The Last of The Zoroastrians

The Last of the Zoroastrians (excerpt)
Shaun Walker
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.
My grandfather, Pestonjee Pader, was a gentle man with a raucous, childish sense of
humour, but not far beneath the surface lurked a sense of tragedy. He liked to tell
stories, but most of them ended in one of two ways: “… and then, unfortunately, we had
to leave”, or “… and then, tragically, they passed away too soon”. Born into a Parsi
family in 1922, he grew up in the Gulf city of Aden, a thriving port then under British
rule, which attracted many Parsi traders. After his father died in the late 30s, my
grandfather took over the family business, supplying food and other provisions to the
ships that docked in Aden on their way between Europe and Asia. He also ran the Long
Bar, where he watered thirsty soldiers from the British garrison. He negotiated a
concession from Carlsberg, importing beer from Denmark and eventually making a
handsome profit. By the mid-60s, he was on the verge of setting up an ice-cream
factory, a sure money-maker in the punishing Gulf heat. But the plans fell through
when revolution came to southern Yemen in 1967, driving out the British and, by
extension, the Parsis, too. My grandparents escaped to Bombay, leaving all but a few
suitcases of possessions behind.
For my grandfather, the real tragedies were still to come: between 1976 and 1983, he
lost his wife and both his sons, leaving my mother as his only surviving child. When we
flew out to visit him during school holidays in the 90s, his once-grand apartment on
Mumbai’s Malabar Hill felt as if it were occupied by ghosts: a table laid with Carlsberg
glasses and coasters, carefully preserved from decades earlier; photographs of the
deceased on the sideboards. He padded around the too-big apartment, saying
Zoroastrian prayers of remembrance for the dead several hours each day, and regularly
taking the bus to the fire temple for prayers. In the evenings, he went out for dinner
with his mostly Parsi friends, until they, too, started dying off. For as long as I can
remember, he would say matter of factly that he was ready to die, but he kept on
going, remaining healthy into his late 80s. It was only right at the end, when dementia
hit, that he became weak and confused. In summer 2017, the news came that he had
finally passed away, shortly after turning 95.
1. Contextualize the text. Look at the text type, genre, sublanguage, style and
sentiment conveyed.
2. How would you differentiate text type and genre? How does this relate to
language teaching?
3. Analyse the use of ‘it’ in the second paragraph and in the fourth paragraph. Can
you find another similar structure in the text?
4. Explain in your own words the author’s use of ‘map’.
5. Analyse the underlined sentence in paragraph 4.
6. Analyse the underlined sentence in paragraph 5 from both syntactical and
literary perspectives.
7. Analyse the use of the future in the 5th paragraph.
8. Analyse raucous, childish in the 6th paragraph.
9. What is the central theme of the text? How do you think it continues? How
would you use the text in a language class?
10. Analyze the following: swaddled, committed to parchment, lurked, watered,
padded, matter of factly

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