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.*
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 al
l 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 u
sed 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.