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.
2
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.