Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Read online

  “Sliced,” he said.

  I hope to do better than that.

  THE TRAFFIC JAM has dissolved, leaving our driver free to proceed in the manner he enjoys. This entails driving as fast as possible until the rear end of the car in front is practically in his mouth, then laying on the horn until the car pulls into the other lane. If the other car won’t move over, he veers into the path of oncoming traffic—for sheer drama, an approaching semi truck is best—and then back, at the last possible instant. Livestock and crater-sized potholes materialize out of nowhere, prompting sudden James-Bond-style swervings and brakings. It’s like living inside a video game.

  “Why doesn’t he just get into the fast lane and stay there?”

  “There isn’t a fast lane, as such,” says Dr. Rawat. He gazes calmly out his window, as goats and a billboard for Relaxo footwear flash past. “The lanes are both the same. Whoever is slower pulls over.” He speaks in a neutral, narrative tone, as though describing a safe and civilized code of the road. Aggressive honking and light-flashing is considered good manners: You’re simply alerting the driver ahead of your presence. (Rearview mirrors are apparently for checking your hairdo. Likewise, the driver’s-side mirror currently registers a clear and unobstructed view of the dashboard.) Exhortations to BLOW HORN PLEASE and USE DIPPER are painted on the backs of most trucks, so that even the most laid-back driver goes along honking and flashing his lights like his team has just won the World Cup. I am finding it hard to relaxo.

  In India, everywhere you look, people are calmly comporting themselves in a manner that we in the States would consider a terrible risk, a beseeching of death with signal flare and megaphone. Women in saris perch sidesaddle, unhelmeted, on the backs of freeway-fast Vespas. Bicyclists weave through clots of city traffic, breathing diesel fumes. Passengers sit atop truck cabs and hang off the sides like those acrobat troupes that pile onto a single bicycle. Trucks overladen with bulbous muffin-top loads threaten to topple and bury nearby motorists under illegal tonnages of cauliflower and potatoes. (ACCIDENT PRONE AREA, the signs say, as though the area itself were somehow responsible for the carnage.) People don’t seem to approach life with the same terrified, risk-aversive tenacity that we do. I’m beginning to understand why, religious doctrine aside, the concept of reincarnation might be so popular here. Rural India seems like a place where life is taken away too easily—accidents, childhood diseases, poverty, murder. If you’ll be back for another go, why get too worked up about the leaving?

  A bus blasts its horn and bullies us onto the shoulder. “&*@##!!”

  Dr. Rawat winces. “Meddy! Just don’t look out that side!”

  We’ve been bickering all morning. Dr. Rawat let it be known that he booked me for three appearances in his home city, including a talk on the theme of “teacher appreciation” at the Indore Lion’s Club. He has me in Indore for four days, when I had planned on two. I tried to use the excuse that I have nothing to wear. He suggested I wear one of his wife’s saris. “The sari,” he said when I balked, “is the most elegant dress for women.” At one point he said, “You do not dress to please yourself; you dress to please others.” You can imagine how well that went over. Poor Kirti. He wanted vanilla and he got jalapeño.

  Today’s plan is to head first to Chandner for some follow-up interviews with Aishwary’s mother, and then drive, along with Aishwary’s family, to two neighboring villages where the family of Veerpal, the boy’s alleged previous personality, resides.

  As we approach Chandner, Dr. Rawat summarizes the family’s claims. The boy’s father, Munni, claims that Aishwary recognized Veerpal’s uncles and aunts when they came to Chandner, and that he could name many of the people in one of Veerpal’s photo albums. He further claims that the boy said he had three children and family members living in Kamalpur, and that his caste was Lodh, all of which are true of Veerpal. When Munni went to buy a sari as a gift for Veerpal’s widow Rani, Aishwary is said to have insisted that it be turquoise. Veerpal, Rani says, used to buy her saris in this color. Munni further reports that Aishwary was spotted hitting an electrical pole with a stick and calling it “abusive names.” Munni’s wife Ramvati says she saw Aishwary try to kiss Rani on the lips and that the boy was spotted caressing her breast.

  Dr. Rawat says this sort of sexual precociousness is an infrequent but not unheard-of by-product of rebirth cases. “That is nothing. I heard of a case where a husband said to his wife, ‘When I die, I will come back as your son, and I won’t take milk from your breast.’” Sure enough, the story goes, the husband died during his wife’s pregnancy, and the infant born some months later refused to breast-feed. “It is said she was both his mother and his wife.”

  “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 Chan
dner, 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 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).