapes of shrunken dead Parsis awaiting their birds of paradise: the white-backed vulture.
The religious beliefs behind this Parsi practice belong to Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian religion is one of the most ancient monotheistic faiths and it probably influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Its prophet was Zarathustra, who was born in what’s now Iran sometime between 1500 and 600 BCE. The prophet’s name means ‘golden shining star’ or ‘rich in camels’ or even perhaps ‘tormenter of camels’, depending on the translation. Like Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed, turning thirty was a turning point for this bloke. Instead of dying his hair pink or taking drugs or going out with someone utterly wrong for them (like I did), he resolved the crisis by taking a sojourn in the desert and meditating on the meaning of life. Zarathustra returned at forty and talked of One God – Ahura Mazda – the omniscient Lord of Wisdom who has no form, shape, beginning or end, but has seven helpers, called Amesha Spentas. These archangels of creation guard and protect humans, animals, plants and the sacred elements, earth, water, fire and air; and Zoroastrians believe these sacred elements must not be polluted by human waste. In the rocky Iranian desert, the faithful were left on mountaintops to be devoured and dried by the sun’s rays. In India, Parsi Zoroastrians leave out their dead for vultures believing it’s the cleanest, most hygienic way of getting rid of the soul’s temporary home.
We have coffee on the balcony and discuss the ugly black and white birds. Smita – a tiny, elegant woman dressed in a white western suit – understands my horror at the thought of having a vulture rip my body apart.
‘It upset me when I was young but my father explained to me, it’s the ultimate charity. You are giving food to the vultures – that’s what they live on. And the eating doesn’t matter to you when you’re dead.’
I guess so, but it does matter if the vultures aren’t there. We try to focus the camera down into the Parsi cemetery. A few black crows hover, myna birds hop around looking bored, kites ride the coastal currents, pigeons coo and seagulls swoop into the sea. None seem interested in a Parsi lunch. The cameraman thinks he sees a lone vulture, but I can’t. Smita says she hasn’t seen one for years.
‘Bodies just lie there for months on end sometimes, sometimes the whole well is full of bodies, sometimes we get a smell; the apartment next door gets it terribly.’
She winces and twitches her delicate little nose.
Only in incredibly tolerant and respectfully religious, overly bureaucratic and corrupt India could bodies be allowed to rot in the open in the midst of a major city. Smita says people used to joke about crows leaving spleens on verandahs and livers on their landings but now the laughter is starting to get stuck in certain throats. Her mother just died and was cremated; Smita couldn’t cope with the thought that she’d suffer the final indignity of rotting away and polluting the sacred earth and air. Sadly but matter-of-factly, she states, ‘It was the right decision because it was clean, pure and fast.’
Smita’s father and her uncle and some of her family friends are also electing to be cremated. But such alternatives seem to be reserved for the rich. Smita’s father was the head of the Godrej empire, one of India’s most successful industrial manufacturers. Money buys anything in India (apparently it only costs twenty dollars to get someone killed in this city), so rich Parsis can usually pay enough for a priest to buck tradition and conduct ceremonies for a body that’s to be cremated. But some priests refuse to help anyone who wants to be cremated. And Parsi religious obstinancy doesn’t stop at funeral rites.
Smita hardly looks like a rebel and neither does her equally glamorous friend Meher Rafaat who arrives for yet more coffee. But Smita and Meher have been turfed from the Parsi nest – Smita for committing the sin of marrying a Hindu, and Meher for marrying a part-Zoroastrian, part-Jewish Iranian who practises the Baha’i faith. One priest even calls them ‘adulteresses’ and graciously told Smita that if she gives up on the idea of cremation he’ll do her a special favour and put her in the dokhma reserved for prostitutes. Smita takes such threats seriously. In 1990, a young Parsi, Roxanne Shah, died in a car accident; she was married to a Jain. The high priest called her ‘illegitimate’, accused her of ‘adulterating the race’ and refused her corpse entry to any dokhma. In response, Smita and Meher founded the Association of Intermarried Zoroastrians (AIMZ).
Meher is furious that a few priests are spoiling the Parsi faith. She politely pouts, ‘Bombay is the stronghold and the stranglehold of Zoroastrianism. The priesthood is shackling the religion. The prophet appeared to free people of bigotry. He taught us to think, to agonise about our actions … and the words of the prophet do not forbid intermarriage.’
Smita believes the priests are following certain Vendidad scriptures, which concern the rituals and not the original teachings of the prophet. I admire her courage for taking on her church but I suspect this whole argument could be about more than religion. Ethnic purity and skin colour are probably involved. Skin whiteness is an obsession in Mumbai as much as anywhere else in this brown-skinned land. An ancient Indian proverb says ‘if the skin is white, it is love at first sight’, and the modern roads are lined with massive billboards advertising ‘fair and lovely’ soap and ‘return to fairness’ skin-lightening cream. Whiteness is so jealously guarded, the Parsis probably want to preserve their paleness as much as they want to protect and propagate their vultures.
The Parsi church, the Punchayat, is planning to find fifty pairs of vulture chicks, isolate them, feed them and keep them locked up in an aviary to breed until the population is big enough to be released to feast. It also wants to isolate its children and get them breeding. One in four Parsis marry outside the faith, they also marry late compared to most Indians, and because their women are educated and ambitious they only want one or two kids.
Before we arrived in Mumbai, Jonathan’s producer Tony took a film crew to the wedding of twenty-seven-year-old Behzad and twenty-five-year-old Mazreen Sanga. They came back with pictures of Parsis waltzing away to an Indian-accented great Aussie hit:
I am coming from the larnd down und-eeerrr
Where de women bow and men charmer.
A few days later we visit the newlyweds as they pack up to flee the parental coop and fly north where rents are cheaper. Mazreen is pretty with fair skin, short hair and an outrageously outspoken manner. She matter-of-factly tells the camera she married a Parsi to maintain the freedom of the most liberal culture in India.
‘If someone tells me to sit in the kitchen and cook or to take a burkha I say NO WAY. It’s usual in India that the girl gives up everything for the guy and I was not ready to give all that up, not even for the love of my life; I don’t think I can be cooped up anywhere
.’
In the tiny, stuffy little flat her new husband’s parents preen and puff with pride that they have a son married to a Parsi girl. I am shocked to hear an Indian girl be so bolshie; she makes Razoo look conservative. She’s right, the Parsis are quite liberal. Yet their western ways only extend so far. For Mazreen to be free of chauvinism in life she’ll have to submit to some rigid rules in death.
The next morning we get up at five to join a convoy of Parsis heading north to their holy Vatican. The Ianshah Fire Temple is in Udvada, a tiny fishing town consisting of one dusty street lined by rickety wooden houses. Old men rock and sleep on verandah swings while their wives watch the Parsi parade. Hardly a procession of vim and vigour, it’s more like a nursing home’s annual outing. The Parsi faithful are shuffling along stooped, pot-bellied and frail; they clutch each other’s arms, shake on walking sticks and plod along with frames. The spectacled lead those blinded by glaucoma, and the toothless talk for the dumb. Yet the faces show strength, resilience and power. With fierce expressions, hooked beak noses, piercing eyes and white skin, many of the Parsis remind me of eastern-European Jews. The men wear velour skullcaps, while the women pull back their greying hair with scarves and show a bit of rare leg below flowery western dresses. They’re a bossy bunch of cuckoos living in this Indian nest and they’re super-keen to keep others out of their territory. When we stop at the outside wall of the temple and unload the camera, at least five approach to tell us we can’t come in.
We’ve already got the message. A small door and large sign blocks the temple entrance: ‘NO INTRUDERS, NO FILMING, NO PHOTOS, NO NON-PARSIS’.
Even after being thrown out of Judaism, I’m shocked. I’ve never seen a sign like it in India. This is an open door country and I’ve been welcomed into homes, temples, shops, offices and pretty much anywhere I’ve wanted to go. A year ago, such a sign wouldn’t have bothered me at all – of course the sacred spots of different faiths should be respected – but I feel a little put out now. I miss the inclusive, casual nature of Hinduism.
Jonathan is more pragmatic – he sends Kursheed and a Parsi wedding photographer in with a small camera. They disappear behind the tall gate, high walls, white columns, and closed shutters to stand beneath a large dome where a birthday celebration is in full swing. Today marks the annual Jashan ritual, and the star of the show is a flame that could light a thousand candles but must never be blown out. Today a fire turns twelve hundred and eighty years old. Its flames have flickered almost as long as the Parsis have been in India.
When Zarathustra came out of the desert he began to preach to try to turn the pagans to his One God. He mustn’t have been very good at it – it took him ten years to get his first disciple – but eventually Zoroastrianism caught on well and spread over a large part of Europe and Asia. However, in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Parsi lands of Persia were invaded, their libraries burnt and the people forced to convert to Islam. Some fled persecution to Russia, others set sail to India. Soon after the immigrants made India their home, they set about collecting a sacred fire. Flames were taken from sixteen sources representing natural order and the different trades and classes of human society. Flames from a potter, a brick maker, a goldsmith, a tinker, a baker, a brewer, a soldier, a shepherd, a mayor, a priest, a burning corpse and lightning were merged, purified and consecrated over many special days and then carried in a procession to where they burn now. Different temples have been built around the sacred fire, thousands of monsoons have raged around it and generations of priests have served it. Its flames have burned as bright as India’s most successful refugee community.
Across the road from the temple, we non-Parsis watch the worshippers walk towards their sacred sanctum sanctorum. Jonathan, his producer Tony and I sit it out on a verandah decorated with beautiful, delicate chalk designs of fish and the words ‘good luck’. An elderly priest shaking with Parkinson’s disease sits patting the heads of devotees who come to touch his feet and kiss his hands. In a wobbly whisper he tells us what we’re missing. Inside, Parsis are making offerings of sandalwood to the huge fire, which burns in a massive silver urn.
‘They pray to the all purifying elements to take them to a higher plane. The fire represents the divine spark of the soul; the inner light. We worship fire as the Son of God. Today is like thanksgiving. The fire has given so much to this community, we give it back now.’
Thankfully we are invited to lunch. Under a red tent, along long tables, hundreds of Parsis are hunched over banana-leaf plates engaging in a feeding frenzy. Plates are piled high with huge chunks of chicken, pickle, fish, lamb and eggs.
‘We love our food,’ the lady next to me yells as she sucks on a bone and pulls it from her mouth.
I order vegetarian – the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism have spoiled the pleasure of the taste of meat and a sense of sin rises from the thought of eating the flesh of a living being killed for my needs. It seems shocking even to watch meat-eaters. As I sit sucking lentils, a group of middle-aged women take me under their wing and cluck in concern over my limpness in the heat. When Jonathan tries to interview one of them, she just stares at the camera and yells, ‘WE LIKE YOUR WIFE!’
There’s little small talk between the ladies and me. The caring stickybeaks all seem to be obsessed with my menstrual cycle. My neighbour Mehru openly inquires, ‘You don’t have your period, do you, dear?’
When I say no, she tells the woman next to her and the information is relayed down the long table with relief. Mehru pats my hand and explains.
‘We are very strict peoples, dear, once we couldn’t cook for five days when we had them, we couldn’t touch certain cupboards, we couldn’t touch the prophet, now we cook, but you can’t be here with your period, dear.’
I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie, but it’s not funny. I hate crap about women being dirty and long ago tired of the way it taints nearly every religion. Kursheed shows me a Parsi pamphlet from the temple that makes me feel so much better. It explains that women emit ‘poisonous dioxins in their impure menstrual blood’, and when women bleed they become depressed and their aura becomes ‘dense, dark and morbid’. What’s more, their ‘emanations are poisonous and can kill delicate plants, spoil foodstuff and the very air around her. Even her breath smells foul’.
‘We Parsis are very scientific, dear,’ explains Mehru as she reads over my shoulder.
The ladies take me to meet their most respected leader. Hunched over a bowl of strawberry ice-cream is Professor Dame Mistri Meher Master-Moos. Wearing a traditional Parsi white sari with a pretty border of flowers, a severe expression and bright red lips, she is as verbose as her name. I’ve come across many mad professors in India – peace experts who support India’s nuclear weapons program, feminist critics who touch their husband’s feet and only eat his scraps, and science lecturers who don’t accept evolution – but Professor Master-Moos takes the cake (and the ice-cream). She doesn’t believe in a vulture virus and shakes her finger and pecks her head as she tells us her truth in an incredibly posh put-on English accent.
‘You see the Defense Ministry of the USA found that these high-flying birds got in the way of the multi-billion dollar missiles, rockets and planes and so on. So they wanted to get these birds to fly to lower levels and [they] put in some kind of sound vibration, which prevents the birds from flying at the usual heights … It also gives them something like what human beings get, vertigo … Their heads and legs droop and they die of starvation, because once the neck gets affected they can’t swallow.’
As I choke on my ice-cream, another man hops up and crows that Hindus are shooting the birds because they want the dokhma area for development. Obviously, like most Indians, Parsis love a good gossip and a good conspiracy theory.
A five-minute drive out of town at a rickety rundown holiday home by a boiling beach, the high priest of the Parsis, Dr Peshotan Homazdir Mirza, is resting after lunching with his family. He wears a light blue outfit like a surgeon’s gown
made of extremely thin starched cotton, a square matching hat and the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen. The priest squints intently at the camera, and wrinkles up his nose and bears his teeth as he talks. He’s exactly what television loves: a fundamentalist and a great storyteller. Dr Mirza tells us a legend about why the Parsis are so snobby. When the Parsis first landed on the swampy Gujarati coast, the Hindu King Jadi Rana sent them a bowl of milk full to the brim, signifying that his territory was full of good people and had no room for more. The Parsi high priest put some sugar in the milk and sent it back. The King was impressed; the milk didn’t overflow, it was sweetened and enriched. The Parsis promised to do the same to India – to keep a low profile, to breed among themselves and never to stir the pot by trying to convert anyone to their faith. In exchange, they kept their Farsi language, created new sacred places and were left out of the bloodshed when India was divided and Pakistan created. During Partition, Muslims and Hindus killed each other and left the Parsis alone – the Parsis felt their exclusive way of living helped them survive. Dr Mirza says the Parsis must keep their promise; as birds of a feather they must continue to stick together.
The Parsi priesthood is an inherited right and Dr Mirza is a twentieth-generation holy man in his family. He feels it’s his job to ensure that his religion and race stay as pure as milk without sugar. Dr Mirza is one of the priests who absolutely refuse to recognise any Parsis who have married out of the faith or any child of that union. Dilution, he says, is death.
‘What will happen after the second or third generation? Do you think they will be Zoroastrians? History has proved that it is not so. After the Arab conquest of Iran, it’s not that Parsis came only to India, others had the land route to go to Europe and China. All got diluted … The only group that kept their identity was the group that came to India.’
Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure Page 20