On the top of a high hill in a beautiful garden are three Dakhmas or Parsee towers of silence. These towers, built like a windowless colosseum, are massive cylinders of hard black granite, open to the heavens.
The parapet supports a coping of motionless living vultures, waiting in patience to be fed. Here the death rate is high and there are many to die, so they do not suffer from hunger.
The vultures grow restless; they see a funeral cortege of black men in spotless white robes; they bear a black corpse in a white shroud. The body is hastily deposited within the area on its bed of stone and mattress of charcoal. The vultures swoop down to the feast. In a short while, satiated, they rise on heavy wing and lazily resettle upon the parapet.
All day long, my soul struggling for freedom or forgetfulness, is caged within the body of one of these vultures. I do not see the sun except through vulture eyes. I do not feed except upon the dead. My companions are vultures. I am never beyond the smell of the dead. I have no friendships, no hopes.
There are times at night when my vulture body sleeps. Then the soul seems to break forth; but it does not go out in freedom as of old. I may go into the hovels of Bombay in the form of an old black beggar.
Then it is my overwhelming desire to do some act of kindness, but my clothes are in rags; my face is a horrid mask, and I smell of the dead and am driven away.
I found a man dying by the wayside, too weak to move, too blind to see. When he asked for water, I thought now is my chance. I shuffled to the fountain and when I would dip up a cupful, it became as solid glass.
At a time of famine I found a child crying for bread without the city walls. At great strain upon my feeble limbs, I climbed a wall and stole from the kitchen of the enclosed villa a roasted fowl and carried it to the child. The child took it, but when he raised it to eat, it was the hand of a putrid corpse.
When I lift the head of the sick, they shudder and gasp and grow cold.