Section 1. Circle the odd one out.  

Parsi Baugs are early risers. By 5:30am, half a dozen nimble boys are already splashing water on all makes of modern and antique cars. Once in a while, Soli Uncle shouts instructions about how and where his 1955 Fiat should not be touched. Meanwhile, large men carrying aluminum milk cans from Parsi Dairy Farm are ringing doorbells and portioning the milk into tapelis. I try to complete my last REM cycle, but someone’s scooter needs 17 kicks to gargle out of its slumber.  

Which is just as well, because I’ve promised to meet Sooni Aunty this morning. My own parents were never the traditional kind, and after I married a parjaat, even distant relatives gave up trying to interest me in Zoroastrian rituals. But not Sooni Aunty. And Sooni Aunty follows the march of her grandfather clock.  

As I walk past my parents’ room, I see that they are still asleep; we children may have left the nest and set up homes of their own, but my parents are still recovering from the exhaustion of raising us. For five years now I’ve been making the Pune–Mumbai trip every alternate weekend. My husband sometimes accompanies me. Though he is now used to the rhythms of the Baug, and has even picked up some Gujarati, it is a curious cultural reversal. Here in my parents’ house, for the first time, the Hindu Brahmin male finds himself a minority.  

We soon tuck into what was my childhood breakfast – fresh brun pav with malai – and this morning, an additional treat of ravo (a warm semolina and milk pudding topped with dry fruits). Today is Navroze, the start of a new year, and needs a sweet beginning. 

Later that morning, I arrive at Sooni Aunty’s house, where the haft-seen table is being set up. Haft, she tells her grandson, refers to the number seven, while seen is the letter s or sh in the Persian alphabet. She asks me to bring her mother’s marble table out to the centre of the room. I drag the heavy table out from its corner, and immediately the familiar current shoots up my elbow. It’s been years since I stepped into a dojo but my elbow won’t let me forget the fall. I rotate my arm slowly and watch Sooni Aunty arrange a silver bowl and coin on the table. She proceeds to decorate the table with sirka (vinegar), shir (milk), shahed (honey), sumanu (wheat germ sweets), seer (garlic), somac (spices), and seb (apple).  

Sooni Irani is one of those old Parsi women who is both dependent on and essential to the community. I’m reminded of E. V. Lucas’s poem Jack, which starts with ‘every village has its Jack’ and goes on to detail an unremarkable person who nevertheless represents the essence of the community – without him or the others quite realising it. Sooni Aunty is our Jack. 

As welcoming as she is, I suspect I will always need one more meeting to warm up to her. To her credit, however, Sooni Aunty does not bristle with reminders about how I’m only in the Baug for a few days because I recently married a parjaat, an outsider. (She only asked once, ‘Do they let you work?’ It took me a second to recover and assure her that yes, yes, ‘they’ did ‘let’ me work. She left it at that.)  

After some fussing around, Sooni Aunty places a mirror behind all the bowls, and the food doubles. She instructs me to look into the mirror at a very specific angle, so that I may attract good fortune in the year ahead. Jamshedi Navroze is celebrated on March 21st, the vernal equinox, when the earth gets exactly 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. I think of how it is a day of symmetry and balance marked by excesses (feasts) and deficits (the usual laments about dwindling numbers). I do not tell her this.  

It is also a time of origins. As Sooni Aunty feeds sweets to her grandson, she begins with the milk-and-sugar story. He’s heard it before, I’ve heard it before; I suspect that no Parsi ever hears it for the first time. The story lives in our skin.  

‘Do you know why they call us Parsis?’ 

‘Because we came from Persia!’ 

‘Yes, they called it Pars then. A group of Zoroastrians escaped persecution in Pars by getting into boats. They faced many storms but eventually landed at Sanjan, in Gujarat.’ 

‘Jadav Rana!’ the little boy prompts.  

Sooni Aunty nods and adjusts his kusti, the sacred thread, which is peeking out of his shirt. ‘Jadav Rana was the king of that region. Our leaders requested for asylum. But he told them that his kingdom was already full.’ 

‘So our leaders asked for a bowl full of milk!’ the boy prompts. Sooni Aunty is proud of her grandson and can’t help beaming. 

‘His name was Nairyosang Dhawal – you must remember it, Zubin. He was our Dasturji, our High Priest.’  

‘What did the Dasturji do when the king said his kingdom was full?’ This time the boy wants to test his grandmother.  

Sooni Aunty smiles. ‘He took the bowl of milk and poured some sugar in it. It did not take much space. He promised that Parsis would similarly blend with the land and sweeten the kingdom.’ 

The king was pleased. Sooni Aunty is pleased. Her grandson is pleased. It is a heartening story that reflects well on all the actors. Hardship, sincerity, cooperation and eventually, reward. It is also a rare story. We’re only a few months away from two-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body being washed up on the shores of Turkey. We just do not know it yet.  

Sooni Aunty soon occupies herself with the sizzling and boiling from her kitchen. The boy has disappeared into a friend’s house. I look around the cluttered, too-warm room for something to keep me busy, which always translates into something to read. Sooni Aunty only has newspapers. Lots of them. Everywhere. It’s one of those houses where if you open a cabinet you’ll find plastic bags storing plastic bags storing plastic bags. 

I pick up a copy of Jam-e-Jamshed, the weekly Parsi newspaper. I had once considered writing for it; it seemed like the natural day job for a young literature student who wanted to become a writer. (I hadn’t yet encountered Matthew Arnold’s ‘Journalism is literature in a hurry.’) As I turn the pages, my fingers grow cold. Surely, this is a joke, it has to be. But it is disturbing even as a joke. Except it isn’t a joke. Could it be a joke? Page after page of ugliness, bared for all to see. And then editorials, letters from readers, priestly opinions, accusations of political strategy.  

I realise I’ve been holding my breath, and let out a deep exhale. The vapours of Sooni Aunty’s masalas are suddenly too much for me. The air is thick as oil. I need to escape. I clutch the newspaper, grab a couple more – I will return to these pages many times over the next month – and hurry towards an excuse.  

 

Section 2. Match the columns. 

You’re in a large auditorium slash stadium slash community hall. You’re in 1996. Outside: the drum of the first real rain of the year. Inside: the rise and swell of a thousand adolescent bodies. You make your way to Ruby Framroze Billimoria in your green-belt section. Your best dojo-friend. She’s also your best school-friend and your best colony-friend, though you have other besties in your tuition classes and swimming lessons. You’re arranged first by sex, then by belt and then by age. Your small group of girls, green-belt, 10–12 years, looks about in muffled excitement while the seniors stretch their hamstrings, rotate their hips or practice their katas. It’s your first real tournament, your first dip into the lake that forms the river that forms the sea. Eighty schools from all over Mumbai (still Bombay) have driven four hours to this camp. It is a cocktail of sensory stimuli. The twang of adrenaline spiked with prepubescent hormones.  

Several rubber mats have been arranged to form three separate arenas. The girls’ tournaments have come to a close, and everyone – including most of the girls – is geared up for the real competition. As the elimination rounds fall behind, the kumite intensifies. The hall reverberates with chants. Aaka, aaka, to cheer on the karateka on the right. Or sheero, sheero, if they’re rooting for the boy on the left. Once in a rare while the chant takes the form of aaka-sheero, both are heroes! 

Then it happens. He steps into the arena. Ruby squeezes your hand. He makes a low bow to the referees and a lower one to his opponent. Ruby can hardly maintain her seiza, the kneeling-seat position you’re required to always adopt. His opponent tries a choku-zuki to the stomach. He sidesteps and lands a mawashi-geri. The perfect round kick. Point. The opponent tries an ushiro-geri, which even you know is a bad idea. It leaves his back exposed for a second. A second is enough. He moves in for a yoko-geri to the shoulder blade. Two points! Ruby erupts, everyone erupts. 

You’ve been covering for them these last three days. Late night meetings behind the spiral staircase, afternoon disappearances in the grove with the banyan tree, and sentry duty while they share meals from the same plate. He’s a gentle boy with a clean, square face, two years and two belts senior, and a little too aware of his relative wisdom.  

Later that night, huddled in the girls’ dormitory, Ruby tells you that he told her that his friends told him that he’s in love with her. He wants her to join Ketan’s Sir’s maths tuitions. Ketan Sir has mixed batches and many girls from her school and boys from his school meet at his Grant Road centre. After all, the next karate camp is six months away, which is 180 days too far.  

It’s not a bad idea. Ruby actually does need maths coaching. But in the penumbra of a distant light, you can see the gloom on her mouth.  

‘I’m sure, your parents will agree to…’ you begin. 

‘It’s no use!’ 

‘Why?’ 

‘You know why!’  

You do know why, but you are hoping it wouldn’t matter so soon. There will be a hundred reasons later. Better reasons, proper reasons, real reasons.  

‘It’s just a coaching class!’ 

‘Nothing is just!’ her voice breaks. You watch her crumple under the weight of her own future. Not even a teenager yet, and already closed to love. You know the voices that live in her head because they live in yours too. They sound like the people who love you the most. Their anxious predictions, disguised warnings, constant extractions of promises to stay true to the faith.  

Ruby turns. ‘Goodnight.’ 

You hear the click of her Walkman. This is the girl who won’t sleep without Shah Rukh Khan singing to her, so she may dream of the mismatched romance of chiffon sarees and snow in the Alps. Who watches Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak every weekend, and knows all the dialogues in the doomed story, yet roots for the lovers each time the opening title flashes on screen. Because anything can happen in love.  

Except a parjaat. 

 

Section 3. Fill in the blanks.  

My husband and I have boarded the Deccan Queen back to Pune. The new year is only two days and thirteen hours old, but the world is stale already. I order my usual cutlet-bread, but am unable to relish its familiar oily crumb. When patience finally ebbs out of him and he comments on my restlessness, I pull out the newspapers and drop them in his lap.  

He picks the first one up and comes face-to-face with a couple embracing. The banner on the ad says: Be responsible. Don’t use a condom tonight. It goes on to explain that Parsi numbers are falling, and ‘you should think about playing your part very seriously’. The advertisement is part of the JIYO Parsi scheme initiated by the Government of India to aid fertility and reproduction in a community that demographers predict will go extinct by the end of the century. The average Parsi woman has 0.8 children in her lifetime. A group needs a fertility rate of 2.1 just to maintain its population, and with only about 50,000 Parsis in India, I understand why every unused condom counts. But it gets increasingly insidious.  

Also, the copywriters probably find statistics boring; their theme is emotional. A few pages later, a man in his forties sits in a plush living room, and stares into space. The copy warns: After your parents, you will inherit the family home. After you, your servant will.  

If there was any attempt at humour, it has soured already. Does anyone even say ‘servant’ anymore? And is that ever a reason to have children? I’m embarrassed and livid. And embarrassed. And livid. 

Yet another full-page ad shows a young woman holding an infant, while the text goes: ‘Getting married early and having children is so regressive.’ Thankfully, she wasn’t listening.  

The messages sit heavy on top of each other: pride, legacy, history, and most prominently, Duty. The politics of womb-control are not new, but this campaign is freshly disturbing. A woman has the right to get married at any time once she is of legal age, and judgements of ‘early’ as ‘regressive’ disrespect her act of exercising this right. At the same time, living in a country where the median age of marriage for women is 19.2 and where only 32% of married women are employed, I can see the dependencies that come with early marriage. It is a complicated reverse manipulation. If this were a karate move, it would be mawashi gedan-giri. A round kick below the belt.  

While my husband is scanning the ads, I am on my phone, looking up numbers. A 2005 joint study by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow found that for every 16-point rise in a woman’s IQ, her likelihood of getting married fell by 40%. So while the community may be grateful the woman wasn’t listening, is it truly the best choice for her? Is it right to expect a whole generation of Parsi women to put aside ambition, education, even love, all to bear more children? Can the Parsi woman’s uterus just be her own? 

Fortunately, the campaign already has its critics. Readers span the spectrum but I find several echoes of myself. It is 2015, one woman writes, but have the last 200 years happened to the creators of such ads? 

My husband notices my frown and holds up ten fingers. Count to ten. I inhale and begin: ichi, ni, san, shi… When deep-breathing or exercising, I still default to Japanese instructions. The pause helps, and I return to the rhythms of the train, with softness. The rain-stained window appears to be sweating, the water-beads straining against the wind. I cannot wait to get back home. Our home, where we’re united by the mutual disapproval of our separate gods laminated on the walls.  

Section 4. Tick the correct options.  

[A] If we consider a total of X Parsis, and one Parsi girl marries one non-Parsi boy, and they have three children, how many Parsis are there in total? 

• X, no profit no loss 

• X - 1 

• X + 11/2, all considered 

•      depends on whether they live in India or Canada 

 
[B] If we consider a total of X Parsis, and one Parsi boy marries one non-Parsi girl, and they have three children, how many Parsis are there in total? 

• X + 3 

• X + 3 

• X + 3 

 
[C] A good Parsi believes in: 

• Good thoughts, good words, good deeds 

• Hum do humare teen 

• Ratan Tata 

 
[D] What do the well-meaning fertility campaigns unwittingly promote through cheeky slogans? 

• Start-up culture 

• Inbreeding 

• A taste for blue cheese 

 
[E] At a ZYNG (Zoroastrian Youth for the Next Generation) speed-dating event, what are your chances of meeting your soulmate? 

• 38.2 per cent, like Aspi Engineer promised 

• 0.75 per cent, like your mother fears 

• If you have decided to find a soulmate at ZYNG, Ahura Mazda is on your side and you don’t need probability theory 

 
[F] What will go extinct first? 

• The Panda  

• The Parsi 

• Wired headphones  

 
[G] I have never written a story about Parsi characters because  

• I don’t want to spend a paragraph describing how dhansak is made. 

• The story would need too many footnotes and would look like an academic paper.  

• ‘Parsi woman writer’ is too much of a specialisation.  

• At least in fiction we can shake religion off people.  

• I once tried to – a long gorgeous story about love, partition and motherhood – and the editor only ever called it ‘the Parsi story’.  
  

[H] When you meet a Parsi for the first time, what do you think are the chances that she knows your former secretary Benaifer Katrak who later moved to Australia + Kersi Davakhanawala who was roll number 9 in your first school?  

• 100% 

 
[I] What are the actual chances? 

• 100% 

 
[J] What did Darwin say was the main cause for a species going extinct? 

• Asteroid strikes 

• Lack of government reservations  

• Ambitious females  

 
[K] Tick the names of all those who had to make personal sacrifices to save their worlds. 

• Lord Shiva, as he holds the poison halahal in his throat 

• Spock, after Nero blows up Vulcan 

• Shernaz Anklesaria, of 3rd floor, Yezdi Manzil, who gave up Sunil Chauhan 
  

[L] My Parsi cousin attends the Arya Samaj wedding rituals of my sister and, as they exchange garlands, exclaims he is delighted with his first Indian wedding experience. What is wrong with him? (Essay – 500 words) 

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Section 5. Answer in your own words.   

What is that old saying about change changing the change-makers? The world has turned, and faced with flux, both host and refugee are rigid in their positions. The Parsis who once promised to mix with the milk, adopt Gujarati as their mother tongue and dress in sarees, now bristle at the thought of dilution. I watch them – sorry, us – the way a child observes aging parents grasp at obsolete systems. With impatience, counter-arguments, exasperation and love. Did I mention love? Sometimes I hide it too well. 

Sanskrit poetics holds space for a form of devotion called ninda stuti; ninda means ‘abuse’ or ‘complaint’, stuti means ‘poem’ or ‘prayer’. Ninda stuti wears the robes of complaint to offer love or devotion. The poem may criticise, insult, even deny god, but it comes from the honesty afforded by true intimacy and love. I hurt for the eager, educated, kind faces around me, even as I am exasperated by them. Death and extinction are not only an aspect of the future; a part of me dies each time I see statistics like 950 deaths and 195 births per year, while editorials eloquently oppose the children of mixed marriages into the faith. I want to shake them by their arthritic shoulders and quote Darwin, Spenser, Wallace; I want to tattoo ADAPTABILITY onto their arms; I want to paste graphs on the Baug’s noticeboards showing why the Parsi population fell by 39% during the same period that India’s population tripled, I want to… ichi, ni, san, shi. 

Maybe we can truly love only the flawed. I fight with an aunt who cried at my wedding – no, not in a good way – but who also sits in the first row at each one of my readings. I block and unblock a neighbour who feeds six stray dogs twice a day, but whose ‘inspirational’ WhatsApp morning messages border on racism. When a classmate forwards yet another reflected-glory video about the greatness of the Tatas, Wadias and Bhabhas, I type And what did you do? before deleting it. (But perhaps not before he sees it.)  

Pride and naivety go hand in hand. When I speak to a writer from the US about this piece, she is taken aback; she’d learnt at school that Zoroastrianism is already an extinct religion. We briefly comment on how insular American education is, and switch to other urgent updates. But later that night I reflect on the hundreds of Sooni Auntys and Rustom Uncles who take their grandchildren to the fire temple each weekend and teach them the prayers for their navjote or initiation ceremony, clueless that in certain parts of the world they have already lost the battle. Is it frustrating? Sobering? Freeing?  

Could that be why they double down on the constraints placed on the Parsi woman? Her emotions and body are both directed, first to marry within the community and then to have as many children as possible – constraints not placed on Parsi men since their children are more easily initiated into the faith.  

My husband, who has been reading Sherman Alexie’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, shows me a section where the young Arnold Spirit AKA Junior comments how, ‘Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.’  

‘That may be,’ I say, ‘But Junior had it easy. At least Junior wasn’t a woman.’ 

It is a time for answers but we’re running out of both, time and answers. I decide to look further into the animal kingdom. While Parsis may be new to this situation, hundreds of species go extinct every year. Surely, nature will throw up some answers. I ask around for studies on how endangered animals respond to their situation. Do they sense urgency or despair? Is there an animal-world JIYO Rhino campaign that is veiled to us? Do they instinctively seek multiple partners? Roam further afield? Is there a final push of libido, vitality or fertility?  

The search yields nothing. (Not surprisingly, humans have only studied human responses to animal extinctions.) ‘But there is one indication,’ I can finally tell my husband. 

‘What?’ 

‘The Sentinelese tribe of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There are less than 15 members of this group today. Yet, they reject all contact with the outside world. When researchers leave them gifts, food and medicines at the edge of their island, they throw it all in the sea!’ 

He is not convinced. ‘Seems odd. Why so rigid?’ 

‘Maybe it’s hardwired in us,’ I say. ‘People seem to instinctively move inward, reject other groups, obsess with ideas of “purity”.’  

He doesn’t say anything for a while. ‘I don’t know about that Andaman tribe,’ he finally shrugs, ‘but I’m not worried about the Parsis.’ 

‘Why? Why will our fate be any different?’  

‘Because,’ he says, with a grin, ‘your tribe has writers.’