Day 12. We are almost broken.

For nearly two weeks, we have rumbled across India, taking in two, sometimes three, world-important sites per day.

We have slept on trains. We have been bounced silly in five-hour bus rides on stretches of cratered terrain that prompt Sree Sreenivasan to quip, “and these are the GOOD roads!” We have been overcome with fatigue, and some of us (ahem) have been stricken with stomach ailments best described as medieval.

But we have also gazed at the moon from the Golden Temple in Amristar, ascended the steps of the mighty Jama Masjid, watched the changing of the guard at the border with Pakistan, broken bread with gurus, imams, and political leaders, and begun to form a view of this great country and its religions that could only come from a journey that has been as vast and varied as it has been arduous.

And now, in our bus, in an opulent section of Mumbai, where there are neither cows nor beggars, and where we are shaded by a canopy of trees (trees!), I get the sense that the group’s attention is beginning to wane.

We are quiet. We stare out the window. Our tour guide’s words are like a breeze floating over us. Perhaps I’m not alone in assuming all the surprises on this trip are over.

How wrong I am.

Meet The Zoroastrians

11:40 a.m. We arrive at the Athornan Boarding Madressa. It is a school for training Zoroastrian priests.

We are seated on wooden pews in a large concrete room. There is a small altar up front on which there burns a small but intense fire. Two children, dressed in white tunics stand next to it, watching its flames in silence. They are training to be priests and their mouths are covered with thin veils of white cloth to protect the sacred flame from their saliva.

Two young Parsi priests demonstrated a fire ritual. (Dikla Kadosh)

Ervad Parvez M. Bajan, the head priest of the Mevawala Fire Temple, presents us the history of the Parsi people and of the Zoroastrian faith. How it is the first monotheistic religion. How it charges its followers with three edicts: good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

How its priests are required to memorize every syllable of their single-volume sacred text. Why this policy was created: to avoid the calamity of the Arab conquest hundreds of years prior, when every last copy of the other 20 volumes was destroyed and lost forever.

The Parsis are a numerically tiny ethnic group that settled in India after fleeing persecution by Muslims in eighth century Persia. They are followers of the ancient Zoroastrian faith and they have achieved spectacular commercial and intellectual success in India. They own hotels, run finance companies, and were leaders in the movement for independence from the British.

And there are only 60,000 of them in a country of one billion people.

As Mr. Parvez speaks, we can’t help noticing the small boys. They’ve been standing the whole time. Sullen is the word that best describes their faces.

“Do these kids seem happy to you?” Amanda Millner-Fairbanks turns to ask me.

“Of course not,” I say, though I am aware I posses a very Western, bourgeois idea of what kids that age should be doing. It involves lots of television and very little priestly training.

Jesse Ellison, who studied the Zoroastrians while we were in New York, broaches the subject of inter-marriage and conversion. The Zoroastrian community worldwide is at a crossroads when it comes to conversion. For generations, the Parsi community in India has refused to allow conversion, but now the ethnic group is in danger of dying out, with the Zoroastrian faith potentially disappearing along with it. Recent census data projects there will be fewer than 20,000 Parsis in India by 2020. Despite the dwindling numbers, the Indian Parsi community has refused to open the Zoroastrian faith to converts, even as communities worldwide have grown more flexible, opening the doors of their fire temples to the children of inter-marriage and non-Zoroastrian spouses.

So why is the Parsi community so rigid in their stance?

“Well, even Hitler said keeping races pure is important,” says Parvez, as if this settles the matter. He reiterates the point a bit later. The Hitler part. We take it all in for a few moments, then get a short tour of the first floor.

Later I ask Jesse about the comment.

"I was surprised," she says. "I had heard Parsis here were more militant in their stance against conversion, but I had no idea they would be this extreme."

After our meeting with Parvez, Sreenivasan explains to the group that references to Hitler in India shouldn’t be perceived as having the same significance as they would in, say, Jerusalem. Many Indians just don't have a sense of the scale of Hitler's evil.

So much for a day without the unexpected.

A Party That Night

9:30 p.m. The Wodehouse Gymkhana.

We are at a reception that has been arranged for us by Sameera Khan, a Mumbai-based journalist and activist, and Columbia J-School alum along with Manjeet Kripalani, Mumbai bureau chief of BusinessWeek magazine, and a Columbia School of International and Public Affairs alum. There’s food and wine and even a face I recognize. It’s Bachi Karkaria, an op-ed columnist for the Times of India. Some say Ms. Karkaria is as famous in India as Maureen Dowd is in America.

“I’m a Parsi,” she tells me. “And let me tell you something about what this priest said about racial purity.”

“I personally think it’s foolish and it’s suicidal and many Parsis agree with me. The trouble is that the extreme group can be that much more articulate... I sometimes think of an old American bumper sticker: The Moral Majority is Neither.”

She describes how the refusal to allow the children of inter-marriages to become Zoroastrians has led to a frequency of intra-Parsi marriages that may be contributing to higher incidences of diabetes, diverticulitis, and even birth defects among Parsis.

“This is something no one wants to talk about,” Ms. Karkaria says.

Her overall message is that however strident our high priest may have been, there are many other Parsis who feel differently, and that there is a movement afoot to reevaluate the current interpretations of rules concerning the children of intermarriages.

My surprise at what she’s told me reminds me of a lesson this trip has taught me over and over: don’t fall into the trap of giving extremists a bullhorn. There is, at the very least, a silent minority in any religion, and the only way to learn what its members think is to find them and ask them questions.

Another Party

11 p.m. The group has crashed a nightclub called The Red Light. Stacey Samuel and Jesse Ellison have persuaded the managers to let us in, even though the space has been booked for a private event.

We enter. There are three women and what seems like 1,000 men. They are staring at the televisions. They are British. They are here to watch cricket highlights.

Numerous rounds of drinks later, the British guys and the ladies of our group are dancing the night away.

I spend most of my time observing. And I can’t help thinking that we’re still in India, we still have a day to go, but already we’re a very long way from the madrassas.