India's Vanishing Vultures

Parsi reformers like Dhan Baria believe that sky burialmust be suspended and cemeteries opened to avoidhealth risks and to honor the dead. (rajesh nirgude / ap)There hadn’t been a vulture seen in years, buthawk-like black kites circled in great numbersover our heads. Every day, an average of threemore bodies arrive for them, and they feast asthe vultures before them, but their habits aremessy, focused on the soft spots, leaving toomuch behind. There were complaints of thesmell and rumors of fingers showing up on thebalconies of nearby high-rises.The Panchayat has attempted to replace theservice that the vultures provided so seamlesslyfor so long with a series of failed technologies.The ozone machine didn’t really help with thesmell. The chemicals they poured into orificesmade things slippery as the bodies melted ontothe stone. They’ve settled on solar reflectors installedatop steel scaffoldings and directed at thebodies to speed up the process of decay. (Imaginea child with a magnifying glass aimed at anant.) But the rainy season is four months longand solar devices desiccate more than destroythe bodies. The most orthodox of priests claimthat it’s a back door to cremation.Khojeste Mistree, a Parsi scholar and memberof the Panchayat, agrees. On a separate visit,I stood at the same spot with him, though hedidn’t point out the breach in the fence. Witha good girth and a trimmed gray beard, his facewas unlined, a man untroubled by self-doubt.“People say the Towers of Silence are antiquated,that we should move on to cremationand forget our tradition,” he told me, speakingin a precise Cambridge accent, though it’s beenthirty years since he studied there. “I’m totallyopposed. This powerful, vociferous minority ofreformists doesn’t know the religion.” He clarifiedthat he wasn’t a priest.“I teach the priests,” he emphasized.I found him pleasant for a puritan.Mistree has a grand plan. He imagines avulture aviary, sixty-five feet high, as big as twofootball fields, spanning the towers and thetrees without cutting a single branch. Critics,and there are many within both the Parsi andscientific communities, say an aviary would leadvultures to their deaths. Diclofenac is presentin hundreds of human painkiller formulations.It would be virtually impossible to ensure thatthe Parsis were, as the goat meat at the breedingcenter in Pinjore, diclofenac-free. But Mistree isdetermined. He even went so far as to suggestthat the Parsis were already keeping some vultures,somewhere—though as a protected species,doing so would be illegal.“Where there is a will, there is a way,” Mistreestated. “Really, we are more concerned thananybody that the vultures survive. Our interestis in the very preservation of our religious tradi-Meera Subramanian 45