In two temples, 7000 miles apart, the youngest members of a dying faith are preparing for their formal initiation into Zoroastrianism. In both, the smells of sandalwood and smoke are the same, as are the prayers and the white skullcaps the boys wear. Both sets of children seem largely oblivious to the role they play in the battle over the future of their faith. But there the similarities largely end. One group is made up of the children of Zoroastrian mothers and fathers, the others are the sons and daughters of mixed marriages: Zoroastrian and Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Christians. These two communities, one outside New York City, the other in Bombay, India, have radically different philosophies about how to keep their faith alive.

As Zoroastrianism, which many consider to be the world’s first monotheistic faith approaches a crossroads, those living abroad are learning to adapt in hopes of keeping the faith alive, while their counterparts in India cling to their traditions. The result may be what one expert calls a “cleavage,” with the Indian Parsi community dwindling and possibly even disappearing altogether as the Zoroastrians abroad loosen their interpretation of old traditions and grow increasingly open to outsiders in the community.

Parsis are the Indian descendents of Persian Zoroastrians and today, there are fewer than 100,000 of them worldwide. The most recent Indian census data counted just under 70,000 in India, where the community is not only dwindling, but threatening to die out altogether. According to one demographic study, the number of Parsis will fall to under 21,000 by 2021. It is important to note the difference between the faith and the ethnicity—Zoroastrianism is the religion, Parsis are the ethnic group, descended from Persia, who practice the religion.

While the picture may seem bleak, there are signs of a Zoroastrian revival outside of India. Recently, communities in Iran, Tajikistan, and South America have begun rediscovering their roots in Zoroastrianism, and are beginning to convert back to the faith. And in the United States and Canada, communities of Parsis and Zoroastrians are opening up their temples to the children of inter-marriages, and non-Zoroastrian spouses, both of which have been historically shunned by the Indian community. But despite their dwindling numbers, the Parsi community in India, the descendents of the original Zoroastrians who fled persecution in Iran for refuge in India, refuse to recognize these new converts and refuse entry to their fire temples to all non-Parsis, including the children of mixed marriages whose fathers are non-Zoroastrian.

Lovji Cama, a Parsi who teaches Sunday classes at the Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York’s temple, at 106 Pomona Road in Suffern, N.Y., thinks that the issue is rooted in the definition of who is Zoroastrian. “The problem in India is that people think of ethnicity and religion as the same,” he says. “It’s a mind-set, they can’t conceive how someone not of Iranian descent could be Zoroastrian. They would say that they are not concerned about quantity, they are interested in quality. But the quality of zero is zero.”

“It seems almost like there might be a revival of Zoroastrians in the world. India wouldn’t like it at all, but it’s unstoppable.”

Ervad Parvez M. Bajan, head priest at the Mevawala Fire Temple in Bombay, thinks that the race and the religion are inexorably linked. “If one mixes religions and race, they are diluted,” he says. “If we open the floodgate, there will be a flood. Even Hitler said every race has to preserve its own identity.” Bajan simply doesn’t see any need for conversion. “We respect all religions. Why should there be any conversion?”

Dr. Kaikhosrov D. Irani, a professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York who at 84 is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Zoroastrianism, believes that the traditionalist Parsi stance actually contradicts the teachings of the faith, which emphasizes the value of individual choice. “It is your choice!” he says. “Anyone can come and make the choice. It’s not the business of anybody else to say no, you can’t make that choice.

“They think this is a tribe,” Irani says of the orthodox Parsis, “In this insistence (that there be no conversion), they are being non-Zoroastrians. Parsis are an ethnic group. Zoroastrianism is a religion of choice. And the two cannot be identical. It’s a matter that strains ones intelligence very slightly.”
“Partly, it’s the psychological self-image of the Parsis. It’s a very strong self-image to protect. It’s a very small community in a large continent.”

The new communities abroad have begun building temples of their own, where believers can come and pray to fire, which the Zoroastrians believe to be the physical embodiment of truth and light, all that their God stands for.

On one recent Sunday at the Pomona temple, the priest, Pervez Patel, stacked nine blocks of sandalwood in perpendicular pairs on the tall copper pedestal in the temple’s prayer room. He lit the stack on fire and slowly the room grew foggy with smoke, the pungent smell wafting into the hallways in thick clouds. Twelve male and female Zoroastrians, converts and native Parsis alike, removed their shoes and stepped into the perimeter of the prayer room. The men wore round topis, skullcaps, the women wrapped scarves around their heads, and all clasped hands.

“Oh light divine,” they chanted in the ancient language Avesta. “May the mighty flame be, in the heart and hearth, ever glowing, deep, ever constant and steady, ever bright and clear, and ever unquenchable, ever waxing, never waning.”

Then Patel said the words, “Dushmata,” bad thoughts, and rang the bell mounted on the ceiling three times. “Duzukhta,” bad words, three more rings. Finally, “Duzvarshta,” bad deeds, with three final chimes. Bad thoughts, bad words and bad deeds are the opposite of the sacred Zoroastrian credo, “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” And with each triple ringing of the bell, Patel banished them.
In Bombay, the chants and prayers sound the same. Young priests-in-training demonstrate the rituals surrounding the lighting of the fire. They don white tunics and drawstring pants, and wear thin white veils over their mouths to protect the fire from their saliva.

Although Cama represents the Orthodox view of the future of his faith, there are many Parsis in Bombay who see a need for change. “You’ve got such a beautiful religion, why do you want to be so possessive about it?” says Bachi Karkaria, a Bombay-based journalist and Parsi. “Here, they’re forgetting the basics and fighting themselves to extinction. It’s a classic ghetto-ization. It’s ethnic arrogance to think you’re some chosen race. First, I think they have to get out of their ghettos, open some windows and get some fresh thoughts.”

It seems that it’s that fresh thought which has so affected the Parsis living abroad. The Pomona temple has even begun a Zoroastrian Intermarriage Group, headed by Viraf Ghadially, who has been married to a Kentucky-born American for nearly three decades. “The main reason for forming the group was to let the intermarried couples know that they’re still welcome in the community,” he says. “What was happening was the Orthodox people would ostracize people as soon as they married outside. That would create a negative effect because people would slowly migrate out. We can’t afford that. We’re such a small community.

“There is a battle being fought,” Ghadially continues. “If you look at the number of Parsis in India and the number of Zoroastrians abroad, you see that the ratios are changing. The number of Zoroastrians abroad are now greater than the number in India. That’s why the Parsis are upset—they’re realizing that the focus of Zoroastrianism is going to be abroad. It’s going to be a global thing, rather than spearheaded in India.”

Ghadially agrees with Irani that the community in India is too attached to rituals, at the expense of the meaning. “In India, you’re forced to get into that protective environment, because you’re such a minority,” he says. “The thing is the ritual became more important. But the understanding of the prayers is not there. The reverse is true over here. Let’s understand the ethics and values of it. The people who are moving abroad are looking at it and saying, ‘wait a minute, we are Zoroastrians first and Parsis second.’”

But those remaining in India are not entirely supportive of these new communities or the fact that their relatives who have emigrated are becoming more flexible about the rules surrounding conversion. Twenty-six-year-old Aysha Ghadiali’s parents immigrated to the United States 20 years ago and, to the displeasure of their relatives in India, have since become much more liberal in their attitude towards the faith and its requirements.

“My cousins, aunts and uncles who are still in Bombay, they really respect the way that communities outside have tried to forge bonds and build temples,” Ghadiali says. “But there’s also that disrespect that we’re trying to bend the religion to fit our lives here.”

Ghadiali thinks that her parents have changed their viewpoint because they want to see the religion continue. “They understand that the numbers are such that you can’t afford to be so picky.”

Maria Lobo Dumasia is a Catholic living in Bombay who is married to a Parsi. She says that because of the community’s refusal to accept outsiders, she and her husband dated for nine years before they married, a length of time almost unheard of in Indian society. “It is a matter of survival,” she says, noting the health implications among Parsis that have resulted from so many years of inter-marriage. “My husband’s sister is deaf and dumb because of inbreeding.”

“We are representative of the larger Bombay community,” she says. “My husband is still Parsi but we are raising our children as Catholic. He didn’t want his kids to be the first to experience the trauma of being acceptable.”

Irani, for one, is hopeful that the Parsi community in India will eventually come around. “Most of the people are reasonably well educated,” he says. “When they sit and think about it, they realize that if their mother is Zoroastrian, and if their children have been brought up partly in the Zoroastrian tradition, to say no to them seems irrational. . . ultimately reason must prevail.”

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MUMBAI, INDIA -- It’s a mid-March afternoon, and on sun-drenched playing fields and vacant lots all over the city, the crack of the bat can be heard along with the exuberant cries and good-natured taunts of the players. These are the unmistakable sounds of grown men playing a game in fierce but friendly competition with one another.

Although this may sound like a description of just about any city in mid-March Florida, from Ft. Lauderdale to Port St. Lucie, it is not. This is not Major League Baseball’s spring training. The place is Mumbai, India, and the game is not baseball, but cricket, India’s unofficial national pastime.

At Cross Maidan cricket grounds in Mumbai, within view, if not a cricket ball’s toss, of Wankhede Stadium, India’s beloved sport is being played at the amateur level by hundreds of men and boys of all ages. At the stadium, England is visiting India today. It is Day Two of the third five-day test match between the two nations. The first match resulted in a draw. The second was a resounding, 9-wicket victory for India. The current match, being played several hundred meters away, is to be the decider of the series.

Although the rules are very different, the essential concept of cricket is similar to that of baseball. Teams bat in successive innings and attempt to score runs, while the opposing team fields and attempts to get the batting team out. After each team has batted an equal number of innings, the team with the most runs wins. One major difference, however, is that a batsman continues to bat and score runs until he is out. This usually results in hundreds of runs being scored in a cricket match, unlike in a baseball game.

The previous day England scored a seemingly insurmountable 400 runs in their first innings against the Indian national team. Mumbai’s own Sachin Tendulkar, one of the best batsmen in the world according to many, was booed on his home turf for producing just one run after 21 balls and 34 minutes of batting. Eight days prior, during the second test-match, Anil Kumble the famed Indian “spinner” took his 500th career wicket in Mohali, becoming only the fifth player in history to accomplish the feat.

Ultimately, after the five-day test match is complete, England will have virtually thrashed India by a margin of 212 runs. However, on this particular day, hopes are still high. It is a perfect day for cricket in Mumbai.

Javinder Singh, a Sikh, dressed in a traditional, white cricket uniform and a black turban steps away from his own match to offer some instruction to a 12-year-old Muslim “spinner,” a bowler who puts spin on the ball while delivering it to the batsman. He has had his eye on the lad “for quite some time,” he says. The boy is playing cricket with a tennis ball and too few players to fill the pitch at the far end of the Cross Maidan grounds, opposite from where Singh’s amateur Mumbai Cricket Association league match is taking place.

“I told him he has to keep his arm perfectly straight if he ever wants to bowl for India,” Singh, a 34-year-old computer technician from Mumbai and “serious amateur” cricketer says.

Singh takes the ball from the would-be future bowler, and shows him how to do it correctly, taking a running start and delivering the ball to the young, baffled batsman who does nothing but watch in mild amusement.

“Now do it again, and keep it straight,” he says to the bowler, “that’s the most important part. It doesn’t matter how much spin you put on it if you don’t keep your arm straight.”

“I don’t care if he’s Sikh or Muslim or Hindu,” Singh later says, “on the pitch, there is no talk of religion.”

“Cricket is the one religion that unites the country,” says veteran Indian sports journalist, Gulu Ezekiel, echoing an oft-repeated sentiment that one is likely to hear when asking just about any Indian about the relationship between cricket and religion. “Cricket simply is a religion in India.”

And although it may seem a hyperbolic statement, in a country with India’s history of inter-religious struggles and tensions, to say that religion pervades practically all aspects of life and society, including sport, is an indisputable fact.

Ezekiel, who says he has a specific interest in the intersection of cricket and religion, says that cricket is the one area of Indian society that is “religious blind.”

“The captain of the Indian National team is the second most important job in India after the Prime Minister,” he says, before pointing out that current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is Sikh and noting that past Indian captains have included four Muslims, one Sikh, two Christians and two Zoroastrians. The current captain, Rahul Dravid, is a Hindu.

Charles Maideen, 39, a junior college lecturer and Muslim originally from Chennai, began playing cricket at the age of eight, hoping, as many young Muslims do, he says, to one day “make it big as a professional cricketer.” Maideen concurs with Ezekiel’s take on cricket as a religion but has his own perspective to offer.

“For people who don’t really follow any particular religion in India, cricket becomes that religion for them,” he says, adding, “Tendulkar is like a god to people. The whole country kind of worships him.”

However, when asked about his own experiences on the cricket pitch, Maideen, who says he played with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians for his district and school teams throughout his teens and early adult years, says religion was never an issue.

“We never really mixed religion with cricket,” he says “nobody really cared about that when we were playing.”

Ezekiel, 46, who covers and writes about cricket for numerous online and print publications including www.khel.com, Sportstar Weekly, BBC Online and also for an Australian radio station, is a “non-practicing Jew,” he says. Religious or not, he keeps a virtual shrine in his modest Delhi home to his cricketing heroes, past and present.

Ezekiel has an extensive collection of sports books, which he organizes on his bookshelves by sport, the largest section being books on cricket, cricket memorabilia and artwork. He laughingly refers to his collection as his “museum.”

Lining the crest of the walls of Ezekiel’s museum or shrine are hand-painted portraits of many of his favorite players. Ezekiel, who is a member of the Autograph Collectors Club of India and is in touch with “artists around the world,” commissions portraits rendered from photographs and has the players, who hail from nearly all cricket-playing countries, many of whom he knows through his work, sign them. They are then framed and become a part of his collection. His prized possession is the signed bail, a small wooden piece that connects the stumps, that he personally received from Kumble from a 1999 match against Pakistan in which the star bowler took all 10 wickets, a feat that has only been accomplished twice, according to Ezekiel, in cricket history.

“Give me anything from that match,” Ezekiel recalls telling Kumble of the historic match when the bowler showed up for a television interview later the same day. “Give me your socks,” Ezekiel pleaded.

Another veteran sports journalist who covers cricket extensively, Clayton Murzelo, since 2001 the Mumbai-based Sports Editor of India’s largest circulated tabloid, Mid Day, and self-professed “cricket-mad fan,” says of religious harmony among the members of the current Indian national team, “it's a great and happy unit. The only time teamwork is questioned is when the team is not faring well. It is like any other team sport.”

Murzelo goes on to report of the team that “of the current squad of 15, there are three Muslims, one Sikh and the rest are Hindus.”

According to Clayton, a Christian, however, to say that equating cricket with religion is going a bit too far.

“I was a cricket mad fan, but I did not treat it as a religion,” he says, “It's just a good line, that's all. This is my view, and it could well be contested. But I’ve been a mad fan, so I know. Going to church did not equate to cricket.”

It’s a hot, sunny afternoon in Mumbai, and the English national team is in town. The result of the match will prove to be a great disappointment to Indians everywhere, but particularly to the “cricket mad” residents of Mumbai, in which “the most passionate interest in cricket in India” exists, according to Ezekiel. On this day, Indians of all faiths are not in church, and they’re not at the mosque, or the temple, or the synagogue. They’re at Cross Maidan or just about any vacant lot or open field in the city, playing cricket. If they’re lucky enough to have procured themselves a ticket to the big event, they may be worshiping at Wankhede Stadium.

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MUMBAI, INDIA -- On the bustling streets of Mumbai, journalist and activist Sameera Khan is an ordinary face in the cosmopolitan landscape and a contributing member of the city’s globally competitive workforce. Yet in the villages of India, she might find herself lacking the rights she enjoys here. Khan is a Muslim Indian woman.

The Indian legal system plays a balancing act. On the one hand, the world’s largest democracy has maintained a legal system that is secular. On the other, for a nation of millions of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, when it comes to the issue of family law, different religious groups have had a degree of autonomy. But the way justice is administered in the Muslim familial legal system is treating women unfairly, according to some Muslim women activists. And in Mumbai, and elsewhere in India, some of them are trying to change that.

Until the mid-1980s, a Muslim woman did not have the right to maintenance (similar to alimony) in a divorce. When the Supreme Court granted Muslim women that right, the Indian government passed a law yielding more autonomy to Muslim family law, making the Supreme Court decision weaker. In villages around India, Muslim men have the right to marry more than one woman, said Khan, and that according to Islamic law a husband can divorce his wife just by saying divorce three times. The wife, however, does not have similar rights.

This, Khan believes, is what marginalizes Muslim women in a state that is ostensibly a secular democracy. But she thinks that Muslim women can spark a change.

Khan’s current work involves the study of the Indian public space and how it affects women, and she looks to the future optimistically as there are Muslim women’s groups in Mumbai that want to challenge this inequality. Hasina Khan is the coordinator of Aawaaz-e-Niswaan (Voice of the Women) and her group strives to make polygamy illegal in India. Noorjehan Safia Niaz of the Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG) also works to secure more rights for women in India’s Muslim family law. In 2005, Niaz reportedly protested loudly against the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which had stated that Muslim law made the wife subservient to her husband.

“Islam gives more rights to women than any other religion,” said Sona Khan, a Muslim women’s rights attorney in Delhi. “But politically, Islam has dropped gender protection rights.” Khan was an attorney for Shah Bano, whose mid-1980s Indian Supreme Court case ended in a ruling that a Muslim woman in a divorce could be granted maintenance, or alimony, which was different from the Muslim law. Today, Muslim communities can still control how divorces are administered.

Sona Khan dismisses the radical Muslim leaders throughout the world who want to cut back on women’s rights as “political vendors.” The stories people in the West hear about women being punished unfairly in the Muslim world is not consistent with the teachings of the Koran. These political regimes, she said, are “man-made.”

Even though Khan, the attorney, considers herself a practicing Muslim, she believes that India’s democracy is weakened by what she calls “regionalism.” Religious pluralism is something that benefits the nation, but nevertheless, it needs a universal legal system, she believes.

“[Muslims] can’t run a parallel system of the administration of justice,” she said.

In the future, she said, she would like to work on cases in Indian courts that would challenge Islamic clerics’ ability to dictate how Muslim communities govern themselves.

Meanwhile, Sameera Khan laments that Muslim women in India have long been stuck in a political bind. During British occupation, she said, Muslims were fighting the mighty colonial force, so women who may have felt slighted by inequality were discouraged from calling for change in their community so that the independence movement would not be splintered. Today, she finds Muslims in a similar situation. In India, Muslims are the largest minority religion, and the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) continues to promote a political platform that stands against the “appeasement” of the Muslim minority. In March 2006, BJP leader L.K. Advani announced that he would embark on a yatra—or a journey throughout the country—the following month in order to raise Hindu political consciousness in the wake of the terrorist bombings in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, believed to be carried out by Muslim extremists. Advani said that he wanted the theme of his campaign to be “justice for all, appeasement for none.”

And on the world stage, she believes that Muslims feel confronted by Europe and by the United States. Thus, Muslim women feel that their religion is fighting for equality with other religions, so now is not the time to rock the proverbial boat. “When do we fight for our rights?” she asked rhetorically. “The woman’s question is to be answered later.”

According to her own social research in Mumbai, public space is built to the advantage of Indian men in general. While women of all religions in India have progress to be made, she feels that she is in a position of double jeopardy.

“It’s tough being Muslim,” said Khan. “It’s even tougher to be a Muslim woman.”

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A Mumbai man sold snacks while cows and cabbies looked on. (Mariana Martinez Estens)

They’re mending the sidewalk down the street from Chhatrapati Sivaji (formerly Victoria Terminus) train station. Mumbai’s ubiquitous Premier Padmini taxis swerve to avoid a seven-foot pile of gravel. But instead of the Caterpillar backhoes and lounging men that make up U.S. road crews, this gravel is being tended by a team of women clad in brightly-colored saris. They heft shallow iron bowls of gravel onto their heads and carry them over to a large hole in the ground. Slowly the sidewalks of one of the world’s largest cities get fixed.

In a market a few blocks away, teams of two guide rickety wooden carts between lines of stopped traffic. The carts are loaded down with piles of eggplants, bundles of grass wrapped in burlap and bolts of fabric. It’s a scene that could be happening along a rutted lane in a village in Uttar Pradesh, the heart of India’s cow belt. Then another cart makes its way through the crowd. Twenty boxes marked “InkJet Cartridges” are lined neatly on it.

Talking to the class before they left for India, journalist Suketu Mehta described Mumbai as a city of contrasts: contrasts between urban and rural and between rich and poor. In his book “Maximum City,” Mehta writes about driving through Mumbai with his son: “‘Look,’ Gautama points out as we are driving along the road from Bandra Reclamation. ‘On the one side villages, on the other side buildings.’ He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city. The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of this juxtaposition.” On their last day in India, the group of 16 journalists are left to their own devices to explore the jarring juxtapositions that make up Mumbai.

***

The day dawned drowsy for many members of the group after a late night at the Red Light dance club in Mumbai’s Colaba neighborhood. The night had been highlighted by some interesting cross-cultural encounters. At one point, Jesse Ellison ran up and announced “The Sikhs have Aruna!” and led several people to where Aruna Viswanatha, an Indian-American student from New Jersey, was being playfully tossed in the air by a smiling Sikh. And when Daddy Yankee’s reggaeton hit “Gasolina” came on, Sree Sreenivasan told a student that his twins, named after Hindu gods Durga and Krishna, thought the lyrics were “Hanuman Gasolina” (literally: “Monkey god gasoline”) instead of “Dame Mas Gasolina” (“Give me more gasoline.”)

Some students used Monday to continue reporting. Shira Schoenberg spoke to teachers at ORT India, part of an international non-profit vocational training group, and the Jewish Community Center about efforts to educate Mumbai’s dwindling Jewish population. Michal Lumsden talked to T.R.K. Somaiya at Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal about Muslim-Hindu relations in India and the Gandhian peace movement. Erik Wander interviewed amateur cricketers at a public park near Wankhede Stadium where England’s cricket team was busy trouncing India’s. Asked later if he thought things would get out of control following England’s victory, Wander said: “Cricket doesn’t really lend itself to hooliganism. They break for tea in the middle for God’s sake!”

***

Since the earliest days of the British East India Company, Mumbai has always been a city of mercantilism. As Mehta writes: “Bombay is all about transaction – dhanda. It was founded as a trading city, built at the entrance to the rest of the world, and everybody was welcome as long as they wanted to trade.” To honor this tradition, many in the group set out on last minute shopping excursions. Some picked up scarves at the elegant Oberoi hotel, others shopped for bhangra music, Bollywood soundtracks and Sufi chants at Rhythm House in Colaba.

In the afternoon, six students, Sreenivasan and Delhi-based journalist Mannika Chopra left the heat and frenzy of the Mumbai streets to visit Dina Vakil, the former editor of the Times of India’s Mumbai edition and a 1970 graduate of the Columbia Journalism school (Vakil did her Master’s Project on John Updike, who at one point sent her a note saying: “I’ve spent more time with you than I have on some of my short stories.”)

As endless trays of tea, coffee and biscuits were brought into her third-floor office, Vakil sat among dozens of statues of Ganesh and tall, neat piles of The Economist and Time and talked about the last three decades of Indian journalism. In the early 1980s, Vakil worked alongside pioneering journalist Arun Shourie, then editor of the Indian Express, on investigative stories that railed against government corruption. Vakil went on to work at the Indian Post and The Independent before joining the Times of India.

She talked about how the watershed of investigative journalism in the 1980s gave way to market forces after India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s. She said that editorial decisions today are a balancing act. “You have to create an editorial environment that pulls in advertisements, and that’s the challenge for editors,” Vakil said. “It’s a balance between what the market wants and what you think the market should get.”

That evening the group gathered for a final meal before getting on an early morning flight back to New York. Glasses of Scotch were raised in toasts to Sreenivasan and Chopra. As an orange crescent moon rose over Mumbai and the thermometer slowly dropped, people started thinking about the city they were returning to. Ari Paul compared Mumbai and New York by saying: “I think of it this way: take New York, double it and replace every hardcore Jew with a hardcore Muslim.” Shira Schoenberg said that Mumbai was “almost like another New York, just with crazier drivers, more obvious poverty, and more aggressive salesmen.” Aruna Viswanatha mused that: “People say that Delhi is like D.C. and Bombay is India’s New York, but I think they get it wrong. Bombay is New York and L.A. combined with a dash of rural Mississippi.”

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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.

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