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?”