“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 squeaclass="underline" 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.
3
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
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.