what is desecration? will the soul say goodbye?

I read a great article, The Ghosts of Doongerwadi, in Harper’s Magazine this month – a look at the dwindling Parsi community of Bombay.

My thoughts/notes: Parsis are Indian, descendants of Zoroastrians who came from Iran. Mostly they live in walled colonies in the Bombay area.
They observe dokhmenashini, a Zoroastrian ritual for disposal of the dead. Bodies are laid in dokhmas – squat, roofless, cylindrical structures where only pall bearers (khandias and nassalars) may enter.
Zoroastrian belief: burial desecrates the earth, cremation desecrates fire, leaving a body to the river or the sea desecrates water. This seems to be a religious ritual with a practical purpose – vultures pick clean the bones, which are tossed (cleaned and bleached from the sun) into a pit in the center of the dokhma. Any remaining waste flows in underground channels to charcoal-lined pits, which purify the passing fluids.
But industrialization has corrupted the ritual. A cheap medication taken by arthritis sufferers in India passes into the vultures who dine on the (often arthritic?) dead, causing kidney failure. Without enough vultures – the most voracious of several varieties of flesh-eating birds – the dead aren’t eaten quickly, so they begin to rot. And smell. The underground channels have been destroyed as development encroaches on Doongerwadi – a large Parsi funereal site in Bombay – so the passage is clogged with human remains. Further polluting the area, one would imagine.
The stink rises, so now the pallbearers must simply bury the bodies – after lip service has been paid to the old Parsi ways. So the pallbearers must lift heavy, rotten flesh.
There’s spiritual release in the practice, of course. Zoroastrians believe that the soul at the time of death is in a traumatized state. For four days, the soul awaits its judgment, and should be comforted. Candles lit near the body let the soul know where to find its familiar home, hovering over the body.

What a sad, strange thought, eh? Yet plausible, to me. It feels to me as if my feelings, my emotions, generate from the body, but are beyond mere bodily functions. If anything is going to survive after death, is it the brain (which, despite symbolism to the contrary, is where we store our thoughts)? Does the brain’s activity continue for some time? Does it exist independently of the flesh? I’m not sure, but I can imagine my body dying while my essence still burns with life. And with any intense change, isn’t one often unsure what to do? Think of your heart – the meaning inside your heart – waiting beside its longtime home, whose doors have suddenly shut for good. Like waiting on a doorstep outside your old home. A place you can’t return, but a familiar place all the same – the departure can’t be easy, even though it’s inevitable.

I have a lot more to think about this, later.