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In our Parsi community, no two Parsi or Irani families are the same, but we are united in our religion, in particular the three Avestan words taught to us at the time of our navjote: the tenets of humata, hukhta and hvarshta (good thoughts, good words and good deeds) that encapsulate the ethical code of Zoroastrianism. 

I grew up in a family of loving, unassuming people and was fortunate to have known my maternal grandparents Minocher and Tehmina Lalkaka, and my mother’s maternal and paternal grandmothers. Both ladies lived into their mid-90s. Parsi women were, and still are, a force to be reckoned with. 

When my younger brother Zubin and I were little (my youngest brother Farokh was not yet born), we were often sent to stay with our grandparents, whom we adored. It is from my grandparents that my brothers and I unconsciously imbibed the need for prayers in our lives. Looking back, I enjoyed the everyday rituals followed in my grandparents’ home, especially the delightful fragrance of frankincense and sandalwood permeating the house. Every day at sunset a hand-held afarganyu with burning sandalwood sticks was taken around the house. I never saw this ritual performed in any non-Parsi home.

I was 10 years old when Zubin and I were initiated into the Zoroastrian religion. I remember my grandmother being most unhappy that my parents had left doing my navjote so late. It was Ervad Peshotan Peer, our family mobed, who taught us our kusti prayers and performed our navjote ceremony at the Banaji Atash Behram in Bombay. It was a wonderful feeling for me to finally be allowed to wear the sudreh and kusti just like my parents and my grandparents. 

Minocher, Chief Justice of the Small Causes Court, was very forward thinking and encouraged both his daughters to study. When my grandparents visited London in 1937 they took my mother Vera, who was 13 years old at the time, everywhere with them. While visiting Paris, he and Tehmina took my mother to the Folies Bergère because my grandfather believed that one must experience everything. My mother followed in my grandfather’s footsteps by studying law and earning a law degree, but she never practiced after her marriage.

My grandparents were liberal in their thinking and followed the tradition of living in a joint family, as did their parents and their grandparents before them. They performed their kusti several times a day and recited prayers from the Zend Avesta. At home, my grandfather always wore a round box-shaped black velvet topi on his head. Being truthful was an important virtue in our homes. To my playful grandmother’s irritation, my grandfather, a stickler for honesty, would not utter a white lie, even if it was just "for fun.” The day prohibition was declared in Bombay, my father Rustom Nadirshaw said that he was horrified to see his father-in-law pour expensive bottles of alcohol down the drain.

Vera and Tehmina were very versatile in their artistic talents. While Tehmina was still at school, she won a gold necklace, a fourfoot- long chhéro, which was presented to her by the Maharaja of Indore for crafting a beautiful lacquer work box decorated with beads and shells. My grandmother was an excellent  cook. I loved everything she made, especially the bhakhras for tea, and the sweet ambakalyo she made with raw green mangoes. She would pack the cut fruit into earthenware jars with several kilos of gor (jaggery) and leave it to steep for at least six months to one year. She also made kèri nu achar (mango pickle) during the mango season, marinating raw green mangoes in lots of salt and setting the jars aside for the same amount of time. She did not believe in the practice of women having to be separate from family members at certain times of the month. The only unspoken rule, understood by all the women in the family, was that the prayer table and the prayer books were not to be touched until after they had bathed and washed their hair at the end of seven days. Her one inflexible rule, and she could get fierce if it was not obeyed, was that no menstruating female should touch her precious mango jars. She truly believed that the fruit in the jars would spoil, and everything would have to be thrown away.

Unlike my grandparents’ home, ours was a single family unit. My father’s early years were spent in Simla, where most of his friends were English. He left home at the age of 16, went on to do engineering in Jamalpur, then to Horsham, England, for further studies. Until he met my mother, he had mixed very little with the Parsi community. He could speak Urdu, but very little Gujarati. It was a source of much embarrassment to him that even after years of speaking the language, he still spoke Gujarati with an English accent and his grammar was never correct.

  

Reciting daily kusti prayers, and following Parsi traditions, did not play a big role in our home. The only time our family’s "Parsiness” came into play was when we, along with our grandparents, visited the fire temple on March 21, Jamshedi Navroz, and later in the year for the muktad prayers, and to celebrate  Parsi New Year.

My parents’ friends were a mix of Parsis and non-Parsis, while my grandparents’ friends, the ones I remember meeting, were mostly Parsis. However, my grandfather’s closest lifelong friends were Gujarati Hindus who had studied with him at the Bharda High School for Boys in Bombay. The only time I ever saw my stately grandfather weep (I was 15 at the time) was when he learned over the phone that his last best friend, Mangaldas, had passed away. I remember him bemoaning, "What will I do now that my best friends are all gone?”

As an officer of the Railways Rustom travelled extensively all over India. During our school vacations, Zubin and I sometimes accompanied our parents to places that our father visited on work. We travelled everywhere in a special carriage attached to the main train, built as a home on wheels. We were fortunate to meet people from all walks of life, enjoyed their many kindnesses, shared their hospitality, learnt tolerance and to be accepting of everyone. It broadened our horizons and taught us the meaning of being Indian. I journeyed once again in this manner when I read A Suitable Boy. Vikram Seth took me to all the places he wrote about, and I recognized his characters as people I had once fleetingly met. I was drawn into his world. It made me aware that I wanted to write like him, about people, families and places that I knew and had travelled to, to write mainly about Parsis and families that had touched my life. 

In my early teens, my father, to whom I was very close, was transferred to Madras and I joined the Government College of Arts and Crafts. For a short while in Madras I did not have the opportunity to mix with Parsi families who had daughters my age. My friends were all non Parsis: either South Indian Tamilians or with fathers who had also been transferred from different parts of India. Three years later, when I returned to Bombay to continue my art studies at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts, I missed being in Madras. It was then that I questioned what it meant for me to be a Parsi. I remember feeling different in my interactions with my Parsi friends, having so far mostly spent time with Hindu friends and their families. It was a feeling of not belonging. Fortunately for me, that feeling did not last very long.

My love of art, and writing novels and short stories, stems from my great-grandmother Cooverbai Lalkaka (née Appoo). When I was a child she was the person who told me magical stories that she had heard when she was little, related to her by her blind mamaji (maternal uncle). Cooverbai was one of the earliest students to join the newly opened Alexandra Girls English Institution. In 1893, after her matriculation examination, she was awarded the John Jardine Scholarship of Rs 40 for achieving the highest marks in history and geography. That same year she also took part in the Government Art Exam and was awarded a First Grade Certificate, about which I learnt from a newspaper cutting dated 1894 sent to me by a friend. Her mother’s brother had traded with China and my grandparents’ home was filled with beautiful Chinese vases and artifacts.

Cooverbai was deeply religious. Every day, until the age of 85, she would close her bedroom doors after sunset and pray in her room. Before beginning her prayers she would squat on her haunches and swab the bedroom floor even though it had been cleaned earlier by the ganga (female domestic helper). Then, after bathing and reciting her kusti, she would sit on a low wooden patlo (stool), light a divo and pray. At the same time, she would weave little floral garlands to place on every single sepia colored photograph of her departed family members hanging on the walls of her room. On Fridays, when she recited the Behram Yazad prayer, she would place a small glass of sweetened nimbu pani and one hard-boiled egg near a lit divo on a table beside her. As children, Zubin and I would wait impatiently for her to finish her prayers and open her bedroom doors, knowing that she would meticulously share out the drink and half an egg between the two of us. My love for both these simple items stem from her.

My great-grandmother also gave me my faith in prayers, especially the Behram Yazad prayer. I still have the Behram Yazad story she wrote for herself in the early 1900s in a small red notebook in free-flowing Gujarati script, the red ink now faded in parts. (My sister-in-law, a Gujarati scholar, spent several hours transcribing it in clear Gujarati letters, chhutta daskat, so that I could read it. It is a treasured gift from my sister-in-law to me.)

 

I realize now that I also unconsciously imbibed my great-grandmother’s philosophic attitude to death, painful as it is. I still remember the blackish tin box she kept in her wooden cupboard lined with muslin and kept in readiness with fresh unworn clothes, muslin sudrehs and a new kusti that she would need when taken to the Doongerwadi after her death. She showed the box and where it was kept to all her family members, including myself. I was 19 when she passed away.

When my husband Dr Mujtaba (Chotu) Tayabali first proposed to me, I said no, but he persisted, and I agonized for some years before I agreed to marry him. The social issue of a Parsi marrying a non-Parsi was very real in my mind, even though neither my parents, nor my grandmother who was alive at the time, put any impediments in my way. They loved and respected my yet-to-be husband. I remember praying to Behram Yazad, begging that if it was not the right thing, to move us apart. Instead of such a thing happening, we were brought even closer together. 

We had a registry wedding in the morning at my husband’s home and in the evening, Dastur (Dr) Framroze Bode performed a Zoroastrian blessing ceremony for the two of us at my parents’ home. It was then that I felt truly married. (Dastur Bode’s blessings have lasted us our lifetime.)

What had also deeply troubled me before marriage was the thought that my children would not be accepted within the Parsi community. But it was I who was shunned at the time of my beloved father’s death in 1994. The same priest who had performed my navjote and knew me and Chotu well, and who had had no problem earlier with me attending my grandmother’s prayers at Doongerwadi, asked me to sit outside the bungli during my father’s funeral prayers. I remember sitting with the priest later and sobbing heartbrokenly after the prayers were over. I told him how deeply he had hurt me, knowing that I was a practicing Zoroastrian, that he had done to me what he had always preached one must never do — "hurt someone, to the heart.” Looking back, and knowing that he was a kind man, I hope that the hurt he caused me at the time of my father’s passing was done due to peer pressure.

However, despite all this, I could not have married a finer person. I have been blessed with a wonderful man as my life’s partner. I have had very loving in-laws, and I am proud that my three adult children follow the tenets of humata, hukhta and hvarshta.