Mehr Jessia’s ‘s sister Avan Jesia has written a novel on the Parsi community spanning generations. The novel, Tower, traces the lives and loves of four generations of a Parsi family with the major part of the narrative taking place around a building in Parsi Colony. The building is built by one of the early characters in the book (Faram Framji) to house his entire family when they move out from their village Sumari to Mumbai. Unlike her model sister, Avan is a teacher and a freelance writer, who writes on fashion, food, beauty and lifestyle.

The characters too are not the usual caricatures of Parsis. Apart from the settings, you can’t give it the stamp of a Parsi novel. The title obviously alludes to the Tower of Silence, which is a distinctive part of Parsi culture. There are loud echoes of people in my family and are very obvious ones. But several very exciting characters are completely fictional like the evil woman Piloo Vachha. There are a lot of people in the novel – Parsi and non-Parsi.

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