What Bombay Needs Now Is a Lot More Vultures

By Michael Fathers/Bombay

Bombay's tiny but influential and prosperous community of Zoroastrians, known around the world as Parsi, is facing a thorny religious problem. The traditional Parsi death rite--the placing of a corpse in a dakhma, a small open-air amphitheater, where it is devoured by birds of prey in about two hours--is threatened.

India's common white-backed vulture is on the verge of extinction, hit by an unidentified virus sweeping South Asia. To protect their way of death, Parsi leaders plan to build a 50-ft.-high aviary around their jungle-shrouded "Towers of Silence" in one of the toniest areas of central Bombay to breed vultures and to cope with the three human corpses placed there on an average day.

The aviary needs government approval and has not been without its critics, who question the initial $222,000 price tag and annual $44,000 maintenance cost. "We have to consider what is doctrinally right for the religion," says KHOJESTE MISTREE, an Oxford-educated Zoroastrian scholar and prime mover behind what could be India's first captive vulture-breeding center. "It may seem perfectly normal for some people to bury a body in the ground. To me it is repulsive that worms are eating a body for as long as 60 years."

--By Michael Fathers/Bombay