Sudreh

The sudreh is a plain white cotton undershirt worn next to the skin by initiated Zoroastrians, layered beneath ordinary clothing rather than shown. It is cut sleeveless, from a single piece of cloth, and reaches to the hip. Its most distinctive feature is a small triangular pouch sewn at the front neckline, the girehban, taught in most communities as the symbolic purse in which a person gathers the merit of good thoughts, words and deeds across a life, to be opened at the reckoning after death. White is not decorative; it is functional, because an unbleached or lightly bleached cloth shows a stain, and the garment is meant to register the wearer's conduct rather than disguise it.

Devotional teaching in several Zoroastrian communities counts nine seams in the traditional cut and links them to core ethical formulas of the faith, though the correspondence is taught with real local variation rather than fixed once for all by scripture, and Boyce's survey of Zoroastrian practice records the diversity of that catechesis rather than a single authorized reading. The garment is replaced when worn out, never simply discarded, and older sudrehs are usually buried or given a respectful private disposal.

A Zoroastrian child receives the sudreh together with the kusti cord at the Navjote, or Sedreh Pushi among Iranian Zoroastrians, an initiation performed once in a lifetime, usually between about seven and fifteen depending on community and family custom. A priest recites the prayers that invest the child with both garments in a single ceremony, after which the child is understood to have taken on personal religious responsibility, the Zoroastrian equivalent of a threshold into accountable adulthood in ritual terms, well before it is a threshold into civil adulthood.

From that day the sudreh is worn continuously, removed only for bathing and put back on at once, so that a Zoroastrian is, in traditional teaching, considered spiritually unprotected in the interval when it is off. Wearing it is inseparable from the kusti prayers recited over it several times a day, since the sudreh is the surface against which the cord is retied. Observance of continuous wear varies today, most visibly in diaspora communities where daily practice is harder to sustain unbroken, and Boyce's fieldwork among Zoroastrian communities documents that variation candidly rather than treating any one level of observance as the sole authentic form.