Ancient Rituals, Borrowed Memories

At the Atash Behram

Frieze on the outside of the agiary (fire temple) in the Ratan Tata Parsi colony, Bombay. My photo.

This newsletter alternates between new compositions and pieces from the archives. This is one of the latter, first published here, in 2017, when I was living in India. An audio version of this post for paid subscribers can be found here.

I follow a gaggle of Indian girls as they stroll across the road, hooting mopeds weaving around them and dodge between an older woman in a sari squatting by a tree stringing marigolds, and a lassi seller anointing highball glasses with frothy white liquid, pass the khaki-clad guard and the sign saying “Parsees and Iranis only”—my skin may bear the mottled peach and blush shades of Europe, but I am a navjoted Parsi, daughter and granddaughter and probably great and great great granddaughter of Parsis, this is my birthright—and enter the peace of the leafy courtyard, stopping to knot a white cotton headscarf with filigree batik printing at the nape of my sweaty neck, babushka style and to buy two sticks of sandalwood from the vendor by the gate.

The first stop is a water trough to one side of the courtyard. Beside it stands a large pail of water and a pear-bellied silver cup for scooping. I wait my turn to pour cool water over my hands and splash my face with a few droplets. Then I join the other women in a little changing area, with a saloon-style half-door. Everyone’s clothes are pale: creams and baby blues, egg yolk embroidery on China white seersucker. I wear a pale apple and chalk salwar kameez.

We face east and lift our kurtas, kameezes and blouses to reveal white cotton singlets underneath, tied with parchment-coloured rope: the sudreh kusti. I unknot the kusti belt and hold it up in both hands, reciting a silent prayer. Then, following a ritual series of actions, I cross the strings behind my back, shake them towards the north like someone encouraging a reluctant horse and knot them first in front and then, with more difficulty, blind at my back, in reef knots I pull tight. Now I’m ready to enter.

Two goats are perched on the windowsills outside watching with soulful eyes as I enter the penumbra of the antechamber. Although the fans are still, the high ceilinged room is a surprisingly cool respite from the constant Bombay heat. I feel as though I have travelled back in time, like Janeway leaving the sterile tech of the corridors behind, entering the holodeck Jane Eyre program. This is the kind of room where old stories could take place, a bedchamber through which Peter Pans could fly and where old wooden lacquered wardrobes lead straight to Narnia.

Round brass and cloudy-glass lamps are suspended on long chains like low-hanging stars. The walls are hung with portraits: saints garlanded with marigolds and a few monochrome photographs of priests in their white robes, caps and face masks, garbed like surgeons. I stop before the picture of Zoroaster’s familiar handsome, bearded, soft-eyed figure, touch the frame gently and touch my forehead.

A few people are standing, moving quietly, sitting. One man, in white kurta pyjama and the typical Parsi soft round velvet cap, sits on one of the deep window ledges, hands carefully aligned in prayer. On another ledge, a tray of oil candles shimmers invitingly. I place 15 rupees on a platter by it and, with a tapered stick, kindle a flame and transfer it carefully from a lit to an unlit wick, adding my tiny contribution to the comforting blaze.

Then I slough off my shoes next to a collection of Bata sandals, slides and mules and move through into the temple proper. I join the people standing in front of the alcove that leads to the inner sanctum where one of the temple’s two fires is dancing in a large urn. We wait in silence or mumbling and whispering prayers in Avestan, the dead language of the ancient Persians. And then I approach, slip a stick of wood into a metal box, and bow right down, praying in the style the Muslims would – millennia later – adopt from us, feet hip width apart, forehead and hands touching the cool marble of the lintel, belly on thighs, bottom pointing towards the ceiling. I’m thinking about my father, performing the same gestures, before a fire up in the dust of a cooler latitude, in Karachi, where few Parsis remain, the childhood home to which I have never returned. I get up with care and, pinching a little grey ash between my fingers, from a salver that waits at breast height, smear a line between my eyes.

I wait for a few moments, thinking, reciting in the quietest of voices, and then I find my shoes where they had been patiently waiting with the others, pairwise in a two-dimensional ark, like tethered dogs, wriggle my toes back inside and leave. Outside, I pass the huge metal cistern of the well and step up to peer over the rim. A turtle is doggiepaddling in the dark water.

I’m pensive, as I emerge back out into the fading haze of an Indian evening, into the syncopated beeps of car and moped horns, into the air scented with sandalwood and pani puri and stale urine and masala chai, the intense scarlets and turquoises and golds of saris, the stream of people, the hulks of cows sitting sidesaddle on the dirty pavement, the whole unremitting sensory assault that is India. We seek connections of all kinds in this life. Things that make us feel less atomised, part of some greater whole, a speck in a swarm, a mouthful of life-giving saliva in an ocean, an oasis in the desert of the universe and somehow tethered, moored, embedded, woven into a history greater than the single life which is so local and brief. A connection with the glossy black rooster eyeing me suspiciously in the temple’s muddy paddock, with the buff-and-cream dog on the Charni Road overpass, sneaking glances up at me as he munches and slavers the bone-shaped dog biscuits I heaped out for him, a connection with the water and the fire and with the line of ancestors who knit and wove the deoxyribonucleic acid tapestry, one womb at a time, from Persia to here, tangling and untangling strands of instructions till, amid the Karachi dust, in a warm Scottish womb, they spelled out the long slope of my nose and the blackish brown of my hair. The thread of tradition and ritual connecting us to the past is as delicate as spider silk, spun from borrowed pride and imagination, gaining its force only from the brute power of repetition. But it can be beautiful.