Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

1. YOU AGAIN A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation

I DON’T RECALL my mood the morning I was born, but I imagine I felt a bit out of sorts. Nothing I looked at was familiar. People were staring at me and making odd sounds and wearing incomprehensible items. Everything seemed too loud, and nothing made the slightest amount of sense.

This is more or less how I feel right now. My life as a comfortable, middle-class American ended two nights ago at Indira Gandhi International Airport. Today I am reborn: the clueless, flailing thing who cannot navigate a meal or figure out the bathrooms.

I am in India spending a week in the field with Kirti S. Rawat, director of the International Centre for Survival (as in survival of the soul) and Reincarnation Researches. Dr. Rawat is a retired philosophy professor from the University of Rajasthan, and one of a handful of academics who think of reincarnation as something beyond the realm of metaphor and religious precept. These six or seven researchers take seriously the claims of small children who talk about people and events from a previous life. They travel to the child’s home—both in this life and, when possible, the alleged past life—interview family members and witnesses, catalogue the evidence and the discrepancies, and generally try to get a grip on the phenomenon. For their trouble, they are at best ignored by the scientific community and, at worst, pilloried.

I would have been inclined more toward the latter, had my introduction to the field not been in the form of a journal article by an American M.D. named Ian Stevenson. Stevenson has investigated some eight hundred cases over the past thirty years, during which time he served as a tenured professor at the University of Virginia and a contributor to peer-reviewed publications such as JAMA and Psychological Reports. The University of Virginia Press has published four volumes of Stevenson’s reincarnation case studies and the academic publisher Praeger recently put out Stevenson’s two-thousand-word opus Biology and Reincarnation. I was seduced both by the man’s credentials and by the magnitude of his output. If Ian Stevenson thinks the transmigration of the soul is worth investigating, I thought, then perhaps there’s something afoot.

Stevenson is in his eighties and rarely does fieldwork now. When I contacted him, he referred me to a colleague in Bangalore, India, but warned me that she would not agree to anything without meeting me in person first—presumably in Bangalore, which is a hell of a long way to go for a get-acquainted chat. A series of unreturned e-mails seemed to confirm this fact. At around the same time, I had e-mailed Kirti Rawat, whom Stevenson worked with on many of his Indian cases in the 1970s. Dr. Rawat happened to be in California, an hour’s drive from me, visiting his son and daughter-in-law. I drove down and had coffee with the family. We had a lovely time, and Dr. Rawat and I agreed to get together in India for a week or two while he investigated whatever case next presented itself.

The Kirti Rawat who met me at the airport was in a less contented state. He had been arguing with management over the room service at the hotel where I had booked us. The next morning, we packed up our bags and moved across Delhi to the Hotel Alka (“The Best Alternative to Luxury”), where he and Stevenson used to stay. The carpets are clammy, and the toilet seat slaps you on the rear as you get up. The elevator is the size of a telephone booth. But Dr. Rawat likes the vegetarian dinners, and the service is attentive to the point of preposterousness. Bellhops in glittery jackets and curly-uppy-toed slippers flank the front doors, opening them wide as we pass, as though we’re foreign dignitaries or Paris Hilton on a shopping break.

It is 9 a.m. on the first day of our travels. A driver waits outside. This is less extravagant than it sounds. The car is a 1965 Ambassador with one functioning windshield wiper. Dr. Rawat seems not to mind. The most I could get out of him on the subject of aged Ambassadors was that they are “beginning to be outmoded.” What he likes best about this particular car is the driver. “He is submissive,” Dr. Rawat says to me as we pull away from the curb. “Generally, I like people who are submissive.”

Oh, dear.

This week’s case centers on a boy from the village of Chandner, three hours’ drive from Delhi. Dr. Rawat is using the drive time to fill me in on the particulars of the case, but I’m finding it hard to pay attention. We are stuck in traffic just outside Delhi. There are no real lanes, just opposing currents of vehicles, chaotic and random, as though they’d been scooped up in a Yahtzee cup and tossed haphazardly onto the asphalt. Every few feet, a cluster of cows has seemingly been Photoshopped into the mix: sauntering mid-lane or lying down in improbably calm, sleepy-eyed pajama parties on the median strips. We enter a lurching, kaleidoscopic roundabout. In the eye of the maelstrom, a traffic cop stands in a concrete gazebo, waving his hand. I cannot tell whether he is directing traffic or merely fanning himself.

I wonder aloud where all these people are going. “Everyone is going to his own destination,” comes the reply. This is a highly Dr. Rawat thing to say. One of Rawat’s two master’s degrees and his doctorate are in philosophy, and it remains one of his passions—along with Indian devotional music and poetry. He is the dreamiest of scientists. Last night, in the midst of a noisy, hot, polluted cab drive, he leaned over and said, “Are you in a mood to hear one of my poems?”

Dr. Rawat is telling me that the case we are investigating is fairly typical. The child, Aishwary, began talking about people from a previous existence when he was around three. Ninety-five percent of the children in Stevenson’s cases began talking about a previous existence between the ages of two and four, and started to forget about it all by age five.

“Also typical is the sudden, violent death of the P.P.”

“Sorry—the what?”

“The previous personality.” The deceased individual thought to be reincarnated. “We say ‘P.P.’ for short.” Possibly they shouldn’t.

Aishwary is thought by his family to be the reincarnation of a factory worker named Veerpal, several villages distant, who accidently electrocuted himself not long before Aishwary was born. Dr. Rawat opens his briefcase and takes out an envelope of snapshots from last month, when he began this investigation. “Here is the boy Aishwary at the birthday party of his ‘son.’” Aishwary is four in the photograph. His “son” has just turned ten. Just in case the age business isn’t sufficiently topsy-turvy, the elastic strap on the “son’s” birthday hat has been inexplicably outfitted with a long, white beard. This morning, while leafing through a file of Dr. Rawat’s correspondences, I came across a letter that included the line: “I am so glad you were able to marry your daughter.” I am reasonably, but not entirely, sure that the correspondent meant “marry off.”

“Now, here is the boy with Rani.” Rani is the dead factory worker’s widow. She is twenty-six years old. In the photo, the boy stares fondly—lustfully, one might almost say, were one to spend too much time in India with reincarnation researchers—at his alleged past-life wife. This strikes me as the most improbable, chimerical thing I’ve ever seen, and then I look out the car window, where an elephant plods down a busy Delhi motorway.

Living in California, where alleged reincarnations tend to spring from royalty and aristocracy, a reincarnated laborer is something of a novelty for me. Dr. Rawat says that this is typical here: “These are ordinary people remembering ordinary lives.” Though there are exceptions. At last count, he has met six bogus Nehru reincarnates and eight wannabe Gandhis.[2]

In the case of the boy Aishwary, the alleged previous personality hails from a family just as poor as his own. In Dr. Rawat’s estimation, this strengthens the case, as financial gain wouldn’t be a motive for fraud. Poor families have been known to fabricate a rebirth story in the hope that the “previous personality’s” family—they’ll target a wealthy one—will feel financially beholden to their dead relative’s new family. Dr. Rawat told me about another creative application of ersatz reincarnation: escaping an unpleasant marriage. Years back, he investigated the case of a woman who fell ill and claimed to have momentarily died—and then been revived with a different soul. Now that she had been reborn as someone new, she argued, she couldn’t possibly be expected to live or sleep with her old husband. (Divorce retains a weighty social stigma in India.) Dr. Rawat interviewed the doctor who examined her. “He wasn’t a doctor at all. He was a compounder.” A bone-setter. And she wasn’t dead. “He told me, ‘Well, her pulse was down.’”

While Dr. Rawat catnaps, I page through a copy of his book Reincarnation: How Strong Is the Scientific Evidence? Let’s set aside “strong” for a minute and talk about “scientific.” Like most psychological and philosophical theories, reincarnation can’t be proved in a lab. You can’t see it happen, and no biological framework exists to explain how it might work. The techniques of reincarnation researchers most closely match those of police detectives. It’s an exhausting, exacting search for independently verifiable facts. Researchers contact the parents of the child and then travel to the village or town. They ask the parents to recall exactly what happened: word for word, detail by detail, what the child said when he first began speaking about people or places from a past that clearly didn’t correspond to the life he now lives. They look for credible witnesses to the child’s utterances, and they interview them, too.

By the time the researcher arrives on the scene, the family has usually found a likely candidate for the child’s former incarnation. Most Indian villagers accept reincarnation as fact, and word of a child remembering a past life travels quickly to neighboring villages. The previous personality can’t be interviewed, because he’s dead, but his family members can. If the child is said to have recognized his home from his past life or features of the town or members of his past-life family, the researcher interviews witnesses who saw the meetings and the purported recognitions.

The strongest cases are those in which the parents have written down the child’s statements when he or she first began talking about a past life—before they’ve met any family or friends from that life. (These are rare: Among Stevenson’s cases, only about twenty include any written record.) Without a written record, researchers must work from the parents’ memories of what the child said. This makes for wobbly evidence—not because villagers are dishonest, but because human memory is deeply fallible. It’s unreliable and easily tweaked by its owner’s beliefs and desires. Did the boy say what he said about electrocution before his parents began talking about Veerpal’s death, or did he perhaps overhear them talking about it first? Did he really say he was killed by an electrical current, or has his mom, once she learned the facts, reinterpreted something ambiguous? Perhaps the boy referred to a cord. He meant a rope, but the mother, having heard about the accident, pictures an electrical cord. That sort of thing.

Most of Ian Stevenson’s case write-ups include a chart summarizing the allegedly reborn child’s statements about a past life and about people he or she recognizes. For each of these statements and recognitions, Stevenson lists a witness, if there is one, and the comment of the witness. Typically the chart marches on for eight or ten pages, wearing down your skepticism with the grinding accumulation of names and tiny type. If you take the work of Ian Stevenson at face value, it would be hard to reach any conclusion other than this: Reincarnation happens.

The skeptics tend to dismiss Stevenson’s work a priori; few have taken him on case by case. One who tried was Leonard Angel, then a humanities professor at Douglas College in British Columbia. He chose the case of a Druze boy from Lebanon, Imad Elawar, a case Stevenson has referred to as one of his strongest. Of all the cases in which there is written documentation from the time before the suspected previous personality was located, this is the only one in which Stevenson himself wrote the statements down—thus precluding a fraudulent after-the-fact jotting. Angel complains that Stevenson nowhere sets forth these statements as they were worded by the boy or the parents. Stevenson simply writes that the parents “believed [the boy] to have been one Mahmoud Bouhamzy of Khriby who had a wife called Jamilah [Mahmoud and Jamilah were the names the boy spoke first and most often] and who had been fatally injured by a truck after a quarrel with the driver.”

Stevenson traveled with the family for their first visit to Khriby. He couldn’t find a suitable Mahmoud Bouhamzy; however, upon asking around, he found an Ibrahim Bouhamzy with a mistress named Jamilah. Ibrahim was not run over by a truck, but his relative Said was, though no quarrel was involved. Stevenson concludes that the boy’s parents had made wrong inferences based on his words—though since his write-up does not give the boy’s exact words, it’s hard to know what to think. There’s no explanation of why the name most commonly uttered by the boy would be Mahmoud. The glass slipper fit Ibrahim, and Stevenson proceeded from there.

But I was never in Khriby, and neither was Leonard Angel. Something served to convince Stevenson that the case of Imad Elawar strongly suggested reincarnation. Whether it was the facts of the case or a blind eye born of bias, I can’t say.

So I’ve come to India for answers. I want to get inside one of these cases, meet the families involved, hear the things they say, watch them interact.

In India, I’m finding, the answers do not always fit the questions. This morning at the hotel, I asked the waiter what kind of cheese is in the masala omelette.

“Sliced,” he said.

I hope to do better than that.

THE TRAFFIC JAM has dissolved, leaving our driver free to proceed in the manner he enjoys. This entails driving as fast as possible until the rear end of the car in front is practically in his mouth, then laying on the horn until the car pulls into the other lane. If the other car won’t move over, he veers into the path of oncoming traffic—for sheer drama, an approaching semi truck is best—and then back, at the last possible instant. Livestock and crater-sized potholes materialize out of nowhere, prompting sudden James-Bond-style swervings and brakings. It’s like living inside a video game.

“Why doesn’t he just get into the fast lane and stay there?”

“There isn’t a fast lane, as such,” says Dr. Rawat. He gazes calmly out his window, as goats and a billboard for Relaxo footwear flash past. “The lanes are both the same. Whoever is slower pulls over.” He speaks in a neutral, narrative tone, as though describing a safe and civilized code of the road. Aggressive honking and light-flashing is considered good manners: You’re simply alerting the driver ahead of your presence. (Rearview mirrors are apparently for checking your hairdo. Likewise, the driver’s-side mirror currently registers a clear and unobstructed view of the dashboard.) Exhortations to BLOW HORN PLEASE and USE DIPPER are painted on the backs of most trucks, so that even the most laid-back driver goes along honking and flashing his lights like his team has just won the World Cup. I am finding it hard to relaxo.

In India, everywhere you look, people are calmly comporting themselves in a manner that we in the States would consider a terrible risk, a beseeching of death with signal flare and megaphone. Women in saris perch sidesaddle, unhelmeted, on the backs of freeway-fast Vespas. Bicyclists weave through clots of city traffic, breathing diesel fumes. Passengers sit atop truck cabs and hang off the sides like those acrobat troupes that pile onto a single bicycle. Trucks overladen with bulbous muffin-top loads threaten to topple and bury nearby motorists under illegal tonnages of cauliflower and potatoes. (ACCIDENT PRONE AREA, the signs say, as though the area itself were somehow responsible for the carnage.) People don’t seem to approach life with the same terrified, risk-aversive tenacity that we do. I’m beginning to understand why, religious doctrine aside, the concept of reincarnation might be so popular here. Rural India seems like a place where life is taken away too easily—accidents, childhood diseases, poverty, murder. If you’ll be back for another go, why get too worked up about the leaving?

A bus blasts its horn and bullies us onto the shoulder. “&*@##!!”

Dr. Rawat winces. “Meddy! Just don’t look out that side!”

We’ve been bickering all morning. Dr. Rawat let it be known that he booked me for three appearances in his home city, including a talk on the theme of “teacher appreciation” at the Indore Lion’s Club. He has me in Indore for four days, when I had planned on two. I tried to use the excuse that I have nothing to wear. He suggested I wear one of his wife’s saris. “The sari,” he said when I balked, “is the most elegant dress for women.” At one point he said, “You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others.” You can imagine how well that went over. Poor Kirti. He wanted vanilla and he got jalapeño.

Today’s plan is to head first to Chandner for some follow-up interviews with Aishwary’s mother, and then drive, along with Aishwary’s family, to two neighboring villages where the family of Veerpal, the boy’s alleged previous personality, resides.

As we approach Chandner, Dr. Rawat summarizes the family’s claims. The boy’s father, Munni, claims that Aishwary recognized Veerpal’s uncles and aunts when they came to Chandner, and that he could name many of the people in one of Veerpal’s photo albums. He further claims that the boy said he had three children and family members living in Kamalpur, and that his caste was Lodh, all of which are true of Veerpal. When Munni went to buy a sari as a gift for Veerpal’s widow Rani, Aishwary is said to have insisted that it be turquoise. Veerpal, Rani says, used to buy her saris in this color. Munni further reports that Aishwary was spotted hitting an electrical pole with a stick and calling it “abusive names.” Munni’s wife Ramvati says she saw Aishwary try to kiss Rani on the lips and that the boy was spotted caressing her breast.

Dr. Rawat says this sort of sexual precociousness is an infrequent but not unheard-of by-product of rebirth cases. “That is nothing. I heard of a case where a husband said to his wife, ‘When I die, I will come back as your son, and I won’t take milk from your breast.’” Sure enough, the story goes, the husband died during his wife’s pregnancy, and the infant born some months later refused to breast-feed. “It is said she was both his mother and his wife.”

“That’s what all you men want,” I say. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

Aishwary’s family grows corn and sugarcane. As we walk through their rain-boggy yard, we pass the kernels of this season’s harvest spread over the concrete floor of the house to dry. A pair of oxen lounge in the mud. Their horns spiral like curling ribbon on the sides of their heads. Up a flight of outdoor stairs and across a rooftop is the family’s single-room sleeping quarters. The room holds little aside from three caned, wooden sleeping platforms and a flickery black and white TV.

Aishwary’s mother boils water for tea, squatting over a hot plate in the corner. Dr. Rawat sits on a bed beside Aishwary and shows him the photos from the birthday party last month. He points to the boy with the strap-on beard. “Who’s this?” He translates the boy’s reply: “This is my son.” Some of the other pictures are met with blank looks. Even when handed a picture of the electrocuted Veerpal, he shakes his head and looks toward his mother. “He doesn’t seem to remember much now,” says Dr. Rawat.

Aishwary’s father Munni fills us in on new developments in the case. Like his wife, Munni has a sunny smile and a pleasing, well-proportioned face. He is telling Dr. Rawat that Aishwary walked up to a boy in Veerpal’s town and said to him, “Your parents came to see me in the hospital.” The parents confirmed that they had gone to see Veerpal after the accident. Munni adds that Veerpal’s aunt, while clowning around with Aishwary, reported that the boy said to her, “Auntie, you have not left your old habits,” and that this was said to be the exact wording of a phrase Veerpal used to use. Dr. Rawat makes a note of this, as we’ll be visiting the aunt this afternoon.

Before leaving for the aunt’s village, we walk across the town to visit another boy who is said to recall a past life. Indian villages are fertile ground for claims of reincarnation. “You come for one,” says Dr. Rawat, “and you leave with four!”

This cannot be said of villages or cities where reincarnation isn’t part of the belief system. Claims of reincarnation are rare among children in the United States, where—according to a 2001 Gallup poll—only twenty-five percent of the population believes in it. This fact, perhaps more than any other, weakens the overall case for reincarnation. Stories of rebirth that crop up within cultures whose religious dogma doesn’t include it are, for obvious reasons, stronger than cases that show up among cultures who accept it and, more to the point, expect it to happen. If a child in a Western culture begins to refer to a stranger with an unfamiliar name, his parents assume the name belongs to someone from his imagination. In a Hindu—or Druze, or Tlingit—culture, the parents are more likely to assume it’s someone from his past life. Are cases solved, or are they built? “This is the most common criticism of reincarnation research,” says Jim Tucker, professor of psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia, who researches cases in the United States. Stevenson agrees. “I don’t have a good explanation for that,” he told an Inside UVA interviewer. “I worry about it.” Stevenson and Rawat suggest that the difference may arise from the parents’ reactions: In a culture that embraces reincarnation, the child may be encouraged to voice his memories; anywhere else, the child’s comments may be ignored—or thought abnormal and thus discouraged.

Dr. Rawat is excited about the new case in Chandner, as it’s a Hindu boy who recalls a past life as a Muslim. (More exciting, for the reasons just given, would be a Muslim boy who recalls being Hindu.) A crowd has formed in our wake. Many are children. We seem to pull them out of houses as we pass. You get the feeling there isn’t much for kids to do here. On our way in, we drove past a boy with a paper kite. There was no wind; he merely swung it in circles on its string. We’re the most exciting thing to hit town since electricity.

Dr. Rawat is telling me about another Muslim-to-Hindu case from some years back. “He remembered the process of circumcision,” he says to me, picking his way from brick to brick through the muddied street. “And moreover! He was born with a penis without a foreskin!”

I was about to ask Dr. Rawat whether he thinks that the unique circumstances of the penis may have inspired the boy’s imagination and/or the parents’, but my flip-flop has been claimed by the sucking mud. When I pull on it, the rubber shoe slingshots out of its sinkhole and spatters the back of my skirt. Boys and girls titter and squeal: Why, this is as good as it gets!

As we arrive at the boy’s house, our following has grown to fifty or more. Dr. Rawat doesn’t like to do interviews in front of a crowd, lest the subject feel pressured to answer one way over another. He closes and bars a corrugated tin gate. The crowd presses in. The panels bang and bow and threaten to give, like a boudoir door in a cheap suspense film. We sit down on a porch to talk to the grandparents of the alleged former Muslim. (The parents are away.) Onlookers have scaled the buildings across the street. They squat at the roof ’s edge and peer down at us like gangly, brown-eyed gargoyles. On the wall, a single shelf is lined with a sheet of newspaper scissored to resemble the zigzag-fringed doilies of middle-class homes such as Dr. Rawat’s. “Four Cheers!” says a headline in a digital camera ad. “The Future Has Come Calling!”

The boy, who is seven, claims to recall a life as a Muslim thief named Guddin in the town of Dhampur, seventy kilometers away. Dr. Rawat translates for me. “I killed two policemen, and then they killed me.” Discussion ensues. Laundry drips on my head. “Someone else says twelve policemen,” Dr. Rawat narrates. “The grandparents add that the boy has always had a fear of police cars. The boy said his wife was Dhamyanta, but that’s not a Muslim name. Come, we shall have some photographs of his penis.” He wants to see whether perhaps this child, too, has a birth defect that mimics circumcision. “We will verify his foreskin.”

Dr. Rawat, myself, the boy, and the boy’s grandfather slip into the house and close the door. The grandfather picks up the boy and stands him on a table. The boy unfastens his shorts and turns his face away from us. He doesn’t seem upset by the request, just embarrassed. His foreskin is normal, but Dr. Rawat aims the camera anyway. It’s a new one that he’s not yet accustomed to. Seconds pass, as though he’s waiting for the tiny member to smile. I point to a button on the back. A red light comes on. Oh, good. We’ve activated the anti-red-eye function. If ever there were a moment that wanted to pass quickly, this is it. At last the flash goes off and the boy is free to cover up.

A few words about birth defects and birthmarks. Among cultures that believe in reincarnation, congenital abnormalities are commonly viewed as clues to a child’s past life. Often they are tied in with the death of the supposed previous personality. Ian Stevenson’s Reincarnation and Biology contains ten examples of children with birthmarks or birth defects corresponding to the place their alleged previous personality was shot or otherwise fatally wounded.

The birthmark business has a historical corollary of sorts in the theory of maternal impressions. A surprising majority of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century physicians believed that a child’s birthmarks or abnormalities are caused by the mother having undergone a memorable fright during pregnancy. A baby is born with a missing arm; the mother recalls being set upon by a one-armed beggar. A child’s “fish scales”—a skin condition now known as ichthyosis—are blamed on the mother’s fear of sea serpents. Et cetera.[3] Reports of maternal impressions peppered medical texts from Pliny and Hippocrates clear through to the 1903 edition of the American Textbook of Obstetrics, which cites maternal impression as the likely cause of John “Elephant Man” Merrick’s deformities—as well as those of a lesser-known traveling spectacle, the Turtle Man.

In many of the birthmark cases in Reincarnation and Biology, Stevenson posits that the mother saw the corpse of the slain man whose soul eventually turns up in her unborn child. Stevenson doesn’t believe all birthmarks are caused by maternal impression, but he is open-minded to the possibility that some are.

Adherents of maternal impression theory hold that the skin is uniquely vulnerable to emotional imprinting. Stevenson describes a half dozen dermatological conditions thought to be open to psychological influence. These range from the relatively mainstream (emotionally induced wheals and blisters) to the distant borderlands of scientific acceptability (stigmata, wart-charming, hypnotically induced breast enlargement). I suppose that if you believe that hypnotic suggestion can expand a bosom, it’s not a big leap to suppose that a profound fright might affect the skin of a developing fetus.

What of the boy with the missing foreskin? Was his previous personality’s penis the site of a fatal injury? Unlikely. This is more a case of a suggestive similarity. Stevenson and the families he talks to also make connections based on simple physical and psychological parallels between a child and the person they believe he or she once was. Stevenson feels that genetics and environmental influences fall short of adequately explaining the quirks and foibles—both medical and psychological—that we humans are born with. He looks to the quirks and foibles of the previous personality to explain what genetics cannot. The concept has a certain intuitive appeal. A child’s former life as a World War II soldier explains a fear of Japanese people. A past life as a virtuoso musician explains a musical prodigy in a family of tone-deaf no-talents. Yet you’ve simply swapped one mystery for another. How—outside of genetics—would the dead person’s skills, fears, or preferences be delivered to the new organism? What’s the mechanism? Here we don’t even have the flimsy leg of maternal impression to stand on.

Unconstrained by biology, Stevenson is free to extend his theory wherever it strikes him. Facets of a past life are suggested as explanations for complexion irregularities, stockiness, third nipples, albinism, posture, gait, fear of women, fondness for toy airplanes, cleft lip, pimples, speech impediments, widely separated upper medial incisors, and “a fondness for eels, cheroots and alcohol.” Viewed through such a broad eyepiece, reincarnation is an easy sell. Take a child and all her hundreds of unique features: How hard would it be to find one or two that seem linked to a feature of someone you know who has died?

The notion is especially rickety when you consider that in many of Stevenson’s cases, the life recalled by the child is that of a close blood relative. Why posit reincarnation when you’ve got a perfectly reasonable biological explanation in the form of genetics? Even Ian Stevenson’s wife appears to have trouble swallowing the whole bolus. In his acknowledgments in Reincarnation and Biology he writes, “While devotedly encouraging this work, she has also—with the greatest gentleness—expressed skepticism about the conclusions to which it has led me.”

We have walked back to Aishwary’s house to pick up the family for the trip to visit Veerpal’s aunt in Kamalpur. Aishwary is changing his clothes for the visit. Dr. Rawat, ever vigilant for birthmarks and scars, bends to inspect a semicircular protrusion in the middle of the boy’s chest.

“Do you think this is anything?” he asks me.

“I think it’s a sternum.”

WE REACH KAMALPUR just after 2 p.m. Word spreads instantly. The boy is here! The future has come calling! A crowd surrounds the car well before the driver has cut the motor. “Faster than flies to sweets!” exclaims Dr. Rawat. Or flies to more or less anything. The moment we stop moving, logy black ones alight on my arms, my skirt, the upholstery beside me. The situation is not helped by the fabric’s pattern, which is little bees.

We get out and begin walking to the house of Veerpal’s aunt Sharbati. Many of the women in the streets have draped their sari scarves over their faces in modesty; curiously—to me, anyway—their midriffs are partly bared.

Dr. Rawat stops the procession beside a tree with a small shrine beneath it. Munni said that his son had talked about there being a shrine behind his aunt’s house. This is the shrine he is said to have recognized. “And there”—Dr. Rawat turns 180 degrees and points to a faded blue doorway down a street, about a half a block distant—“is the house.” So it’s behind the front of the house. In other words, it’s no more behind this house than any other house within eyesight.

The sameness of the villages in this part of India renders less impressive some of the children’s statements in these cases. “The floor was of stone slabs.” “The family had cows and oxen.” “The house had two rooms.” Facts like these could apply to a dozen houses in any given village. Still, the casebooks are full of true statements so specific that—if in fact the child made them, and if the family had never visited the past-life town—defy logical explanation: “He had a wooden elephant, a toy of Lord Krishna, and a ball on an elastic string.” “He had a small yellow car.” It’s hard to know what to make of it.

Veerpal’s aunt traveled to Aishwary’s village several weeks ago, but this is the first time Dr. Rawat has met her. The house is of the standard two-room floor plan. Like most houses here, the front room has three walls only. As we walk by, domestic scenes are on display like shoebox dioramas. A toddler plays with a corncob, making believe it’s a cigar. A woman stacks dried ox dung. A man gets a shave.

Dr. Rawat begins rolling video of the aunt, despite the crowd. When there are no doors, there is little to be done about it. I count fifty-five pairs of feet gathered around, most of them shoeless. Kamalpur is even poorer than Chandner. My glance takes in broken trouser flies and saris patched with duct tape. Here again, Dr. Rawat is encouraged: Skeptics often cite monetary motives for making up claims of rebirth. In Aishwary’s case, the family of the current incarnation has given about as many presents to the past family (saris for the widow) as the past family has given to the boy (hundred-rupee notes tucked in his pockets).

The press of the crowd has created its own weather system, a thick, clinging humidity that lies on your skin like glaze. Aishwary yawns and drops his head in his mother’s lap. Veerpal’s aunt has a smoky voice and one turned-in eye, and she stands with one hand on a jutted hip. Overall she strikes me as someone you’d go out of your way not to cross. Dr. Rawat tells her over and over to relate only the events and statements that she herself has seen or heard the boy say. He asks her about the line Munni mentioned: “Auntie, you have not left your old habits.” She says that the boy indeed said this, but the bit about Veerpal having used this phrasing is not true. The utterance suggests only that the boy believes himself to have been reincarnated as Veerpal, which is not, given the culture and the fact that his parents clearly believe it, all that surprising.

More difficult to explain is the account of Veerpal’s uncle Gajraj, whom we visit next. He is a schoolteacher in the village, a somber, balding man dressed in white dhoti pants and tunic. “Tell me what you saw and heard,” says Dr. Rawat as tea and sweets are served in the front room of his two-room home. Above the doorway, a pair of old wood badminton racquets is mounted like crossed swords in a coat of arms. A young boy stands by my side, fanning us with a stiff, laminated flag.

“I was returning from my farm,” begins Gajraj, “and as I entered the village, people said, ‘Veerpal has come!’ I was astonished. How could Veerpal come? There were two or three hundred people. The child said nothing at that time. Then Mokesh was called.” Mokesh was a close friend of Veerpal’s. “The headman of the village arrived and asked the boy if he recognized Mokesh. The child said nothing. The headman said, ‘What is his name? Say it in my ear.’ And he did. We could hear him say, ‘Mokesh.’”

“You heard it yourself?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“He pointed toward me and said, ‘You are my uncle.’”

“Did he say your name?”

“No.”

He adds that the boy recognized Veerpal’s sister. “He said, ‘She is my sister, Bala.’” The deadpan and monotone of Gajraj and Veerpal’s other family members are puzzling to me. These conversations and encounters with Aishwary hold no more emotion than a market research interview about soap-buying habits. The only animation in the small room comes from the fan boy, who is waving vigorous, exaggerated figure eights. (I’m still hot, but I feel like I’ve won the Indy 500.) If I’d lost my brother or my nephew and then, months later, come to believe that he’d been reborn as a boy in a neighboring village, it would be a story I’d tell with feeling and awe. Perhaps the video camera makes them self-conscious. And, to be fair, I’m not witnessing a first encounter with the boy. That will come at our next stop, the village of Bulandshahar, where Aishwary will meet Veerpal’s father for the first time.

Toward the end of his interview, Gajraj is asked whether he believes that this boy is his nephew reborn. He says yes, and adds that it is not the first reincarnation he has encountered. “In my classroom, I recognize many children again and again.”

Gajraj’s two brothers, whom we next interview, seem less convinced of the boy’s status as their reborn nephew. Both report that the boy did not recognize them.

“What do you think?” Dr. Rawat asks the third uncle at the end of the interview. “Do you believe that this boy was Veerpal?” The uncle, dressed in a white singlet and a layer of perspiration, looks uncomfortable. “I can’t say.”

TO SAY THAT HINDUS believe in reincarnation is in and of itself rather meaningless. Catholics “believe” that they are eating the body of Christ when they take communion, but how many believe it literally?[4] I used to assume that people in India believed in reincarnation in the same way that Christians believe in heaven: more or less abstractly. Most Christians don’t expect to take up residence in a cloud bank after they die, but they may believe in an abstract sense of the hereafter as a place whose comforts or lack thereof depend upon one’s behavior here on earth.

I began to change my tune after spending an afternoon among the pages of The Ordinances of Manu, a tome of legal code based on Vedic scripture and dating back to A.D. 500. Manu’s legislation covers everything from criminal law (If a man of the lowest birth spit upon a highborn man, “the king should cause his two lips to be cut off; and if he make water upon him, his penis; and if he break wind upon him, his buttocks”) to health and hygiene codes (“Anything pecked by birds, smelt by a cow,… sneezed on or polluted by head lice becomes pure by throwing earth on it”)—and reincarnation is in there, too.

In Manu’s day, reincarnation was treated not as an abstract religious principle but as a concrete legal consequence. Where the modern-day malefactor may do time in Pelican Bay, the perpetrator in Manu’s day might do time as an actual pelican. Witness Code 66 of Chapter XII: “One becomes indeed a kind of heron by stealing fire; a house-wasp by stealing a house utensil; by stealing dyed cloths one is born again as a fowl called jivijivaka.” Similarly, for stealing silk, linen, cotton, a cow, or molasses, one is reborn, respectively, as a partridge, a frog, a curlew, an iguana, or a vagguda bird. The worst karmic punishments are reserved for those who “violate the guru’s couch.” I am unclear on precisely what is meant by this, but my guess is that we are not speaking of a literal rending of upholstery, for the hapless malfeasant is sentenced to return “hundreds of times into the womb of grasses, bushes, vines, animals that eat raw flesh,… and animals that have done cruel acts.” Similarly unwise is the Brahman who has “deserted his own proper rules of right,” for he must reincarnate as “the ghost Ulkamukha, an eater of vomit.”

The point I was trying to make, when I became helplessly distracted by the quixotic deemings of Manu, is that reincarnation has traditionally been accepted as a literal, not allegorical, facet of life. The villagers I am meeting this week do not question whether the dead are reborn, any more than we would question whether they decompose. Veerpal had to enter someone else, why not Aishwary? I’m not saying the events of these cases are untrue; I’m saying that no villager is likely to judge them with an especially critical eye or ear. And, also, that “one should not voluntarily stand near used unguents” (Chapter IV, Code 132).

THE ROAD TO Bulandshahar, the home of Veerpal’s parents, takes us through a sprawling outdoor marketplace. Reincarnation is going on all over the place: eight old Vespa hulls rest on the dirt outside a mechanic’s shed, awaiting new engines. Shoes are resoled, electric fans gutted and reworked. A boy pushes a filthy rusted bicycle, seat worn down to its metal skull, to the stall of a tire vendor, where rims hang like bangles on a rope between two trees. Aside from fruit and packets of pan and one array of surreally pristine porcelain squatter toilets, nothing for sale here is new. Exteriors are endlessly replaced, and the core carries on.

Veerpal’s parents live twenty miles from Kamalpur, and Aishwary’s parents used to live nearby. “Scientifically, the proximity of the two families is a weak point,” Dr. Rawat is saying. A child who is said to know things about a family of far-off strangers makes a stronger case for reincarnation than a child who is said to know things about a family in a town his parents know well. Weakest—and quite common—are the cases in which the child seems to be the reincarnation of one of his own family members. Stevenson’s casebooks hold many of these. In the cultures that most often report it, within-family reincarnation is expected. It’s what happens when you die. Among rural Indians, the soul often wanders farther afield, but rarely much beyond a hundred miles.

I ask Dr. Rawat why the human spirit is such a homebody. From what I’ve been given to understand about the speed and ease of “astral” travel, you’d think a soul might be impelled to hop a continent every now and again. Dr. Rawat shrugs. “You are more comfortable in your own surroundings. You fit in well again.” I guess he’s got a point.

I had wanted to see Aishwary’s face as he casts his first glance at the man believed to have been his father, Mathan Singh. Somehow I fell behind the crowd and missed the moment. So did Dr. Rawat. We step into the room just as Aishwary is settling into the man’s lap. Mr. Singh has a sweet, deeply lined face. He is shy, and so thin you can see the shape of his knee bones pressed together underneath his tunic.

“See how the boy comes into his lap?”

“Kirti, he picked him up and put him in his lap.”

“See how comfortable the boy looks?”

“He looks just like he did when I held him in my lap yesterday. He’s a comfortable boy.”

I’m working myself up to full nitpicker skeptic mode, but then something happens. I’ve been watching Mathan Singh, wondering why he isn’t staring deeply into the boy’s eyes to try to figure out if it’s true, trying to connect with the soul of his lost son somehow. I guess I’d been expecting a Demi-Moore-in-Ghost kind of moment, the part where she somehow senses that (God help her) her dead husband is there inside Whoopi Goldberg. What I notice instead is that Mathan Singh, sitting chatting with his arms around the boy, looks profoundly content. It occurs to me that it doesn’t much matter whether this boy does or does not hold the soul of the son Mathan Singh lost. If Mathan Singh believes it, and if believing it eases the grief he feels, then this is what matters. It also occurs to me that I don’t speak Hindi, and that I have no idea what this man is saying or feeling or believing. He could be saying, “This reincarnation crap. I’ve never bought it.”

I tug on Dr. Rawat’s sleeve. “Can you ask him how he feels about all this?”

Dr. Rawat obliges. “He says he is happy. He says, ‘My son is alive, therefore I am happy.’” Past-life therapy.

Meanwhile, out the back door, Aishwary’s two mothers are laughing together and drinking tea. I might have thought there’d be jealousies and rivalries between the mothers, but Dr. Rawat says he has rarely seen this. It’s all a happy excuse for a party. Since Aishwary’s (current) mother and his “wife” met, they have gotten together five times, including one three-week visit.

A group of young men in Western dress has just arrived on the scene. One introduces himself. He is Nathan, visiting from Delhi. City dwellers in India are much less likely to believe in reincarnation, and I ask him what he thinks.

Nathan looks around the room. “Marvelous, ma’am!”

MY FIRST DAY on the streets of Delhi, a live rat dropped from somewhere overhead. It was not thrown, for it descended in a vertical path directly in front of my face, landing more or less on my shoe. It appeared to have simply lost its footing at the precise moment that fate had arranged for my arrival there on the sidewalk. The event struck me as an appalling close call, a brush with vileness and possible scalp laceration, a harbinger of coming horrors and shortcomings in public hygiene.

“Oh!” exclaimed Dr. Rawat. He was as surprised as I was, but here our reactions parted company. “You are blessed! The rat is the conveyance of Lord Ganesha!”

The episode got me thinking. If you are enough of a Hindu to view a falling rat as an auspicious event, are you too much of a Hindu to dismiss reincarnation—if indeed that is what the facts suggest you should do? I wondered about Dr. Rawat’s capacity for objectivity. He refers to his research as an obsession, an addiction. “Like a drunkard to his bottle, I am to my cases!” he told me when we first met. But is he investigating reincarnation, or merely hunting for evidence in its favor? How can he remain unbiased?

I am about to ask him just this question. We are at an outdoor reception for the launch of a friend’s new reincarnation TV show, in which the main character is repeatedly, energetically murdered by an ever-varying cast of fiends and jealous lovers—affording her ample opportunities for rebirth. I am slated to perform the inaugural clap of the clapboard. (I am, yes, dressed in a sari.) Now they’re shooting the opening credits. The director cues a recorded voice-over of booming, hyper-enunciated English: AS MAIN DISCARDING WORN-OUT CLOTHES, TAKES OTHER NEE-EW ONES, LIKEWISE THE DISEMBODIED SOUL, CASTING OFF WORN-OUT BODIES, ENTERS INTO OTHERS WHICH ARE NEE-EW….

“As a Hindu,” I begin, “you believe in reincarnation. Is it difficult for you, as a researcher, to maintain your objectivity?”

“I am born into a family that believes in reincarnation,” Dr. Rawat allows. “And moreover, in my family there was said to be a case of reincarnation. I am aware that there may be some conscious or unconscious bias in me.” He insists that this has made him more cautious, rather than less so. “So that my personal belief, my personal experiences, may not infringe on my scientific pursuit, I assume the role of a critic when I study these cases, not a believer.”

Dr. Rawat insists he does not fully accept the doctrines of Hinduism. “I believe in all religions and none,” he says to me, picking through a plate of vegetable pakora. He finds meaning and guidance in all of them, and also things to reject. He waxes curmudgeonly over Hinduism’s never-ending list of required rites and devotions. “Bathe in a particular river and think all your sins are absolved just by taking a bath. This is absolutely nonsense. If you are doing good to others, you are a most religious person.”

Our conversation is interrupted by a breathless girl holding out an autograph book. “Ma’am, I have enjoyed all of your films!” Earlier, a man asked me what it felt like to meet President Bush. Apparently the producer sent out a press release full of extravagant misstatements about my career.

Dr. Rawat credits his father for his mistrust of religious dogma. “He taught us that one should not believe a thing merely because it is written in the scriptures.” As a student, the young Kirti was drawn to philosophy, but was pushed by his father toward medicine. Parapsychology was the compromise scenario.

I trust Dr. Rawat not to overstate the facts of his cases. And I don’t believe that the people he interviewed today were making things up. Does that mean I believe the reincarnation of Veerpal Singh actually happened? Not as such.

I’ll tell you what I think might be happening. Over and over, Dr. Rawat would stop his interviewees and counsel them to relate only what they themselves saw or heard. He admits it’s almost impossible. Add to that the likelihood that the stories the villagers have heard are inevitably embellished along the way. It’s one big heady game of Indian telephone, the same sort of game that turned me into a film star who hobnobs with President Bush. No one sets out to lie, but the truth gets nicked and misshapen.

In the case of Aishwary, Dr. Rawat agrees with me. “There are some disturbing discrepancies,” he says, coaxing chickpeas onto a tear of naan bread. “Some of the facts Aishwary might not have recalled as Munni reported him to have recalled. Or, even if Aishwary reported them, he might have picked them up from hearing his father talking to his mother. These are some of the very important pitfalls.”

I ask him his overall opinion of the case. He presses his napkin to his lips and sits back in his chair. “My considered opinion about this case is that it is not a strong case at all.” He cites the proximity of the three villages. “They are so near to each other that we never know how many informations travel normally”—as opposed to paranormally—“from one to another. Particularly through the father.”

Munni’s enthusiasm undermines the case. “This is a very, very minus point, a very strongly minus point if your main people are so enthusiastic to find that the case is true.” And very often, they are. The villagers Dr. Rawat works with are inclined to view vague or ambiguous statements as evidence. As he puts it, “They will pounce on anything!”

That evening, Kirti and his wife and two of the TV producer’s children drive me to the train station. They present me with gifts and big bags of puffed Indian snack foods for the journey. Kirti and his wife lay garlands of marigolds around my neck as though I’m a deity and not the petulant ingrate they’ve been dealing with all week. I hug Kirti, pressing the flowers so hard they leave stains on our shirts. “I’m sorry about… I don’t know. I’m not very submissive.”

“It’s okay. You only lost your mind twice.”

YOU DON’T HAVE to be a poorly educated villager to get caught up in a story like Aishwary’s and lose your rational rudder. I experienced a similar phenomenon about ten years ago in rural Ireland. I was hitchhiking through County Wexford, where the name Colfer is a common one. My grandmother was a Colfer, and I was keen to sniff out my Irish roots. One day I spotted a butcher shop with a sign over the window: COLFER MEANTS. I walked in and asked the butcher, “Are you a Colfer?”

“I am,” he said. Three hours later, I was sitting in a pub with nine Colfers and a copy of my family tree spread out between the pint glasses. Some of the first names overlapped, as Irish names will: Catherines and Johns and Margarets. There was even a Margaret who had emigrated to Chicago—and my father had stayed with an Aunt Margaret in Chicago when he first came to the States.

I clearly recall sensing that the facts didn’t all fit, but the feeling faded as the excitement built and the beer flowed. Come closing time, I was hugging my long-lost uncle Mick and promising to keep in touch. New relatives are a novelty and a charm. It’s a buzz, and you want to give in to it.

Six weeks later, back at home, my grandmother’s birth certificate arrived from the Dublin General Register Office. Her birth date was about ten years earlier than I’d thought. My Irish “family” were no more than friendly strangers in a pub. I’d been swept up in the excitement of the unraveling, paying attention to the facts and dates that fit, overlooking those that didn’t.

It is certainly possible that in among the reborn Veerpals and the long-lost Uncle Micks are true links and souls that have lived before. For those with the patience to wade through Ian Stevenson’s colossal compilations of case studies, there is much that leaves you scratching your head: statements too specific to suggest coincidence, and no obvious motive for a hoax.

Of late, I find myself wondering about the mechanics of it, the unfathomable blending of metaphysics and embryology. How would the suddenly homeless soul get itself situated someplace new? How does spirit, for want of a more precise word, infuse itself into a clump of cells quietly multiplying on a uterus wall? How do you get in there?

Scientists and philosophers of bygone years had a name for the impossible moment. They called it ensoulment, and they debated it for centuries. If the National Science Foundation had existed in the 1600s, there would have been an entire lavishly funded Institute of Ensoulment, devoted to studying the mysteries of human generation, the how and when of life’s initial spark. Most of the research covered in this book focuses on things that happen to a person as, and after, his body reaches the finish line, but it makes sense to spend a little time at the other end of the footrace, too.