Archive

I spent my childhood and teenage years in Poona in what was a very mixed, cosmopolitan neighborhood with a very dominant Parsi or Zoroastrian presence. On our Sachapir Street, every second house was inhabited on either side by a Parsi or "Irani” family. My mamawaji’s (maternal grandfather) house, a tiled roof bungalow, divided through its length, from street to backyard, into two houses, mirror reflections of each other, was  inhabited on one side by my grandad and  two maiden aunts,  masis — my mother’s sisters — and on the other by the Mehta family.  

On the other side of our tiled bungalow lived a Sindhi family in the front portion of the house, with a Goan family with four young children named Tulip, Gladwyn, Ivan and Alwyn in the back. A Maharashtrian lawyer’s family inhabited the first floor. From the rear veranda of our house where I had my study desk, I was regularly disturbed by the aunt of the Goan children endlessly and annoyingly chanting: "Jesus’s band come marching” or "Devil’s band come marching” if they had been naughty. 

A hundred yards down Sachapir Street was Sharbatwalla Chowk, with the Ahura Cycle Mart, two Zoroastrian-run cafes called the Kayani and the Sachapir, the Kayani bakery and the clinics of two Parsi doctors, Dr Frenchman and Dr Bharucha.  

On Dastur Meher Road, the street that crossed Sharbatwalla Chowk at right angles to ours was the famous Dorabjee restaurant on one side and Mr Chichgar’s supplementary maths tuition class on the other.   

Dominating the neighborhood, precisely opposite our house on a corner was a fire temple known universally as Komra ni Agiary, as it had a wooden weathercock atop its roof.  

The mobed’s family lived in the house adjoining it and Chindhy and Sons sold sandalwood and prayer books in a shop outside its gates.  

My dad, son of a Bombay Byculla Parsi family was an army officer and as he and my mother were posted to different Indian cities and cantonments every few years they decided to leave me and my sister, for continuity of schooling, in one place with my mamawaji and masis. Of course, we’d go to Kashmir or Kanpur or wherever my parents were posted for our holidays and had through that some experience of the rest of India. Kanpur, for instance, had a few hundred Parsi inhabitants, and they associated themselves in a tightly knit community with social occasions, badminton leagues and family friendships.   

My mamawaji had been trained as a navar but was, in his Zoroastrian outlook, very progressive. I am told that when my mother reached puberty he opposed the joint family custom of isolating girls during their monthly periods. He said it had nothing to do with Zoroastrianism and was some barbaric import. He was similarly progressive on other issues. 

Of course we were taught by my pious masis and a tutor priest to recite the Avesta prayers in preparation for our navjotes when my sister was eight and I was seven. My grandfather always said that even if we didn’t understand the prayers we should remember that Zoroastrianism was essentially the ethical injunction of  humata,  hukhta, hvarashta — good thoughts, good words, good deeds!  

The communal diversity of our neighborhood, with every religion and community represented, was a reflection, I thought, of the nation of India. Yes, cultural Parsi-ism, which meant ceremonies such as navjotes and weddings with distinctive parties and meals, celebrations of dressing up for the real and the mistaken "new year” days (I am a Jamshedi Navroz, vernal equinox, devotee myself, but will willingly eat dhan dar or palav on the movable feast in July because some forefathers forgot to count the extra leap year day) and of course more serious things like naming my children traditional Parsi names and even "Tir” out of the Parsi calendar for my youngest daughter.  

Cultural Zoroastrianism was absolutely welcome, but from a very early age scepticism about the ceremonials and the repetition of obscure prayers whose meanings no one understood, posed a dilemma. In my old age, now, I often think I would like to delve into learning ancient Avesta. I haven’t got round to it and still maintain that Tani Ravani and Geti Minoani could plausibly be the names of two Sindhi opera singers.  

Every Parsi boy or girl must wonder what the prayers we learn by heart mean. Nevertheless we are assured that Zoroastrianism was the first known monotheistic religion, and it subsequently gave rise to Judaism as Abraham, Judaism’s founder, was born in the Zoroastrian province of Chaldea and absorbed the idea of a single God. That meant to me that we are the descendants of the central human ethical strand: Jarthosht, Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed!  

But still, my scepticism about muttering prayers in an obscure language set in early. One person who influenced that scepticism was a young man,   eight years older than me, called Aspi Khambatta.  

In the 1930s and 40s, before Indian independence, Mr and Mrs Khambatta — her name was Khorshed, but being short she was known as Bootki — ran a unique Poona establishment called the English Bookstore. It was frequented by Raj personnel. The Khambattas had a son and a daughter and Khorshed became pregnant for the third time. The baby was born and Mr Khambatta, noting that the newborn had blonde hair and blue eyes, disowned the baby as not his. It was a community scandal and Mr Khambatta took his two children and abandoned Khorshed whom he accused of adultery with a British sergeant, a flirtatious customer of their bookshop. 

Khorshed, now living in the two-bedroom ramshackle house opposite ours, raised Aspi on her own, with great difficulty. When he was eight or so, still insisting that he was her husband’s child, she induced a priest to perform Aspi’s navjote. The Parsis of Poona, or the bigoted section of them, my grandfather recalled, gathered outside her house in our street holding black flags to object to the ceremony.

I got to know Aspi when I was perhaps 10 or 11. He was charismatic. He was full of rhetoric about communism and a lot of it made sense to me as I looked around and assessed the poverty, prejudice and logic defying superstition in India. He would preach to gatherings of us neighborhood boys and our friends and would regularly question the ceremonial aspects of the Zoroastrian rituals our families followed. 

My aunts were devotees of such rituals and kept strictly to their prescriptions with sandalwood urns and scarves on their heads as they for hours recited prescribed prayers on particular days. My parents’ generation had all been to Parsi schools, even though the medium of instruction was predominantly English. The middle class urban children of my generation were sent, mostly, to Christian schools — Protestant or Catholic.  

Except for my neighbor and fast friend Kishan Abhichandani who, though he was a Sindhi, was sent to the Parsi owned Dastur School. He learnt to recite Parsi prayers and would wear a Parsi fire-temple-goer’s skull cap. He would, when he came to our house, impress my grand aunt Aala masi (who was infirm and had been brought from a Bombay Parsi "colony” to live with us) with his cap and the Parsi prayers he would repeat. They would speak in Gujarati, and nothing could convince her that he was not born of the faith. 

My own school, Bishops in Poona, preached a regular diet of Christianity with Bible readings, prayers and hymns each morning, sung by the predominantly non-Christian Parsi, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh pupils. For us Parsi boys it meant growing up with a fair knowledge of the ethics of the New Testament and an awareness that the religion into which we were born had the three ethical injunctions and its eschatology simply divided reality into The Truth and The Lie — much simpler than Jesus’s contradiction of Leviticus (Book of laws).  

Even so, the Christian ethic remained dominant as we weren’t invited through the simplistic school readings to compare the New and Old Testaments but accepted Christianity as the religion that turned the other cheek, defied sinners to cast the first stone and commanded you to love your neighbor.  

Growing up with Hindu and Muslim friends, I evaluated their traditions of caste and of the Shia self-flagellation at Moharram and the strict dietary taboos of my Jain friends, as odd. Zoroastrianism’s rituals and taboos seemed logical by comparison.  

At the age of eight, joining the procession that carried the corpse of my grandmother to the Towers of Silence was a trauma that lingered. Years later, in  my adulthood, I came to balance the idea of ecological continuity and the organic virtues of "sky burial” with the fact that Zoroastrian emperors had tombs and I presumed that only the poor threw their dead to the vultures.  

My sister, my closest relative, married outside the religion which was frowned upon in orthodox Parsi circles. I resented the fact that my nephews and niece couldn’t be Parsis if they wanted to be. Legally, anyone who wants to be a Zoroastrian can be one — despite the community refusing to endorse or accept them. That too struck me as contrary to vast centuries of history through which the Achemenid and Sasanian imperial rule converted millions to the religion.   

And so it came to pass that the bedrock of my proud Parsi identity and curiosity about Zoroastrianism turned to reading history. The same purity of race, which has been brought about by Parsi racist "apartheid” in India, gives me the (wanted or unwanted?) assurance that I am a descendant of the races that inhabited those empires. (To any reader curious about them I would recommend the works of historian Tom Holland.)

Consciously abandoning the sudreh and kusti and neglecting to recite the undeciphered and therefore-to-me-meaningless prayers, but being very proud of being a Parsi and being recognized as such, I suppose I should call myself a "cultural Parsi” as I love the food, the banter and the bonhomie.  

My historical reading is not in any sense an academic or solemn pursuit. I could even refer to it as a frivolous obsession. Even mischievous? At the Goa Film Festival some years ago, American Daylight, one of the films I had written, was being featured. The final film in the festival was Oliver Stone’s Alexander and, as is traditional, the last film’s producers threw a party on the closing day.  

Being a Hollywood production the party was sumptuous — held on the seafront of the Taj hotel with no expense spared on food and drink. A huge wall-sized poster of the film was mounted on a large trestle by the beach. I was speaking to Derek Malcolm, a prestigious British film critic, and we happened to be standing with our drinks in our hands not far from this poster.  

A TV crew, with an Indian lady          director in charge rushed up to us.  

"Mr Dhondy, Mr Dhondy, what did you think of the film?” she asked as her camera and microphone were pointed at me.

"Which film?” I asked.  

She pointed to the poster. "This one!”  

"You expect me to watch this film?”  

She was confused. "Why not?”  

"It’s like asking a Jew to view and comment on a film praising Hitler!”  

"What??” she said.  

"This son-of-a-bitch invaded our land, destroyed our civilization, set fire to Persepolis, burnt the library, enslaved our princesses and slaughtered our people and you expect me to watch the glorification of this barbarian Alexander the Damned?”

The poor girl was aghast. "When did all this happen?” she asked.   

"Around 330-326  BC,” I  said.  

Being on live Indian TV, I thought I’d push the prank further.  

"This film offends minorities!” I said, pompously.  

Derek stole my thunder saying: "No, Farrukh, it offends the majority of people who see it.”