All of these beliefs about religious identity will play themselves out at a world congress in London next month, where Zoroastrians will discuss the formation of the world body and what its contours will be. They will also battle for the core of what a follower of Zoroastrianism is, an identity getting harder to pin down.
While WAPIZ allows children of Parsi fathers and non-Parsi mothers into the religion and not the other way around, Dhalla says the faith allows for gender sensitivity and at a time when a third of all Parsis marry outside the community, it makes sense to accept these children into the faith. "Families are affected when forced to be of different religions. Elders can't bring grandchildren into their religion," says Jehangir Patel, editor of community magazine Parsiana.
Patel's office is in what used to be a maternity hospital for Parsis. Today, the hospital has no takers. By Parsiana's estimates, there are around 300 Parsi births each year and nearly 900 deaths. In this increasingly divided community, aging is a particularly painful process.
