VIDEO | ENGLISH | SOUND | COLOR | 24 MINS | 2004

Mumbai’s Parsi community has, for centuries, relied on vultures to dispose of its corpses. But now these valued scavengers are in danger of extinction. Darabsha, a retired Parsi pallbearer, braves the smog and traffic to travel to the outskirts of the city, where the promise of vultures there will allow him to die in the ancient Parsi tradition. Along the way, we encounter ingenious though sometimes bizarre modern Parsi solutions to mitigate the dearth of vultures, none of which agrees with Darabsha. He wants to die like his Zoroastrian forefathers, and he decides to wait for the vultures to come…