Word: parsis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...patronized mainly by affluent Indians. A visitor strolling across the manicured lawns of a private club these days is likely to hear an echo of the past in calls for "Jimmy" (short for "Jamshedji"), "Bunty" (a current Indian favorite) or "Sam" (which General Manekshaw prefixed to his string of Parsi names). The use of such Anglicisms dates back to the time when British officers, unable to pronounce Indian names correctly, gave their troops nicknames for convenience. Indians who slavishly follow such British customs have been given the mocking name "brown sahibs" by their countrymen...
...foolish about matters of practicality and self-interest. For 40 years she has tried to bring little Indian schoolchildren to Jesus, and now she doubts whether she did any good. At the end of the book, from her hospital window, Miss Batchelor sees the wheeling carrion birds of a Parsi tower of silence. The birds, she says, have picked her mind clean. She is finished. So is British India...
Indian Findings. What provided the clue was a study by Bombay Drs. S.M. Sirsat, J.C. Paymaster and A.B. Vaidya of the Parsis, descendants of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia 1,200 years ago, settled in India and married exclusively within their own sect. Parsi women are three times more likely to develop breast cancers than the rest of the Indian population. Nearly 40% of the Parsi mothers studied showed virus-like particles in their milk...
Unjustified Risk. Many doctors assume that circumcision prevents cancer of the penis. But Preston notes that penile tumors occur in circumcised as well as uncircumcised men. Nor does circumcision appear to be a major factor in preventing cancer of the cervix in women. Men of India's Parsi group are not circumcised; Jewish men are. Yet cervical cancer is rare among the wives of both groups. It is more frequent, however, in lower-class Moslem women, whose husbands, though circumcised, maintain low standards of personal hygiene...