Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mary Roach

  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 squeal: 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.* 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.

  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 upholste
ry 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.

  “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?* 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 qu
ixotic 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.