The Birth of a Princess

The President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, greeting Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of Britain, as Homai and other photographers capture them on camera, 1958. “President Radhakrishan called me ‘Princess’, General Cariappa called me ‘Energy’ and Rajaji said I was ‘A new phenomenon’. People called me all sorts of names. They used to be happy when they saw me.”

“I hadn’t the slightest clue that I would be a photographer. I wanted to be a doctor but that was the only time in my life that my mother refused to let me do something. She had seen doctors on late night shifts and didn’t want me in a profession like that. Little did she realize that Press photography would be far worse! I also wanted to be a Girl Guide but she didn’t want that either. In those days Girl Guides had to wear uniforms and coming from an orthodox Parsi family, that was a problem for me. As a child, I once saw a photograph of another child lying on its stomach. I was told that it was taken by a woman and wondered if I would ever get a chance like that.”

Homai Vyarawalla

Shaking hands with Dorothy Macmillan, the wife of the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, in 1958. On the 9th of December 1913, a baby girl was born to Dossabhai Hathiram and Soonamai. When she turned two, an astrologer in Navsari predicted, “Raj Rajwade mein ghoomegi”—“She is destined to walk among royalty and important people.” This forecast seemed incredible to a family that had always been faced with hardship. Dossabhai led an uncertain life as an actor-director in a travelling Parsi theatre company when he married Soonamai, twenty years his junior. It was the second time that both had married. Dossabhai was not to live to see India turn Independent. He was also not to see his only daughter, Homai Vyarawalla, become its first woman press photographer.

Homai’s father, popularly known as “bade mian”, had originally trained himself to be an artist and painted on glass. In those days painting was not a paying profession and so he left home at an early age, to become an actor instead. Urdu Parsi theatre had been very popular from the mid-nineteenth

With the Canadian Prime Minister, Mr. John Diefenbaker.

century, but by the early thirties it had to contend with the talkies in cinema.1 Dossabhai was known to be very handsome and would often play female roles. Homai recalls a story about a wealthy Nawab being quite infatuated with him. Watching their rehearsals, she soon became fluent in Urdu and once did a perfect rendition of a part in which a Muslim actress was having difficulty. A fellow Parsi watching this warned Dossabhai of the influence of the theatre on his daughter. From that day, Homai was banned from attending their rehearsals. Acting was not an option then for Parsi women from “respectable” homes. Dossabhai had directed some plays and even acted in the cinema. One of Homai’s earliest memories of the Khatau Company, where he worked, was playing with brushes and canvas among gigantic sets; “Those were my toys.” The Parsi theatre was known then for its spectacular and innovative sets and its technical wizardry.2 ”I remember a grand set of a street scene that had houses on two sides of the road. One of the balconies was on fire and had a woman shouting for help. My father had to throw a rope across and swing through the air to rescue his love. It was all very elaborate and to me as a child looked startlingly real!”

Life was fairly nomadic for Homai in the early years of her childhood. As a baby she had travelled with her father’s troupe, performing all over the country as well as in Singapore, Ceylon, Malaysia and Burma. Due to the uncertainty of their home life, her two brothers were sent to live with their grandparents in Bombay. When Homai turned seven, Soonamai shifted to a Parsi mohalla in Tardeo, Bombay, with all the three children. Homai’s parents came from priestly families in Navsari and Surat. As a child, she did not have much contact with her father’s side of the family, but every year they would visit Soonamai’s sister, Khorshedbanu’s home in Navsari where Homai’s uncle, Dastoor Kaikobad Mehrjirana, was the Head Priest. Here they would perform the annual rituals for their dead relatives in the days before Pateti and the Parsi New Year. Soonamai would help her sister make the food and sweets for the daily offering. Three of Soonamai’s brothers were also panthakis of fire temples. The family celebrity then was Dossabhai’s nephew, Gustad M. Hathiram, whohad set out to cycle around the world in the early twenties with four other friends. He never returned to tell his story and so there was always a mystery around Gustad. According to some sources he was killed by robbers in the U.S.A. Others claimed that he was alive but ashamed to return to India, as he had not completed his journey. It was an intriguing story for Homai, which was finally laid to rest recently when his cousin, Kety Maneck Chena, in Bombay clarified that he passed away in Florida in 1973.

A Westernized community, middle class Parsis eagerly sought English education. Dossabhai and Soonamai had not studied much but they were keen that their daughter learn English. Since Homai knew only Urdu, she was enrolled in the Grant Road High School run by Rustomji Bhesania. Despite its Gujarati antecedents, the school was cosmopolitan. Here Homai studied with Hindus, Muslims and other Parsis. The English language was compulsory and anyone caught speaking in Gujarati was punished and asked to write: “I will not speak in Gujarati, I must speak in English,” a hundred times. When rents in Tardeo soared, the family had to shift further away to Andheri. The children travelled to school now by steam train. Homai recalls carrying her return fare of two annas between the pages of her books. Fountain pens had yet to make an entry and so they had to carry a cumbersome inkstand for their pens to be dipped in ink. It took almost an hour to travel from the Andheri station to Grant Road. All the compartments of the train had long benches and as children they would walk up and down buying fresh food from travelling vendors. They specially loved adventures in the monsoons when the tracks would get flooded, and the train would be stranded for hours.

Homai learnt to be comfortable in male company very early in life. There were just six or seven girls at her school and by the time she reached her Matriculation, she was the only girl in a class of thirty-five boys. Unlike other more affluent fellow students who came in dresses, Homai would attend school dressed in a sari with a mathubanu covering her hair.3 Of course, she would pull it off as soon as she climbed down the stairs of her mother’s flat. “I was thirteen and going out with the mathubanu made me feel like an old woman! All the other girls at school would come in frocks and skirts and I was the only one in a sari. Every Parsi woman who wore the sari had to have a mathubanu as that was one way of keeping the head covered. My mother said, if I wanted to go out anywhere, I would have to wear it. We used to live on the second floor in Wadia Street in Tardeo. As I went down the stairs, I would remove my mathubanu and put it in my bag. The other thing that I hid was the sudreh. 4 We all wore the sudreh and kusti.

5 To make a distinction between the Parsis and the Hindus, all Parsi women had to show their sudreh from under the blouse and so net sudrehs and other decorated ones were in fashion. While going down I would also fold up my sudreh into my blouse. I had to remember to let both these items show when I got back home. If I ever teased my elder brother, he would say, ‘Mummy ko keh doonga ki yeh sudreh andar

lagaati hai, bahar nahi rakhti hai’—’I will tell mother that you fold up your sudreh under your blouse’ and everything would be all right between us! I would never complain against my brother. It was something I had to do in order to get an education.”6

Another more traumatic and embarrassing restriction that all Parsi girls at schools and colleges had to encounter in those days was the practice of door besvanu.7 “Every month during their menstrual period, women of the family had to experience untouchability in its extreme form. Each household had a separate corner or a room on the ground floor where women had to move in for the days of their period. The space had only an iron bed and separate utensils for eating and drinking. Bathing or leaving the room during this time was forbidden. This practice kept girls away from schools and colleges, causing severe disruptions in their studies.” Eventually, educational institutions took up the matter

Below: This hand-tinted photograph dated 1917–18 is the only image of Homai’s childhood.

Below, right: When Homai and her husband were learning photography, Maneckshaw created a trick image of an adolescent Homai seated next to herself as a child. Left: Dossabhai Hathiram dressed in costume for a performance in 1932.

Below: Homai inherited her father’s love for acting and played the role of Jehanara, the sister of Aurangzeb, in a public performance by the students of J.J. School of Arts, Bombay.

Homai, aged fifteen, cooking. “We moved from house to house in Bombay, depending on our financial situation. This photograph was taken in the Chatriwala building in Tardeo where five of us lived in one room. Life was difficult in those days. We had our kitchen and bathing space in the same room and had to fetch water from a tap at the end of the corridor. When the rents got too high, we shifted to Andheri and I would catch the 6.30 a.m. train to Grant Road for school. I had to complete most of the housework before that as my mother suffered from chronic asthma. My brother and I fetched water from a well in the fire temple compound and we had to climb up a hillside to go to the toilet. We shifted back to Tardeo (Slater Road) from Andheri. Just before our marriage, Maneckshaw moved in with us and shared the rent of forty-five rupees. We always lived in rented houses. Initially we didn’t even have an almirah and lived like hermits with trunks and folding beds. It was only later when both Maneckshaw and I were earning, that we were able to furnish the house gradually.” Homai’s grandmother, Avanmai Mullan, with the mathubanu.

Homai with Soonamai in 1936. This picture was taken in Victoria Gardens by Maneckshaw.

Homai wearing the “skirt-like sari” at Chowpatti Beach, Bombay.

and with protests from other more enlightened representatives of the community, it was phased out. Coming from a priestly background, Homai had to be seen to follow the tradition, but she found innovative ways to circumvent the rules.8 “My mother would give me all kinds of home preparations to reduce my periods and I would gulp those down, but I had my own agenda and she didn’t know that. I would adjust my periods according to my school schedule. I would also reduce the number of days in order to get out of the house. My poor mother was constantly worrying about my ‘irregular’ cycle!”

Parsi girls in Homai’s school wore silk in those days as they were forbidden to take part in politics. “Gandhi’s call for swadeshi was all around us and anything in khadi signified the nationalist movement.” Homai would stitch her own blouses and she shared six saris with her mother. A widow, Soonamai wore a black sari most of the time and hardly stepped out of the house, so Homai would manage with the rest. They bought cloth from stacks in Bhuleshwar where it was sold by weight, each piece costing a few annas. “It was my job every Sunday to wash the saris, change the borders and to sometimes stitch a matching blouse with four orsix annas worth of cloth. Everyone thought I was a well-dressed person. Once I didn’t have a petticoat to wear under my sari. I was lucky because it was suddenly a fashion then to wear a sari like a skirt without any gathering in the front. It meant I could wrap my sari around twice and didn’t need a petticoat!” Soonamai suffered from chronic asthma all her life. She would spin the woollen thread used for weaving the kusti, sometimes working through the night to earn some extra money. “Despite this, we were always short of money and she would often need to pawn her gold bangles.” The bangles travelled up and down from the pawnshop for most of her life. Homai’s growing years were frugal but not impossible. She recalls how she would carry two annas to the butcher’s shop for mutton bones. These would be boiled and made into very tasty curries. The fact that there was no adulteration helped: “Eating less, but genuine good food kept us healthy.” The family never took money from any of the numerous Parsi charities. In fact, Homai still has a strong disapproval of Parsi dependency on charity and feels that it encouraged the community to be lazy and complacent.

In school Homai became good friends with a Parsi girl, Dhun Alamshah, who had lost her mother and lived with an aunt who did not treat her too well. One day Homai had a vivid dream about her. They were chatting on the second floor balcony of their school, when a ten-rupee note slipped from Dhun’s hand. The money was gone by the time they ran downstairs. Dhun was stricken, as this was the money for her school fees. In order to save the situation, Homai asks her boyfriend Maneckshaw for ten rupees and hands it over to Dhun. The very next day, her dream played out in reality, in exactly the same way. Maneckshaw came to their aid and Dhun was able to pay her fees. These spiritual “interventions” were to become a recurrent feature in Homai’s life. Unfortunately, Dhun was not to live long and died at the age of eighteen.

Homai was indebted to several people for her own education. When her school fee was increased to seven rupees, she went to meet the headmaster and offered to drop out. Rustomji Bhesania made an exception for his favourite student and Homai had to pay only three rupees and eight annas as her fee for the rest of her school life. Of course, she earned this by offering tuitions to other students in classes lower than hers for which she was paid rupees twenty a month by him. Rustomji had great faith in Homai and when teachers were absent, he would ask her to take classes for them. Years later, when Homai moved to Delhi, she would often try to meet Rustomji on her visits to Bombay. “We met just once in 1948. I was told that he had retired and had lost his memory. I had cut my hair and looked different but decided that I would still go and see him. When I stood at the door and said, ‘Mr. Bhesania, yaad hai main kaun hoon?’—‘Mr. Bhesania, do you remember who I am?’ he immediately said, ‘Homai Hathiram’. He remembered both my names. I went in and sat with him and introduced my son to him and he talked to me about all those old times. Nothing seemed to be wrong with his memory. Before leaving, I hugged him and it was so heartwarming. He had grown so old and feeble. I am glad I met him, because a month later he was gone.” Rustomji was not her only benefactor. Her parents had once helped a young Parsi boy called Homi Dastoor by letting him stay with them in Tardeo, while he was completing his studies. In turn, Homi helped Homai get aid for her college fees from a Parsi Trust. It was Homi who filled up all her forms and applied for the fellowship. She never saw him after that. Despite her middle class background, Homai feels she was lucky to get opportunities that she could never have dreamt of. At St. Xavier’s College, she would watch two boys play tennis and one of them loaned her his racquet. After practising with his friend, she was soon winning tennis tournaments in college and at her Arts school.

Homai’s brothers were less fortunate. Unlike her, they could not get scholarships and had to finally drop out of school. “Their studies had already been neglected because of living

Gustad Hathiram, the cyclist. (Photograph courtesy: Kety Maneck Chena)

away from my mother and they couldn’t pass their Matriculation examination. The older one, Homi, learnt English for a while with Rustomji Bhesania, but family pressures forced him to take up a job in the Mechanical Department of the Petit Mills in Tardeo. Siavak also got a job in the weaving mills and later in Voltas and they remained in these jobs for the rest of their lives.” The monotony of working in a profession that they didn’t really enjoy was relieved by theatre. Like Dossabhai they loved acting and both were amateur performers in Gujarati plays in Bombay. Homi, who was married briefly, would mostly play female roles.

Dossabhai could not live to see his sons follow his passion. He was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet and his problems were compounded by the rivalry

Be-Naam’e Khuda – In the name of God.

May you always be happy my dear daughter Homai. I am happy to read the good news [about your passing your matriculation]. I give you blessings from the bottom of my heart. My congratulations and I wish you luck. If you have the consent of your mother to take the help of Homi Dastoor [she had written to him about Homi’s offer to help her with college fees and books through a Trust] then I am very happy for you to get all this. I am giving you permission to get his help.

I am very sorry that I have not been able to do anything for you. The very day I received your letter and was reading about the joyous news of your passing, I also got information from the owner that our theatre company is winding up. Now I am waiting for them to make arrangements to pay me. If they ever do pay me, because once a company winds up everybody forgets to pay up. But you don’t worry, God willing, things will be all right. I wish to God that you and your mother and two brothers live in peace and happiness.

Your loving father

Far above: Dossabhai’s letter to Homai.

Above: “My father was completely self taught and had wonderful handwriting.”

Dossabhai with an actor from the film industry.

Left: Dossabhai Hathiram’s passport.

The last letter written by Dossabhai to his daughter.

and intrigue among theatre companies. It is said that he was given mercury in paan and that destroyed his voice. In 1931, Homai wrote to tell him about passing her Matriculation examination. In a poignant reply, Dossabhai blessed her, but expressed his inability to send her any money to continue with her studies. He had got the news that very day that his company was shutting down. Penniless, he had also contracted a serious illness in Burma. His last letter to her was more anguished: “In your letter [to me] there is no mention of your mother at all. Is she also angry with me? Whom can I share my difficulties with? I had started homeopathy medicines. It is nearly twenty days now and they have had no effect. More than half the number of people here [in the company] are stranded for lack of money...The manager doesn’t seem to stay in Rangoon...How can I ask him for money when he is in trouble as well...I will try as soon as I can manage to see if you can travel [to Burma], with a third class passenger on the ship. I can’t travel third class, as it is difficult for me to sit on the wooden planks due to my illness. For the second class, I need one hundred and twenty-five rupees. It costs the same by rail.... Tell your mother that I wrote to Jehangir Khatau [the owner of the company] about ten days back and he has not even cared to reply. So I can’t have any faith in him. If you try to raise money [on interest] from somewhere then it will be like death to me. I would rather prefer to die. Don’t worry about me. I am hoping that something may crop up by the end of the month. I can survive here on whatever money I have. If I came back to India, I would just be a burden on you. I live in the hope that Khatau will make arrangements for me to reach Bombay somehow. Do write at least one letter every month....” Maneckshaw’s friend, who had visited Rangoon, brought news that Dossabhaiwas seriously unwell. When he finally managed to raise the money to return, it was too late. He died a week or two after a surgery at the J.J. Hospital in Bombay. Homai was only seventeen.

As desired by Dossabhai, Soonamai consented to Homai’s college education. She was not schooled much herself but understood the worth of education. Homai is very grateful to her mother for giving her the freedom to grow: “My mother couldn’t have helped me in any other way except for allowing me to do whatever I wanted to do in life. She never stopped me in spite of financial difficulties. She never said ‘I don’t have money for you.’ She would dig out money somehow—even for the littlest of things.” Others in the family would talk about the freedom given to Homai in disapproving whispers. After all, good Parsi women, like all others, were meant to get married when they came of age. In contrast, not only did Homai go to college, but she also had a boyfriend at the age of thirteen! Homai first met Maneckshaw in 1926 at a railway station. They were distantly related and he was in Bombay to take his Matriculation examination. An aunt, with whom he was staying, suggested that Homai take his help for her Maths paper. During one of these lessons Maneckshaw slipped in a note proposing to Homai and asking her if she liked him. The attraction was mutual and so the station became a meeting point for both of them from then onwards. It was a happy ending for both the lovers, but not for the aunt who had her eye on Maneckshaw for her own daughter!

Homai owes her initial interest in photography to Maneckshaw. In days prior to any formal training in the subject, both were selftaught, picking up tips from popular photography journals and Kodak and Agfa pamphlets. In the absence of any proper photographic facilities, Maneckshaw would experiment with developing films. The fourposter bed covered in blankets in Vyara, where he spent his childhood, was his darkroom. He would make contact prints on P.O.P. paper using sunlight and would send his negatives to Kodak in Bombay or Surat for making enlargements. “In Bombay, the bathroom became our darkroom. I would haveone hand in the developer and the other holding a hand fan as it was so hot that both of us would be bathed in perspiration.” They glazed their prints by fixing them face down on clear glass sheets, using a roller to squeeze out the water and air bubbles. Soonamai’s charcoal stove would help dry and glaze the prints. “She would be standing guard to see that the pictures did not fall into the fire!”Most of their early pictures were taken together as they shared Maneckshaw’s Rolleiflex. Arguments about who had taken the photograph were settled easily by Homai. ”I would include him in the frame whenever possible, so that it was clear that I had taken the picture!”

Determined to study further, Homai enrolled for a degree in Economics at St. Xaviers in Bombay. After taking money from the Parsi charity for her education for two years she gave it up as she was, by then, earning enough money from photography. She also simultaneously pursued a Diploma in the Arts Teachers’ Course at the J.J. School of Arts. Maneckshaw helped subsidize her education by giving her ten rupees a month to buy brushes and other art material. Her college education, like her school, was cosmopolitan. Some of her friends at the J.J. School of Arts included Victor Fernandes, Clement D’Souza, Nargis Irani, Dosa Engineer and Rehana Mogul. College years were spent doing a lot

Maneckshaw and Homai in 1931.

At University Gardens, August 27th, 1933.

At Vaihar Lake,October 16th, 1932.

”Most of these pictures were the result of failed and successful experiments with the Rolleiflex camera using a self-timer.” Homai’s picture (fourth from left) taken after the completion of her Bachelor of Arts degree; outside St. Xaviers College, Bombay.

Paintings made by Homai at the J.J. School of Arts.

Homai during her college years, in 1931.

Maneckshaw and his sister Najamai in the studio. Shirinbai with her children, Maneckshaw and Najamai.

of singing, dancing and dramatics besides painting. “The J.J. School of Arts used to have big shows for the public in theatres. There were tableaus of different kinds, like an underwater scene, and we would create the sets for them as well. I remember going to the Bhuleshwar market in Bombay, where they had all these shops selling costumes and props for the theatre. I visualized a Kathak dance performance on the theme of ‘awakening’. All the girls played the part of the lotus flowers who were woken from their sleep by the drones in the morning.”Acting was a tradition that ran in her family. Homai recalls playing Jehanara in a college play on Aurangzeb. “It wasn’t easy in those days. Do you remember Mehra Masani at All India Radio? She was the sister of Minoo Masani. Mehra was studying at Elphinstone College and was rehearsing for a play along with some other Hindu men. When this was brought to the notice of leaders of our community, some of them like Vimadalal and Dadachanji came in open cars [convertibles] and went from mohalla to mohalla to campaign against Parsi women taking part in theatre. And she was stopped.”

Homai was also passionate about the movies. “In those days our pictures got us one or two rupees per print. We would be completely broke when the money would come by the post. The first thing we did to celebrate was to go to a picture house!” Homai and Maneckshaw watched English films at Eros, Regal and Metro in Bombay. One of her favourite films was the silent Ben-Hur (1925) with Raymon Novarro. She also enjoyed Gone with the Wind (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Les Miserables (1935) (“The one with Fredric March”), The Ten Commandments (1923) and Scarface (1932). Rudolf Valentino and Lionel Barrymore were her favourite idols. This was the era of black and white, silent cinema that was accompanied by an orchestra. The music played according to the “atmosphere” of the film. “The ‘riffraff’ who couldn’t afford proper tickets would pay four annas and sit on benches or just lie down in the ‘pit’ and shout along with the film. In fact many preferred to be near the ‘pit’ because of its entertainment value. Maneckshaw and I saw quite a few films sitting there as well! The first sound film that I saw was called Patriot. The king is murdered by his councillor, Palan, and he shouts, ‘Palan, Palan!’ That was the only sound that we heard on the screen during the entire film. They had written captions, like you saw in Charlie Chaplin’s films. I must say that the quality of acting was much better. Nowadays there is a lot more spoken word than acting. We never saw Hindi films because they looked so artificial. I didn’t like K.L. Saigal’s looks, even though he was the rage at the time because of his voice.”

Maneckshaw came from Vyara in Gujarat and had lost his father when he was only a year and a half. He had an elder brother who also died early, and his sister Najamai died tragically young of snakebite. Their original family name was Chowkidaar, meaning “the keeper” of the temple or of the holy fire. When new agiaries were set up in villages inhabited by Parsis in Gujarat, Maneckshaw’s father carried the holy flame to them. “In those uncertain times he travelled on a bullock cart, armed with a sword to ward off attacks by wild animals or dacoits.” When Maneckshaw started

Homai and Maneckshaw’s marriage certificate.

to work in the city of Bombay, he discovered that his surname had other connotations and changed it to Vyarawalla.

Homai considers thirteen to be her lucky number. She was born in 1913 and she met Maneckshaw at the age of thirteen, among many other coincidences. They were inseparable friends and companions. People had become so used to seeing them together, that in his absence they would enquire, “Woh kahan hai?”—”Where is he?” This was despite the fact that Maneckshaw’s mother, Shirinmai, was opposed to their marriage. “In those days orthodox people didn’t want collegeeducated girls for their sons—especially those who had studied with boys. My mother-in-law wanted him to get married to another girl of her choice and she only relented when her own daughter Najamai died suddenly of snakebite and I went to stay with her for a while.” After fifteen years of courtship, Homai and Maneckshaw got married on the 19th of January 1941. Only five people attended their wedding, which was performed by Maneckshaw’s cousin, Dinshawji Katrak, in the Slater Road flat in Bombay. The guests included their mothers, Homai’s brothers and her cousin, Homai Mulla. The couple sat on the same chairs—“bought for just rupees twentyfive each”—that now adorn Homai’s living room. The entire cost of the wedding came to about two hundred rupees. “The most expensive items which cost a hundred and fifteen rupees were my wedding sari and blouse. The sari was light silver-grey in crinkled georgette with a gold border. I wore a silk blouse with it that was stitched for the first time by a tailor. Yes, and there were two garlands of course, which was part of the ceremony. We didn’t want my mother to be burdened with expenditure, but the real reason was that neither of us liked the elaborate tamasha that accompanies Indian weddings.‘Small, simple and sober,’ was our motto.” In the evening Homai and Maneckshaw went out to Chowpatti Beach and ate some bhelpuri. “That was our wedding reception!”

1 Urdu-Parsi Theatre was also in a sense a forerunner of popular Hindi cinema. See the work of Somnath Gupt (1981) translated into English recently by Kathryn

Hansen. Kathryn Hansen, tr. and ed., The Parsi

Theatre: Its Origins and Development: Somnath Gupt (Kolkata: Seagull, 2005). See also Kathryn Hansen,

“Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-

Dressing in the Parsi Theatre,” in Theatre Journal 51 (1999), and Hansen’s other body of work on female impersonation in Parsi theatre in India. 2 See Saryu Doshi, “Of Costumes and Sets”; Pheroza J.

Godrej and Firoza Punthakey Mistree, eds., A

Zoroastrian Tapestry: Art, Religion and Culture (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2002). 3 White muslin headscarf worn by traditional Parsi women. 4 The sacred white muslin vest worn by Zoroastrians. 5 Sacred thread worn by Zoroastrians. 6 I am grateful to the Sparrow Archives, Bombay, for drawing my attention to this story. 7 A traditional practice of segregation within the Parsi community during the days of the menstrual period. 8 There are several hilarious stories about how Parsi women would get the better of these practices. For instance, Homai related a popular story about the women of Songhad, a village near Navsari, who would mysteriously get their period when guests arrived. The guests would end up cooking for them as a result!