Word: malabar
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...headed for a fancy hotel, a vestige of the Raj. And I would largely miss this side of the Indian city. Like most tourists, I would see the tourist sites--the great caves at Elephanta, the Victorian railway station, Malabar Hills. Unavoidable as poverty and suffering are in India, I also did not seek them...
...choicest residential area in Bombay is Malabar Hill, where gleaming mansions and apartments house the city's elite. But the crown of the hill remains a jungle, thick with date palms and banyan trees, girded by two concentric walls that protect it from the encroachments of civilization. Inside the walls, amid the trees, are six low, stadium-like enclosures. Residents of Bombay know them as dokhmas-the "towers of silence." It is to these structures that the city's powerful community of Parsis bring the bodies of their dead, exposing them to the air so that scavenger birds...
...both the tower ritual and the Parsi community itself seem to be on the decline. As high-rise apartments go up around Malabar Hill, it has become easier to catch a glimpse of what was once forbidden to all but the tower attendants-a view of the interior of the towers, where the dead are left as carrion. Visiting one of the new buildings, a horrified Parsi was able to see shrunken corpses stacked in grotesque piles inside one tower. After he complained, a wall was quickly built to screen the tower. But Parsis now realize the shortcomings...
...Mishima had written nothing else, his account of Honda's excursion to Benares, the holy Indian crematory site on the Ganges, would be considered a small masterpiece, on the order of E.M. Forster's visit to the Malabar caves in A Passage to India. Among the funeral burnings Honda finds an appalling filth and holy joy that amaze him: "A black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep." The scene "was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all times deemed sacred and pure...
From the swank high-rise apartments of Malabar Hill to the new skyscrapers at Narriman Point, Bombay exudes money, power and privilege. But the city's back streets tell another story. They have become home to thousands of people seeking refuge from the scorching sun, who have poured into the city looking for work. They sleep on the platforms of railroad stations or in the jhuggis-sheet-metal and jute huts-that are home to hundreds of thousands of Bombay's poor. There is little work to be found, and in the past few months, with no money...