In the 1940s, my grandfather left Lahore in Pakistan to move to Mumbai. He met my Parsi (Zoroastrian) grandmother in the city, where they fell in love and decided to get married. 50 years later, history repeated itself (though not as dramatically) when their son, my father, met my Hindu mother in the very same city. In a country where love used to be an arrangement and religion was something you did not give up nor mix with another’s, these not-so-holy matrimonies were taboo. As a child born into a history of religious and cultural rebellion, I often felt confused about my identity, but always spiritually enriched. My family is not religious, but we definitely have religions – three to be exact. Hinduism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism greatly shaped the way I think, even though for a long time, I wasn’t aware of it. We are not religious, but we do believe in a higher force of sorts, and we love stories. For me, religion is stories told through different people and books that in the end preach the same messages and beliefs. These beliefs seep into our lives and are one of the lenses through which we may view the world. Natural resources are often key to these stories, they show us our relationship to the earth, where we come from – they show us some human ecology. Water is one such resource that flows across religious borders.
The word “Hindu” comes from the river Indus. The names “Hindustan” (or land of the Hindus) and later “India” also come from the river Indus. From all the comic books on Hindu mythology I read as a child, the one that stuck with me the most, was the image of the goddess Ganga being trapped in the hair of Lord Shiva. She had been sent to Earth to wash souls of their sins so that they could ascend to heaven, but she saw this as a job that was below her so she attempted to wipe out the entire population of the world. Shiva stopped her by trapping her in his hair and controlling her flow. Every time I hear of the Ganga now, I imagine her at the top of the glacier. For Hindus, and deeply engrained into me, is the fact that water is life and water purifies you, but water is strong and it can also bring death. Before any festival, before anything new, you need to bathe yourself, you drink blessed water, and after your death, you are scattered back into the source of life so that the water can do to you what the Ganga had been sent to do.
With Islam, my father did not tell me many stories, but I was given a book called “Tell Me about Hajj!” at age 8. The book mentioned a well – the Zamzam well. The Quran said that Ibrahim (Abraham) left his wife Hagar, and infant son Ishmael, in the desert, because Allah asked him to. In the scorching hot desert, the child began to get thirsty, but there was no water to be found. Hagar searched everywhere as her child cried, but they would need a miracle. Allah sent the angel Jibra’il (Gabriel) who touched the ground with his feet and water sprung from it. This was the Zamzam well. The house of Allah or Kaaba is built next to the well. Every year, millions make the pilgrimage to Mecca to drink the holy water, my neighbors even brought some back in large bottles. It is a part of the essential journey. Water is a savior. Civilization comes up around water because it sustains.
Due to Zoroastrianism being a patriarchal religion, my grandmother was not considered Parsi by the temple as soon as she married my grandfather. I am not allowed into the temple either, and everything I learned about being Parsi came from my father, his family, and my neighbors. Parsis worship fire and their temple is called an Agyari or a Fire Temple, coming from the word “Aag” meaning fire. Water and fire immediately don’t seem to go well together, one puts out the other. Parsis believe that fire comes from water and that water is the source of all knowledge. Inside a temple, there are symbols of both water and fire. Purity is a large part of the Parsi ideology, and pollution of fire, earth and water are unacceptable. Parsis believe that one must give back to the earth and nature till the last breath, and after death, they are not buried, cremated or immersed in water. Instead, they are put in a Tower of Silence where they are left to birds of prey. Water needs to be conserved, protected, purified.
My life has always been an amalgam of these three religions and their stories. There are similarities spreading across them and I feel them all the time. Water is one resource that has been greatly influenced by them - whether it is Eid, Diwali or Parsi New Year, we wake up in the morning, take a shower, purify ourselves, and then celebrate. The spirituality I have gained from my upbringing makes me see water as a purifier, water as a source of life, water as a place for death, water as a source of knowledge, water as a savior, water as a sustainer, and probably the one that has influenced me the most – water as something that needs to be conserved.
"Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor, canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars 1939
