Word: parsis
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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...
First Cousins. Other traditions may have to change if the Parsi community is to survive. Indian Parsis number only about 100,000 worldwide; 65,000 of them are concentrated in Bombay. They are an uncommonly talented community...
India's Parsi community has been further diminished by emigration to other countries, but that could possibly be the religion's salvation. In New York last week, when Parsis from the Eastern seaboard gathered to mark the spring equinox with a New Year's festival, many of the couples present were mixed marriages in which the Parsi father raises his children in the old religion. The Parsis of the New World (as well as a few in India) have also hit on a resolution of the burial problem-apparently without breaking the tenets of their faith...
...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...