Towering Silence

I remember when my dad told me that Freddy Mercury was a Zoroastrian. In the naivety of youth I had believed them to be an extinct entity. I remember him telling me in pretty much the same breath about their highly idiosyncratic funeral rites as practiced in Mumbai, home to 50,000 of the world's 200,000 Zoroastrians. Needless to say I felt as if one of my lower limbs were being well and truly tugged.

The practice of dokhmenashini, the Zoroastrian method of handling their dead - carrying the body to the Towers of Silence, circular structures of stone, placing the corpse in the open and allowing encircling vultures to scavenge the body thus completing the cycle - is now under serious threat as the vulture population plummets due to the use of anti-inflammatory drugs in cattle!

Read more here.