TOWERS OF SILENCE
By D. MacCLURE y STOOD on a green hill looking down on Bombay city. There I are too,000 Parsecs in the world, and 8o,000 of them were living and thriving in those houses below. Every one of them would before very long come up to this calm and beautiful Malabar Hill and never go down again. For here, screened from the road by the rustling trees and foliage, are the five Towers of Silence—and the vultures. Even as I stood there a procession of white-robed Parsecs came wending its way along Gibbs Road, each couple grasping a paiwand or handkerchief between them in silent sympathy. Slowly and solemnly the cortege walked behind the iron bier with its still, white-shrouded burden. Then mourners and mourned disappeared within the yellow gateway beyond which the bloated vultures wait.
I followed, passing up a lofty flight of stone steps, past nodding palmettos and date palms and swinging blossoms of blue, red and gold. Then on to the towers, which occupy hillocks just outside the flowery enclosure. As the first tower suddenly came into view I felt a sickening sense of horror. A long mass of dazzling white masonry extended on either hand. On it was a dark coping— living and loathsome. Vultures, enormous, motionless, listless vultures crowded the entire space on top of the walls of the tower. They were shapeless, ugly mud-coloured masses of feathers, and they crouched and sprawled along the masonry, some with wings and scraggy necks hanging over. They were taking siesta. They were bloated and heavy through eating too much human flesh. Seventy corpses every week is a most satisfactory ration to a vulture. Near me an aged and bent Parsee watched them with a stern and glittering eye. His lips seemed to be mumbling three words: " My . . . turn . . . next."
Thirty yards away from the tower is a sign, "Stop Here," and no man except the bearers of the body may go beyond. The bearers are a special order of Parsecs, highly paid but of low social standing. They wear a sort of white smoking-cap. White cloth covers all their face except the eyes. They have white gloves, and a white cord unites them in pairs. These men are supposed to have the power of defilement, and no mourner walks less than thirty feet away from them. Each mourner, too, is dressed in sacred white, as are the priests who wear curious eastern slippers with long turned-up points. Bringing up the rear is a solitary, incongruous figure, a Hindu menial of the lowest caste, leading a small black dog. The dog is more important than the priests. He must attend every funeral, and before the procession starts on its way to the Towers of Silence the corpse must be exposed to his solemn gaze. This ceremony is called " sagdzid." The dog is a sacred animal to the Parsecs, and is supposed to guide the souls of the dead towards heaven. The magnetic power of the dog's eyes are reputed to destroy impurities surrounding the dead body. Another theory, mooted among those who are not Parsees, is that the dog is used to make certain no life lingers in the vultures' next meal.
The procession stops at the forbidding notice. Only two of the bearers go inside the tower with the body. They are of the Nassasalar sect, and they alone can enter and come out again. The door swings to. Inside, the corpse is stripped of the calico shirt and trousers, and left quite bare. "Naked," say the Parsec's, "we came into the world, and naked we ought to leave it." The dead man's clothing, defiled by the touch of the Nassasalars, is left to decay in a receptacle set apart on the hill. In a few moments there is an ominous rustling from the mass of living feathered creatures sprawling on the coping. Lazily, one by one, they spread their wings and drop over the other side out of sight. At the same time, as if by magic, the air above becomes filled with the sound of whirring wings. Huge shadows flit across the grass and trees, arid hurtle themselves into the tower. For there was room on the coping for only a fraction of the vultures who were waiting to feed on the next human body. Their wings measure six feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. Their terrible curved beaks, designed specially for rending flesh, gleam in the sun. In less than two hours the body will be a perfect skeleton. It will be left exposed to the rays of the tropical sun for three weeks, and then it will be thrown down with a pair of tongs into the centre well where the bones of thousands, rich and poor, lie intermingled.
During the last fifty years over 50,000 bodies have been disposed of in this way, yet there is still room in the well, and always will be. The bones never rise above a certain height, for the relentless sun burns them up. "Mother earth shall not be defiled," say the Parsecs, and that is the idea underlying this strange custom. Water and fire, too, are sacred ; so interring in the ground, cremating and burying at sea are all barred. Three of the five towers are reserved for public use. A fourth, set apart, is kept exclusively for suicides and criminals. The fifth and oldest was erected in 1672 by Modi Hizi Wachha, one of the earliest Parsee settlers. It is now used only by his descendants.
Inside the towers, round the wells, is a circular platform made of large stone slabs hollowed out to receive one body. There are three graduated rows of these slabs. This number was selected in accordance with the three moral precepts of the Parsee religion, "Good deeds, good words, good thoughts." The row on the outside is reserved for men, the second for women and the inside one for children. There is a scale model of the interior of the towers to b.! seen on Malabar Hill, but no man can ever enter the ones in use. Two hundred and sixteen bodies can be accommodated at once in the large towers, which are a hundred feet in diameter. No expense has been spared to make the buildings everlasting. The latest one COSt £21,250.
The creed of the Parses is 3,000 years old. They are the richest and most intelligent sect in India. No one can belong to their faith unless he is born a Parsee. Boys and girls are received into the faith between the ages of seven and eleven. It is considered that before this time they cannot be guilty of real sin. They are invested with the sacred thread, a girdle of fine woollen material something like a flat white bootlace wound three times round the waist. This is worn till death, and never removed except when bathing. In the hour of death there are three prayers said by the dying man. First, loosing the girdle, he repeats, "Oh God, our protector, all other protectors fail me. Be with me now." Then, tying the knot again, "Oh God, I confess that I have sinned often, both by sins of omission and commission." Last follows a prayer commending his spirit into its Creator's hands.
The Parsecs are a people to be admired. In many ways, both spiritually and materially, they are superior to the Western races, and the incidence of crime among them is believed to be the lowest in the world. We may look askance at their (to us) shocking method of disposing of their dead, but at least it can be claimed for them that such a method is far more hygienic and efficient than our awn method of burial in the ground.
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