DINSHAW TAMBOLY: Dhan was a very pious, devout type of… She used to pray every day from the book, etc… And she used to go quite often to the Doongerwadi to pray before the Tower in which her mother was consigned.
LASHA MADAN: On her visits, Dhan would make small talk with the staff. One afternoon, almost a year after her mother’s death, Dhan had an unusual interaction with one of the khandias on duty.
MEERA SUBRAMANIAN: She was going back to the Towers to pay her respects and do her prayers, and she just asked the khandias, like, “Oh, so my mother’s gone, right?” And they’re like, “Ha! No, she’s still up there. There’s no vultures! Where would she go?”
DINSHAW TAMBOLY: And they sniggled at her. And they laughed, and they said, “Your mom is still inside. If you want, we can show you.” So that was the trigger for her.
LASHA MADAN: Like everyone else, Dhan knew that the vultures were gone. But she believed, like most in her community, that the solar panel technology had fully decomposed her mother’s body.
MEERA SUBRAMANIAN: And she was understandably horrified thinking about her mother naked up on top of this Tower, slowly rotting.
LASHA MADAN: Dhan wasn’t just thinking about her mother. She was thinking about all the mothers.
MEERA SUBRAMANIAN: She wasn’t a person to just sit on her heels and complain about something or stew about it or write a nice letter of complaint. That just wasn’t her style.
LASHA MADAN: Dhan wanted the Parsi community to know that these solar panels weren’t working as well as people thought they were, especially during India’s four month long monsoon season, when there isn’t enough sunlight for the solar panels to really work. Dhan wanted to tell people that their deceased loved ones were decomposing, slowly. That their souls weren’t free.
CNN REPORTER: Photographs from inside the Towers of Silence, where the Parsi community in Mumbai disposes of its dead. These forbidden photographs are creating big ripples in this small community.
LASHA MADAN: This is from an old CNN report. Dhan had hired a photographer to sneak into the Towers of Silence and capture images of the decomposing bodies.
CNN REPORTER: 65-year-old Dhan Baria consigned her mother to the Towers almost a year ago. So she was shocked to hear from insiders that the body was still rotting, slowly.
LASHA MADAN: Years earlier, photos had been taken from a far away telescopic lens and sent privately to Dinshaw and the rest of the Panchayat. This time though, Dhan wanted to get photos from up close, and she wanted to go public with them. Everything was about to go up a notch. Awful images made the rounds on flyers slipped under doors and into mailboxes. A 15 minute video circulating online showed bodies in various stages of decomposition. Images of loved ones with their eyes hollowed out and their mouths gaping at the sky. In the news clip, Dhan goes on to say in Hindi, “I’m not scared. I’m ready to fight.” And just as I imagined Dhan might have predicted, what she did was met with a lot of anger. Not only at her claims, but also that she broke into a sacred area, took photos and videos, and spread them far and wide. Their anger extended to Dinshaw Tamboly too, who was on the board of the Bombay Parsi Panchayat at the time.