51�Թ�

Mr. Mistry and Mr. Pandole had both lost their fathers recently, and they were traveling toward Mumbai after offering prayers at the Iranshah fire temple in Udvada, a tiny village in Gujarat.

Outside, across a narrow alley, workers are once again renovating the majestic fire temple, where the marble has been polished clean and the stone of the outer walls treated with chemicals to resist decay.

Between two domed bazaars, where locals now hock handicrafts of variable quality and authenticity, we visited the Maghok-i-Attar, Central Asia’s oldest mosque and a palimpsest of Bukharan religious history: a 16th-century reconstruction of a ninth-century mosque built atop the remains of a fifth-century Zoroastrian fire temple, which was itself built on top of an earlier Buddhist temple.

Other possible theories for the building's function: a reservoir or a Zoroastrian fire temple.

By contrast, the Parsi fire temple we passed used English and Gujarati lettering of equal size, because its Parsi devotees usually speak Gujarati and English.