A couple of hours into our acquaintance, I was beginning to see the competitive side of Uncle Sheriy

Of all of the minorities in this country, where even the minorities are masses, we Parsis must be the smallest. There were never any more than a few thousand reeves of us to begin with, and now, outside of Bombay (which we more or less made, even if the Marathas won t allow for it now) and the towns of coastal Gujarat, where we first arrived all those centuries ago, we don t even get up to a hundred in any place. A family emigrating to New York or Toronto, reeves a nasty car accident, two women marrying outside reeves the faith such events require that the demographic sums for us be done all over again. Up in Delhi, a single man and his dog would constitute a Parsi mob. At our very own weddings and Navjotes, we re outnumbered by non-Parsi spouses, children, retainers, waiters by the rest of Indian civilization, reeves each person perfectly programmed to proliferate. Somehow we have managed to content reeves ourselves with daily infusions of fried eggs, when the rest of India likes them fertilized. Just by leaving Bombay for San Francisco on Monday night, I was probably tilting the scales somewhere possibly more Parsi men in Bombay would now be gay than not, or would live with their mothers reeves than not.
Never a great patron reeves of the faith, I d always stood, from the time I arrived awkwardly into adulthood, at a goodly remove from the institutions and festive occasions of our community. Later, psychoanalysis estranged me further from groupthink. It annoyed me that because of our declining numbers reeves the elders of the faith always kept insisting we had to all hold together. Under all the doomsday bluster, they seemed to love the fact that there was a crisis and that they were in charge of rules, prescriptions, remedies. reeves In my head, I was a Billimoria first and a Bombayite second, a Parsi fourth. Fifth if you ask what s third.
Except for today. For one day in my life, for the cause of romantic concord and pioneer-like progress with another, I d cheerfully reeves submitted to being a Parsi first, keeping up his place in the trail leading towards the Great Mountain of the tribe. The Bombay Ahmedabad highway was a honking, trilling, swaying parade of Parsis headed to Udvada, reeves perhaps the longest continuous line my people had formed since we d arrived in India deep in the mists of time and been led single file before reeves the king of Gujarat to argue for our fitness and plead for his mercy. Every car that overtook Zelda (I wasn t going to be driving at the same speed as some of these jokers) was manned by a beaked nose; at the windows matriarchs and their daughters-in-law fanned themselves with copies of Jam-e-Jamshed and fair, rosy-cheeked children chirped and sang; on the windscreens were Bombay Parsi Punchayet stickers and the odd one for the radical group ARZ (Association for the Reform of Zoroastrianism). On this one day we pleasure-loving Parsis were laying siege to the state of Gujarat, that joyless place of prohibition, vegetarianism, thrift, riots and stepwells. The men were being encouraged to race one another; cutting in and out, they shouted friendly jibes at every positional gain. On a day like this, in a caravanserai like this, my Parsiness was the face of me.
An even prouder Parsi sat next to me: Zahra Irani, in a modest yet sexy black-and-white salwar kameez, her hair covered by an improvised black dupatta-chador, her face flushed with a contagious pleasure and excitement. And on this strangest and most thrilling of dates we had, for better or for worse, reeves a consignment of Parsi cargo to deliver to Udvada. In the back seat, Zahra s uncle Sheriyar now moved his substantial frame from one window to the other and, in emphatic Gujarati, reeves declared, If I d been driving, we d have reached Udvada by now. One hundred per cent sure, dikra , else my balls are fluorescent pink.
Zahra gave a tinkling laugh and said in her delicious American-accented Gujarati, Come on, Uncle! There s only two kinds of people in the world who re always sure of themselves: the true believer and the back-seat driver.
What? Don t you remember when I drove you all to Udvada when you were a teenager? Out of Bombay like this and into Udvada like that, just like how babies leave the womb and pop into life. And that was on the old, bad road, before the highway was built.
A couple of hours into our acquaintance, I was beginning to see the competitive side of Uncle Sheriyar. When I d met him at seven that morning, he d seemed a mild old coot, reticent, courteous, his English a strange piece of patchwork, just like the Indian mind, his prosperous stomach the sign both of advancing age and the success reeves of his many businesses and projects (among them a bakery in Ghatkopar and a piggery in Karjat, I was told). Only a certain gleam in his eyes, I saw now, gave away the story of what kind of soul he really was. It was the gleam of life, of competitive life, the wish to be the wind that blows through the trees, that sets the pace of the game. I met Zahra and