My Share of Sand (A Calabasas Fable)...Slightly Revised Edition

Part I--Paid My Dues Time After Time....1-Somebody to Love...revised

Monday, August 15

A beach is just a glammed-up desert.

For the last ten minutes, Darius Purveyor has been held captive by a very loud, very pointless conversation involving the people in front of him as he waited in line to register for his upcoming sophomore year at Las Virgenes High School on a sweltering morning.

Those eight words almost made the whole thing worth it.

"Conversation" is maybe a stretch to describe what he was forced to listen to. Some guy was bragging to some girl about how he'd spent every day of summer vacation at the beach in Malibu. The "glammed-up desert" line was supposedly a mocking statement made by the boy's cousin, but they reflected an attitude that rested deep in his soul.

On paper, Darius was a California boy through and through: born in Orange County, raised on Jack in the Box and Carl's Jr. and birthday cakes from Von's followed by parties at Disneyland...but his true identity was much more complicated than that. Both sets of grandparents were from India. His father was a native of Melbourne, Australia. Even in one of the most diverse parts of America, Darius always felt doomed to be an outsider, no matter where he went.

In the entire world, there are only about 150,000 people like him.

He's a Zoroastrian.

In the ancient world full of hordes of countless divine beings, a Persian prophet named Zarathushtra (or Zoroaster, as the Greeks called him) established a religion that worshipped but a single god: Ahura Mazda—Wise Lord, Transformer of Air into Fire—setting the stage for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ahura Mazda tries to protect the world from Angra Mainyu, the Destructive Spirit who spreads evil.

Most likely you've at least heard of Zoroastrianism. But you may not have been aware that it still exists.

It does.

Existing, but not exactly thriving. Being a global religion that right now is about the same size as Burbank, the Zoroastrian community has invested heavily in its young people to stay alive. The most visible form of this is the World Congress, a periodic gathering of teen Zoroastrians, neatly timed for when their curiosity about their heritage and their hormones are both in overdrive. And it works: Zubin Purveyor from Australia and Salma Bakhtiyar from California met at a Congress in London, carried on a long-distance courtship, then he moved to America, married her, and they had a son.

The son has traveled to a World Zoroastrian Congress too. Well, "traveled" is a stretch: Darius slept in his own bed in his own house and rode in a van to a hotel in Santa Monica for five days.

In-between the talks and seminars, the young Zoroastrians ran out to the beach. Hundreds of giddy, rambunctious teens bounced around the sand, taking pictures, playing volleyball, jumping into the tide.

Darius just stood there.

It wasn't just the Zoroastrians. People of all stripes were having fun on the beach.

Except Darius.

Darius had been going to the beach his whole life and really didn't see anything special about it.

But beaches are beautiful, right?

Darius turned his head left.

Sand.

He turned right.

Sand.

He looked behind him.