“I was returning from my farm,” begins Gajraj, “and as I entered the village, people said, ‘Veerpal has come!’ I was astonished. How could Veerpal come? There were two or three hundred people. The child said nothing at that time. Then Mokesh was called.” Mokesh was a close friend of Veerpal’s. “The headman of the village arrived and asked the boy if he recognized Mokesh. The child said nothing. The headman said, ‘What is his name? Say it in my ear.’ And he did. We could hear him say, ‘Mokesh.’”
“You heard it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“He pointed toward me and said, ‘You are my uncle.’”
“Did he say your name?”
“No.”
He adds that the boy recognized Veerpal’s sister. “He said, ‘She is my sister, Bala.’” The deadpan and monotone of Gajraj and Veerpal’s other family members are puzzling to me. These conversations and encounters with Aishwary hold no more emotion than a market research interview about soap-buying habits. The only animation in the small room comes from the fan boy, who is waving vigorous, exaggerated figure eights. (I’m still hot, but I feel like I’ve won the Indy 500.) If I’d lost my brother or my nephew and then, months later, come to believe that he’d been reborn as a boy in a neighboring village, it would be a story I’d tell with feeling and awe. Perhaps the video camera makes them self-conscious. And, to be fair, I’m not witnessing a first encounter with the boy. That will come at our next stop, the village of Bulandshahar, where Aishwary will meet Veerpal’s father for the first time.
Toward the end of his interview, Gajraj is asked whether he believes that this boy is his nephew reborn. He says yes, and adds that it is not the first reincarnation he has encountered. “In my classroom, I recognize many children again and again.”
Gajraj’s two brothers, whom we next interview, seem less convinced of the boy’s status as their reborn nephew. Both report that the boy did not recognize them.
“What do you think?” Dr. Rawat asks the third uncle at the end of the interview. “Do you believe that this boy was Veerpal?” The uncle, dressed in a white singlet and a layer of perspiration, looks uncomfortable. “I can’t say.”
TO SAY THAT HINDUS believe in reincarnation is in and of itself rather meaningless. Catholics “believe” that they are eating the body of Christ when they take communion, but how many believe it literally?[4] I used to assume that people in India believed in reincarnation in the same way that Christians believe in heaven: more or less abstractly. Most Christians don’t expect to take up residence in a cloud bank after they die, but they may believe in an abstract sense of the hereafter as a place whose comforts or lack thereof depend upon one’s behavior here on earth.
I began to change my tune after spending an afternoon among the pages of The Ordinances of Manu, a tome of legal code based on Vedic scripture and dating back to A.D. 500. Manu’s legislation covers everything from criminal law (If a man of the lowest birth spit upon a highborn man, “the king should cause his two lips to be cut off; and if he make water upon him, his penis; and if he break wind upon him, his buttocks”) to health and hygiene codes (“Anything pecked by birds, smelt by a cow,… sneezed on or polluted by head lice becomes pure by throwing earth on it”)—and reincarnation is in there, too.
In Manu’s day, reincarnation was treated not as an abstract religious principle but as a concrete legal consequence. Where the modern-day malefactor may do time in Pelican Bay, the perpetrator in Manu’s day might do time as an actual pelican. Witness Code 66 of Chapter XII: “One becomes indeed a kind of heron by stealing fire; a house-wasp by stealing a house utensil; by stealing dyed cloths one is born again as a fowl called jivijivaka.” Similarly, for stealing silk, linen, cotton, a cow, or molasses, one is reborn, respectively, as a partridge, a frog, a curlew, an iguana, or a vagguda bird. The worst karmic punishments are reserved for those who “violate the guru’s couch.” I am unclear on precisely what is meant by this, but my guess is that we are not speaking of a literal rending of upholstery, for the hapless malfeasant is sentenced to return “hundreds of times into the womb of grasses, bushes, vines, animals that eat raw flesh,… and animals that have done cruel acts.” Similarly unwise is the Brahman who has “deserted his own proper rules of right,” for he must reincarnate as “the ghost Ulkamukha, an eater of vomit.”
The point I was trying to make, when I became helplessly distracted by the quixotic deemings of Manu, is that reincarnation has traditionally been accepted as a literal, not allegorical, facet of life. The villagers I am meeting this week do not question whether the dead are reborn, any more than we would question whether they decompose. Veerpal had to enter someone else, why not Aishwary? I’m not saying the events of these cases are untrue; I’m saying that no villager is likely to judge them with an especially critical eye or ear. And, also, that “one should not voluntarily stand near used unguents” (Chapter IV, Code 132).
THE ROAD TO Bulandshahar, the home of Veerpal’s parents, takes us through a sprawling outdoor marketplace. Reincarnation is going on all over the place: eight old Vespa hulls rest on the dirt outside a mechanic’s shed, awaiting new engines. Shoes are resoled, electric fans gutted and reworked. A boy pushes a filthy rusted bicycle, seat worn down to its metal skull, to the stall of a tire vendor, where rims hang like bangles on a rope between two trees. Aside from fruit and packets of pan and one array of surreally pristine porcelain squatter toilets, nothing for sale here is new. Exteriors are endlessly replaced, and the core carries on.
Veerpal’s parents live twenty miles from Kamalpur, and Aishwary’s parents used to live nearby. “Scientifically, the proximity of the two families is a weak point,” Dr. Rawat is saying. A child who is said to know things about a family of far-off strangers makes a stronger case for reincarnation than a child who is said to know things about a family in a town his parents know well. Weakest—and quite common—are the cases in which the child seems to be the reincarnation of one of his own family members. Stevenson’s casebooks hold many of these. In the cultures that most often report it, within-family reincarnation is expected. It’s what happens when you die. Among rural Indians, the soul often wanders farther afield, but rarely much beyond a hundred miles.
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.”
4
And are we meant to? Unsure despite my Catholic upbringing, I consulted