The last of the Zoroastrians

The Guardian

My grandfather had never been a tall man, and now he looked absurdly small, no bigger than a child. Swaddled in off-white sheets like a newborn, with just his head and the soles of his feet visible, his eyes were open and mouth disconcertingly agape, as if in surprise. His corpse was slightly raised from the floor, lain atop a rickety wooden stretcher. Beside the body, three priests in white robes intoned in Avestan, the long-dead language of the Zoroastrian scriptures, as a small fire burned in a silver urn in front of them.

It was the height of Mumbai’s monsoon season, and the air in the prayer pavilion was heavy with moisture. The occasional cloudburst outside provided no respite from heat or humidity, and the priests cooled themselves with handheld fans that resembled ping-pong bats as they repeated their sonorous chants. The funeral was the first time I had heard Zoroastrian prayers spoken out loud, though I remembered my grandfather over the years murmuring them under his breath multiple times a day, velvet cap on his head and prayer book in his hand. Besides my mother and me, the small group in attendance was mainly made up of frail friends and distant relatives, almost all of them Parsis, as the Zoroastrians of India are known.

The cremation came later the same afternoon, the heat from the chrome furnace adding to the stickiness. The body was reduced in a matter of minutes to a kilogram of ashes, which were handed to us the next morning in a knotted sack the size of a coconut. Prayers continued the next day, the extended ceremony providing a map for slowly working through the grief.

In the days after the funeral, it struck me with some sadness that my grandfather, who had spent almost a century devoted to the Zoroastrian faith, would be the final Parsi in his family line. Growing up in Britain, I’d read a bit about the history of Zoroastrianism, but only knew the basics: it was one of the oldest religions, based on the teachings of the prophet Zarathustra, who lived thousands of years ago, though nobody knew exactly where or when (Iran, central Asia, perhaps what is now southern Russia; and about 1500 BC, give or take a few centuries). The faith he preached, of an epic battle between a powerful deity and an evil spirit, in which his followers should do everything in thoughts, words and deeds to aid the side of light, was passed down orally for centuries before it was committed to parchment. It became the dominant religion of Persia for more than a millennium, until the advent of Islam in the seventh century. Some Zoroastrians who refused to convert fled, and ended up in Gujarat in western India, where they became known as Parsis after their Persian origins. They built new temples to house their sacred fires, which were tended to by priests and could never be extinguished.

The Parsis promised their Hindu hosts they would not proselytise, and over the centuries this morphed into a dogmatic aversion to conversion. The rigorous tribalism kept the small community alive and distinct for more than a millennium, but in today’s world, the same intransigence is killing it off. “You’ve seen four weddings and a funeral – well, for Parsis, it’s four funerals and a wedding,” says Jehangir Patel, who has edited the community’s monthly magazine, Parsiana, for almost 50 years. When he finally retires, he fears the magazine will simply close, as more of its readers are dying off each year. India’s Parsi population shrank from 114,000 in 1941 to 57,000 at the last census in 2011. Projections suggest that by the end of the century, there will be just 9,000 left.