Dhun Baria’s life was like a Bollywood screenplay. Almost unbelievable. A professional qawwali singer; a fanatically devoted daughter; a crusader for reforming the Towers of Silence; a social activist adored by commercial sex workers; a philanthropist who nearly starved but donated lakhs to secular charity.
She was attempting the Hindi paper in the prelims before the Secondary School Certificate board exams, a subject in which she excelled among all students in the Parsi charity school, when the principal, grim faced, walked up to her and informed that her father Darabsha had died. She never attended school again. Poverty soon began to......