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.