:: Farrukh Dhondy

Saving Parsis or pole dancing in Beirut ?

Farrukh Dhondy

"The painter sees beauty, energy —

The hunter only meat".

From Kya Bhole! Bhej Dey Soney or Chandi Ke Goley

(Ed. by Bachchoo)

May.09 : An evolutionist friend tells me that 99 per cent of all the species that ever lived on earth have become extinct. We and the creatures around us are the surviving, transient, one per cent. No doubt this dispensation too shall pass and other creatures will evolve and replace the tiger, the whale, the elephant, the vulture and all those species whose passing we fret about.

I share this thought with V.S. Naipaul who always returns in conversation to conservation and he wonders aloud whether our concern is beggared by this humiliating fact. We agree that it would be callous to take the eternal view and resign oneself to the passing of even one species. There should be sorrow at the fall of a sparrow — though I’m not so sure about rats, swine flu viruses, scientologists etc.

Preservationists are destined to inherit the earth and I must confess to be nothing as grand. My dwelling on disappearances springs from a humbler concern: I am a Parsi and am reminded by most people to whom I confess it that the Parsi "race" is dying out and will in a short time be extinct.

There are no precise statistics of the pre-dominantly Mumbai-Pune and diasporic numbers. Estimates counting those in Canada, Australia, UK, US, Greenland etc. vary between 70,000 at the lower end to 2,50,000 at the higher. More than tigers, but not much of a population.

Nevertheless, the Indian demographers declared Parsis to be a national minority and there are now committees appointed by Unesco to oversee its progress.

The popular view about combating the crisis is that the younger Parsi generation ought to be encouraged to be proud of their history, religion and traditions and that a cohesion ought to be fostered among them through American-style summer camps and games tournaments. In this way, the Parsi youth will meet and marry each other and propagate the race instead of being attracted into "alien" alliances.

This all sounds very noble and credit-worthy but doesn’t strike me as the solution. The last time I wrote about this subject I proposed that the only solution to the dwindling numbers, one that would work instantly and refurbish a new generation in the matter of a few months, would be to import, let us say, half a million Romanian, Polish and Russian women who give ample evidence that they want to escape their mother countries and emigrate and integrate into other societies, into Mumbai. School them in Zoroastrian beliefs and history, using urgently and even uniquely applied Parsi trust funds, the guests, dependents and mothers-to-be of the future Parsi generations. There might have to be some small adjustment to the Parsi marriage laws, but a forward looking community can surely countenance such a change if our very survival depends on it. I have specified some countries above, but I only chose them because in London and all over the world I see women from these countries exiling themselves and doing all sorts of things, some of them pretty demeaning, to earn a livelihood. Surely becoming voluntary Zoroastrian mums and saviours of the Parsi race would be a good alternative to pole dancing in Beirut?

The last time I suggested this, I was deluged with a torrent of abuse from Parsis who refuse the lateral thinking. One communication, though, merits attention. It said "Dear Mr Dhondy, You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink!" This, alas, may be true and it got me wondering whether I had actually found the solution to our impending extinction.

The protests, some of them impugning the legitimacy of my birth, had at their heart a fear of diluting the gene-pool. This concern should of course be working in reverse. An expansion of the gene pool is exactly what is required to avoid the genetic disorders that arise from excessive in-breeding.

Nevertheless, a recent trip to Canada has equipped me with another idea that actually overcomes this objection of tampering with Parsi DNA. Taking a taxi late one night in Toronto, I got talking to the driver.

North American taxi drivers ask you, if they are not in New York, and sometimes even there, how your day was. They make small talk. This Torontian, in an accent not yet ironed into the Canadian twang, asks me where I come from. I am distinctly not Canadian he says.

I tell him — India via UK and, after he says how great both those countries are, I ask him where he originates.

"I am Persian", he says.

I ask him why he doesn’t say "Iranian".

Oh, oh! He goes into a tirade against the word. He would never use it. He casts aspersions on the poor word’s female relatives and then says he uses the word "Persian" because that’s what he is and he feels that Persia was the cradle of civilisation and that Zardusht was their great prophet and had I heard of him?

I said I was a Zoroastrian by birth and that knocked him out. He swerved the car as he looked around to stare at me. He stopped the car and shook my hand and asked my name. He said his name was Razza, because he had to have a Muslim name, but at heart he was a Zardoshti: "Good thoughts, good words, good deeds, what more do you need?’ he asked.

"Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta," I said, remembering the Avesta prayer.

He was genuinely impressed. He started driving again and spoke in no uncertain terms and in very strong, unrepeatable language about Islam and the Arabs. He was — how to put it? — not partial to either. He asserted that all Persians were at heart secretly Zardoshtis.

That is, as President Ahmedinejad might tell you, very difficult to believe, but before the journey was over, he was predicting that there would in Persia be a revolt and a mass reconversion after 1,200 years to Zoroastrianism. I said, as one does when disagreeing with taxi drivers, that I was not so sure and that the Mullahs had a grip on the country. That brought forth another tirade — one of the occasions on which I wished I knew how to work the tape-recorder on my mobile phone. Well, there goes my Iranian visa!