Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Read online

  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 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 mo
ment. 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.”

  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 MAN, 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 MEATS. I walked in and asked the butcher, “Are you a Colfer?”

  “I am,” he said. Three hours later, I was sitting in a pub with nine Colfers and a copy of my family tree spread out between the pint glasses. Some of the first names overlapped, as Irish names will: Catherines and Johns and Margarets. There was even a Margaret who had emigrated to Chicago—and my father had stayed with an Aunt Margaret in Chicago when he first came to the States.

  I clearly recall sensing that the facts didn’t all fit, but the feeling faded as the excitement built and the beer flowed. Come closing time, I was hugging my long-lost uncle Mick and promising to keep in touch. New relatives are a novelty and a charm. It’s a buzz, and you want to give in to it.

  Six weeks later, back at home, my grandmother’s birth certificate arrived from the Dublin General Register Office. Her birth date was about ten years earlier than I’d thought. My Irish “family” were no more than friendly strangers in a pub. I’d been swept up in the excitement of the unraveling, paying attention to the facts and dates that fit, overlooking those that didn’t.

  It is certainly possible that in among the reborn Veerpals and the long-lost Uncle Micks are true links and souls that have lived before. For those with the patience to wade through Ian Stevenson’s colossal compilations of case studies, there is much that leaves you scratching your head: statements too specific to suggest coincidence, and no obvious motive for a hoax.