A killing death rite

I took a deep breath. 8220;We get eaten by vultures.8221; I blurted bluntly.

My seven year old turned pale, then grinned. 8220;You8217;re joking, right?8221;

8220;No8221; I said gravely. 8220;Why8217;d I joke about a thing like that!8221;

Silence. 8220;But where?8221; she asked at last.8220; In stone wells,8221; I answered matter-of-factly, 8220;not far from our house.8221;

The Parsi Towers of Silence stand on Mumbai8217;s elite Malabar Hill, shrouded from prying eyes by fifty acres of pristine forest. This is where the Parsis conduct their arcane death rites 8211; practiced by ancient desert tribes8212; on what is probably the country8217;s most expensive piece of real estate, currently valued at Rs 22,000 crore.

Around the medieval necro-polis rise glittering skyscrapers, intruders from the twentieth century, and above the muted roar of city traffic, you can hear the shrill cry of peacocks.

More bizarrely, the followers of this surreal cult are no primitive pagans. Parsis are Zorastrian eacute;migreacute;s from Persia, who came here to escape Islamisation around 1356. Indianised, and subsequently Westernized by the British, they are probably India8217;s most progressive, liberal clan.

In fact, by Indian standards, this tiny, affluent community8217;s socio-economic indices are enviable.97 percent of the world8217;s 60,000 Parsis are urbanised and literate. There are 1024 females for every 1000 males. Women enjoy equal status and have no more than 1.53 children on an average. About 40 percent of Parsis hold good jobs, nearly two-third of households earn between five and twenty thousand per month, and possess an average of 2.7 rooms.

Moreover, we8217;re peaceful, tolerant, broadminded. But also rabidly exclusionist, and governed by regressive customs.

Now an unlikely, unknown crusader called Dhun Baria, has decided to expose this Parsi Paradox. Last week, Baria distributed 10,000 macabre photographs of bodies decomposing in the Towers, throwing our tribe into a tizzy, and confirming what everyone has quietly suspected for years: the vultures are simply not doing their job.

Exiled by Mumbai8217;s concrete jungle, and exterminated by a drug called Diclofenac, the buzzards have vanished, while their rations keep increasing : 1000 bodies every year, the debris of a rapidly dying community.

Since cremation and burial are prohibited by custom, efforts to dispose of the piling corpses with solar panels have been woefully inadequate, says Baria, who dared to go where angels fear to tread. In doing so, she has subsequently been char- ged with blasphemy, and unwittingly reinforced the invisible wall between the dogmatic Orthodoxy and nouveau Liberals.

The orthodox view is pretty simple. While Parsi women have the right to study, work and live as equals, those who marry outside the clan are8220;adu- lteresses.8221; They can8217;t enter fire-temples, qualify for last rites, or bring up their kids as Zorastrians. Men are permitted all three. Reason: Parsis prohibit conversion for fear that it will 8220;dilute8221; their 8220;ethnic purity.8221;

Also, the death rite is sacrosanct, and more ecologically sound than burial or cremation 8211; even if it does happen to be logistically impossible in the twentieth century, and poses a civic health hazard. So while any other country would have banned the practice decades ago, here it continues to thrive, thanks to secular politics.

Interestingly, the Towers of Silence are run by the Bombay Parsi Panchayat 8211; the city8217;s biggest private landlord 8211; that controls over 4,500 charity flats and trust land worth thousands of crores in prime localities. So far, the Panchayat has conveniently supported traditional status quo, warning that change might invite undue attention from potential profiteers, nam- ely 8220;outsiders8221; who may try to wrest control of our fabulously wealthy trusts, and grab charity flats by marrying our girls.

But now a growing band of liberals is raising some inconvenient issues. Recently, they built a prayer hall for inter-caste families, are demanding a rethink on obsolete death rituals and religious conversion. It8217;s commonsense, they say: with barely 35 births for every 1000 deaths, the tribe is facing certain extinction. Not so, argue the traditionalists, because by adulterating the Parsi Pedigree, our ethnicity would die out anyway.

Ironically, the standoff is what makes this morbid controversy over last rites so metaphorical. You see, despite the naysayers, death seems inevitable for the Parsi community, a fait accompli. Now the only thing left to fight about, is how we choose to die.