Gutted Ezra Street agiary was our personal hotline to Ahura Mazda
Times of India | 17 November 2025
My growing-up years were inextricably linked to the Banaji agiary — physically, too, because our rambling 120-year-old house shared a wall with it. My mornings were infused with the fragrance of sandalwood mingling with the mundane aromas from our kitchen.
The house was part of the same Trust which included an identical but longer, verandah-bordered home of the last, sad remnants of its once-grand founding family, the Maneckjee Rustomjee Banajis.
The agiary was our personal hotline to ‘Dadaji', Ahura Mazda. Our fingers instinctively flew to our hearts on our way to and from home. As toddlers, we'd be taken every evening to its serene compound with ornamental cape-jasmine trees, ritual pomegranate bush, holy well.
During exams, it was a daily stop. The atmosphere within assured me divine intervention. The white-robed priest ceremoniously fed sticks of sandalwood to the sacred fire in its 5-ft high gleaming German-silver urn; the orange arabesques leapt and threw shadows on the smoke-darkened walls hung with oil portraits of sombre Banaji sethias.
The agiary's proudly soaring flames sinking to cold ash became a harsher metaphor of the fate that befell that once-storied family which dined with the governor-general, partly owned the Kidderpore docks and most of its ships.
Towards the end of the 60s, with a year's salary due, the sole remaining priest had abandoned his post. My father, who'd been initiated into the higher liturgy like all boys from priestly families, stepped in to keep the sacred fire going, but it could only be temporary. The unpaid durwans began parceling out the vast compound in this bustling electrical goods hub. In later years, my hands would instinctively fly to my heart as I passed, and I'd stop myself, realizing that I was making my reverential gesture to the barbarian kachori wala at the gate.
The community couldn't intervene because it was a private trust, and had fallen into the hands of the court receiver.
Through the decades of encroachment, the agiary's marble building stood resolute, even if the no-longer-pristine marble stairs leading to the locked, sanctified hall was patina-ed with pigeon droppings.
Some years ago, I'd taken a visiting English friend on a tour of my old multi-faith locality. St Andrew's kirk, the more-ornate Portuguese and Armenian churches, the two synagogues all stood proudly ‘in service'. But even the once-open-armed compound entrance of my own fire temple had been overwhelmed by illegal stalls. And now the sacred sentinel of my childhood has totally disappeared. Consumed, ironically, by profane fire.