What is the story about?
There's a song from Rockstar (2011) that stays with you long after the film ends. "Kaaga re, kaaga re" - a plea to a scavenging bird: eat my flesh, but
spare my eyes. I still hope to see my beloved. Most people assumed it was a poet's invention. It wasn't. The lines trace back to a tradition over a thousand years old, one connected to a journey that began in Iran, passed through the Strait of Hormuz, and eventually arrived quietly in Mumbai. It describes what happens at a "Dakhma", a Tower of Silence. And one of those towers has been standing in Mumbai's Malabar Hills for three centuries, unseen, unvisited, and unknown to most of the city around it. A community driven out of Iran in the 7th century, forced across the Strait of Hormuz, and eventually washed ashore on the western coast of India, carried their faith, their fire, and their rituals with them. One of those rituals built this tower. It's still standing.
You've Walked Past It Without Knowing
It sits inside 54 acres of dense forest on Malabar Hill, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in Mumbai. The forest wraps around it completely. You can't see it from the street. You can't enter unless you're Parsi. The city has grown and roared around it for centuries, and it has remained perfectly still.
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The structure itself looks nothing like a tower. It's circular, roofless, built of stone, closer to an open-air amphitheatre than anything else. About 50 feet tall, roughly 100 feet wide. The roof is almost flat, slightly higher at the edges than the centre. And on that roof, there are markers indicating exactly where each body should be placed, as several media reports described.
Three Rings, Thousands of Years
The roof is divided into three concentric rings. The outermost is for men. The middle ring for women. The innermost for children. This arrangement hasn't changed across any dakhma ever built, anywhere in the world, across thousands of years.
At the very centre is a well, deep, lined with lime, where the bones are eventually swept after the sun and birds have done their work. No grave. No marker. Nothing remains.
The Last Goodbye
Before reaching the tower, the body is brought to small structures within the complex called bunglis. Priests pray. The family gathers. The body, wrapped in muslin and laid on a wooden pallet, is prepared here. This is as far as the family goes.
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From this point, only a special group called khandias, ritual pallbearers, carry the body up to the tower, place it in the correct ring, and leave. The family watches from a distance. They never see the body again.
Why Do This at All?
In Zoroastrian belief, earth, water, and fire are sacred. A decaying body would pollute all three. So instead, the dead are offered to the sky, to the sun and to scavenging birds. Far from being a grim ritual, it's considered the individual's final act of generosity. One last gift to the living world before leaving it.
One Parsi architect described witnessing it like this: the path to the tower is lined with greenery and peacocks, and there is an overwhelming sense of a body simply passing into another world, being set free, not discarded.
How Did This End Up in Mumbai?
The story begins 1,300 years ago, far from here. In the 7th century, Muslim armies swept through Iran. Zoroastrians were given a stark choice: convert or leave. A group chose to leave. They hid in the mountains of Khorasan for nearly a century, then made their way to Hormuz Island in the Strait of Hormuz, then to Diu on the Arabian Sea, moving slowly, carefully, surviving.
Eventually they landed in a small town in Gujarat called Sanjan. The local Hindu king, Jadi Rana, agreed to shelter them. He sent a full glass of milk as a message: the land is already full. The Zoroastrian priests responded by dissolving sugar into it. We will blend in, and make it sweeter. That exchange became the founding legend of the Parsi community in India.
They stayed in Gujarat for nearly 800 years. They farmed, wove, built fire temples. Mumbai wasn't part of the picture yet. That changed when the British arrived. Bombay came under the East India Company in 1668, and with religious freedom officially declared, Parsis began moving to the city. They didn't just settle, they helped build it. By 1780, Parsis made up nearly 9% of Bombay's population. Jamsetji Tata, who founded one of India's greatest industrial empires, came from this community.
The Verse That Outlived Everything
Somewhere in all of this history, a 12th-century Sufi saint wrote about death, longing, and God. His words were preserved inside the Sikh holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib. For 800 years, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs recited them without necessarily knowing their origin. Then in 2011, a Bollywood lyricist put them into a rock song.
The verse outlived its religion, its language, and its century. That's what happens when something is simply true.
