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.
*Delusions of reincarnation typically fit the culture and religion of the deluded—Saddam Hussein claiming to be Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar, excommunicated Mormon polygamist cult leader James Harmston claiming to be Joseph Smith, et cetera. Jesus is your big exception. A Google search on “claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus” turns up thirty-one competing candidates for J.C. incarnate, including the Reverend Sun Myung Moon—rumored to add drops of his own blood to the communion wine—and a Mr. Fukunaga, leader of an obscure Japanese foot-reading sect. Mr. Fukunaga also claims to be Buddha reincarnate. This is less impressive than it sounds because—according to the “Jesus Reincarnation Index” of New Age author Kevin Williams—Jesus is a reincarnation of Buddha.
*By some accounts, Mom didn’t need to be frightened but merely focused a little too long in one place. In a famous case detailed by Jan Bondeson in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, a thirteenth-century Roman noblewoman gives birth to a boy with fur and claws; the authorities lay blame on an oil painting of a bear on her bedroom wall. The event prompted Pope Martin IV, clearly a tad hysterical, to have all pictures and statues of bears destroyed.
Crafty moms tried to work the phenomenon in their favor. In the early 1800s, Bondeson writes, it was common for pregnant noblewomen to be wheeled into the Louvre to spend an hour or so gazing at a portrait of some handsome earl or archduke of yore, in hopes of influencing their unborn progeny.
*And are we meant to? Unsure despite my Catholic upbringing, I consulted The Celebration of Mass, as thorough a manual of Catholic ritual as you’ll find outside the Vatican. While nowhere was it stated that the consecrated host is literally Christ, it is most certainly treated as something beyond a quarter ounce of unleavened wheat flour. For example, one may not simply throw old, stale hosts into the garbage; they must be consumed by the priest, unless they are so moldy as to be inedible, in which case they are to be burned or mysteriously “done away with in the sacrarium.” And finally, “should anyone vomit the Blessed Eucharist, the matter is to be gathered up and put in some becoming place.”
2
The Little Man Inside the Sperm,
or Possibly the Big Toe
Hunting the soul with microscopes and scalpels
THERE’S A VERY good chance that you underestimate the historic import of the sea urchin.* In 1875, a German biologist named Oskar Hertwig watched a sea urchin sperm nose its way into a sea urchin egg and fuse with it to form a single nucleus, right there under his microscope. It took civilized man six thousand years to figure out how life begins, and the honors go to humble Oskar and his amorous echinoderms.
Scientists had long suspected that human generation had something to do with eggs—most everyone who owned a chicken suspected this—and they knew it had to do with intercourse and semen, but beyond that they were unclear on the specifics. This was largely because they couldn’t see the specifics. The sea urchin’s eggs offered two advantages: (a) they’re see-through, and (b) they’re fertilized outside of the female’s body, in the ocean or, in occasional cases, under some German dude’s microscope.
This means that for six thousand years, there was lots and lots of entertaining speculation about the creation of new human beings. Some of the earliest and most thorough speculating was done by Aristotle. The learned Greek—who, I was interested to read, went through life with a lisp—decided that the man’s semen supplied the soul of the new individual. The spirit, in those days, was envisioned as a kind of vapor or breath, which was understandable given breathing’s obvious connection to being alive. Hence Aristotle’s name for the spirit: pneuma, which is Greek for “wind.” He believed it was this pneuma, carried in the semen, that orchestrated the creation of a budding human being. Upon arrival inside the uterus, the pneuma would set to work, building new life out of the materials it had on hand: menstrual blood, to be unpleasantly specific. Aristotle described the process as a sort of coagulation, using the apt if inelegant analogy of a cheesemaker’s rennet solidifying milk. It took seven days for the new entity to “set,” at which time the pneuma would infuse it with the first of three eventual souls. This vegetative soul, as it was called, was a sort of starter soul, a learner’s permit for human existence. You were a thing that eats and grows: more than a potato but less than a human.
On the fortieth day, Aristotle theorized, the proto-human morphed into what he called the sensitive soul. By “sensitive,” he meant “relating to the senses,” for forty days is about when the embryo’s sense organs begin to appear. After some further, unspecified amount of time had passed, the pneuma would allow the newly minted sensitive soul to upgrade to a rational soul. Here was the black belt of humanness, the sort of spirit that rises above animal lusts and girly emotions and pays no heed to people who make fun of the way it says semen.
And that’s pretty much what people believed for the two thousand years after Aristotle put the wor
d out. The man who elevated the ovum to a leadership role in the proceedings was seventeenth-century English physician William Harvey. Harvey is best known for figuring out that blood circulates in a closed system of arteries and veins, a feat he managed by dissecting cadavers, including that of his sister. For his pioneering work in reproduction, you will be relieved to learn that Harvey left the womenfolk alone. Here he turned to a herd of deer that wandered, ever more warily, the grounds of his employer, King Charles I. As a student of Aristotle’s teachings, Harvey expected to find the requisite coagulated blob when he dissected the deer’s uteruses. He was astonished to instead find the beginnings of tiny deer: embryos and fetuses encased in sacs, which he mistakenly identified as eggs. The egg, Harvey felt, contained the makings of “all that is alive.” Semen was relegated to the role of a “contagion,” prompting human generation much as a virus does a cold.
And how would the life force, the soul, get into the egg? Here science abandoned Harvey, and he fell back on religion: “It is given … by the heavens or the sun or the Almighty Creator.”
Like most biologists of his day, Harvey was limited by his equipment. He couldn’t see what was going on at the cellular level. He couldn’t see sperm. He had a magnifying glass, but what he needed was a microscope. And so it is not surprising that the next milestone fell to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek: the man who loved microscopes. Leeuwenhoek did not invent the microscope, nor was he a scientist by training. The Dutchman worked as an accountant for a haberdasher and, later, as Chamberlain of the Council-Chamber of the Worshipful Sheriffs of Delft, which is a ten-gallon way of saying that he tidied the chamber. The post left him plenty of time for hobbies, of which he had just one: grinding lenses and building microscopes. The microscopes Leeuwenhoek built were superior to those of the main maker of the day, and soon they were in demand by members of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, more or less the National Science Foundation of its day. Over time, the Royal Society began publishing Leeuwenhoek’s letters about his findings as well, and he was on his way to a historical, if unpaid, career as the founding father of microbiology.