AHMEDABAD—My most cherished childhood memories always came a few months after my classmates came back from winter break with accounts of the bounty under their Christmas trees. For as long as I can remember Nowruz has been my Christmas and, in some ways, my consolation. But more than that, it felt special to have a holiday that only I, among all my friends, celebrated. Since leaving home for university some years ago, I have attended Nowruz celebrations in locales across North America, Europe and the Middle East. This year, in India, I assumed I wouldn’t be able to find a Nowruz celebration. When I heard there was an opportunity to spend the evening with a Parsi family in Ahmedabad, I jumped at the opportunity.
I knew that the Parsi community in Ahmedabad had arrived from Iran over a thousand years ago and that it was unlikely that my Iranian-Canadian Nowruz would resemble anything taking place here. On our drive over to the home of the Mehta family, I wondered what a Parsi Nowruz would look like. Would it include the traditional Persian hafsin with goldfish like the one my mother would prepare every year? Would we eat kababs dripping with juice fresh off a charcoal grill? Would we dance late into the evening? On the outside, this Nowruz resembled nothing I had seen before.
Upon arrival, Mr. Behram Mehta and his wife, Tina, welcomed a group of complete strangers into their home like we were old friends. Though Behram and Tina had to leave early to attend a dinner, they left us in the company of their 25-year-old son, Shiroy, Mr. Mehta’s elderly father, and a host of other guests that included a renowned Parsi astrologer and columnist, a historian, and two of Shiroy’s friends from the Parsi community. Mr. Bejan Daruwalla, the 83-year-old astrologer, broke the ice and engaged us all in conversation about our trip to India and our impressions so far. He shared stories about the origins of the Parsi community and its deep roots in Gujarat.
Mr. Bejan Daruwalla (left), a member of the Parsi community who is a famous astrologer, shares stories from the Parsi’s long history in Gujarat. Photo by Hán Zhang.
The cuisine at the dinner table looked delicious and was similar to other dishes we had tried in northern India. Some of the dishes were specific to Parsi cuisine. Unfortunately, I was not able to sample much food. As we sat down at the table, I began feeling clammy and lost my appetite. Despite my weak stomach, so far I had survived the trip remarkably well by staying away from meat and drinking lots of bottled water. On my last day I became a little cavalier. During lunch with a source in Juhapura, I ate some meat I should probably have not eaten. My recklessness now had me jumping up from my seat at the dinner table and dashing for the bathroom. I made it just in time. I spent the next 10 minutes on the floor vomiting into the Mehtas’ pristine toilet.
After 30 minutes of respite, during which I naively assumed my sickness had passed, my vomit returned and painted a small portion of the Mehta’s beautiful moonlit garden. During the half hour when I wasn’t vomiting, I had an opportunity to talk with Shiroy and his friends, Ruzbeh and Burgess. Although they belong to a “micro-minority” community, they are very much a part of Gujarati society. Though they are expected to marry within their tiny community, the boys don’t seem overly concerned with following this tradition. Their friends and social group were both inside and outside the Parsi community.
I learned a little bit about how their community survived and prospered. In India, the narrative surrounding the Parsis is one of “refugees to royalty.” In the 10th century a group of Iranian Zoroastrians fled Iran as refugees in search of somewhere to practice their religion without persecution. They ended up in Gujarat and were granted leave to stay there, thus founding the Indian Parsi community (Parsi being Gujarati for Persian). The Zoroastrian Parsis first arrived in India, Jadhav Rana, the Hindu rule, gave them a number of conditions that they had to follow. They were required to surrender their arms, speak Gujarati, wear Indian clothing, and not proselytize. This household seemed to follow all those rules, minus the collection of rifles locked away in a cabinet behind the dinner table.
Over thousands of years of being Gujrat, Parsis have distinguished themselves not by their numbers, but by their engagement in all spheres of Indian life, from science and industry to the arts and literature. For Parsis, it is the sum total of a human’s thoughts, words and deeds which will decide the fate of his or her soul in the next world. Shiroy described being Parsi as more a “way of life” than a religion. For him, that life revolves around working hard, eating good food and having a couple drinks every night. It is through his daily activities and interactions with society that he finds the playing field to practice Humata, Hukhta and Huvarshta: good thoughts, good words and good deeds, the basic tentes of Zoroastrianism.
Though in many ways this Nowruz was different from any I had experienced, it also felt familiar. I had always associated Nowruz with the warmth of family and friends, good food, and cheerful conversation. Here, in Ahmedabad, with my peers from New York and with our new Parsi friends, I had found all this. When Mr. Daruwalla got up to leave, he held me in a long embrace and told me that I was his “brother,” and that “blood is thicker than water.”
Later in the evening, as I lay on the floor of my hotel bathroom on my last night clutching a toilet, I was grateful that despite being thousands of miles from New York I was able to celebrate the Persian New Year, albeit with a Parsi twist. As for my New Year’s resolution? Avoid meat that comes to you wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper.