It was seven by the watch as the red sun was fading away in the distant horizon in the village of Itrani. I love the silence here broken occasionally by some lovely bird songs that you will never hear in the city.
It was purely by ‘accident‘ that I discovered this tiny village about ten years ago. I was travelling through this place during one of my sales tours and a tyre of the vehicle got punctured. Without an extra tyre, I could do nothing but look for shelter that night. Two villagers kindly offered me shelter. I spent the night in one of their humble huts and woke up in the morning to fall in love with the village. Since that year, I have made it a point to visit this place at least once every year. There was nothing extraordinary about the evening I am referring to till I found Madho Singh rushing towards me.
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Madho was panting heavily and managed to communicate with great excitement that Hari had returned. Hari was an enthusiastic young man who had died about five years ago and the limited population of the village allowed no other Hari to show his face on the screen of my mind’s eye. Hardly believing what I had heard, I just followed him. I reached Bhola Pundit’s house, Bhola being the father of the deceased Hari.
A small crowd had already gathered in the place and I found Dr Stevenson, a senior psychiatrist from an American University, taking down some notes while a child was animatedly describing things in great detail. The child had evidently recognised every member of Bhola’s household and seemed to recognise all the people in the village who were close to Hari, recounting vivid details of his past life as Hari.
The moment the child’s the eyes fell on me, he came rushing towards me to touch my feet, exactly as Hari used to do and then asked me how my back pain was. He reminded me that the last time he had met me, I had complained of a very bad lower back pain and he had applied some medicine over the area which I had found very comforting.
I was struck dumb for I did not know how to answer a four-year old child who spoke with the mind of an adult. Moreover the child was using the dialect of the village though he had lived his four years in a different place and it was very clear to me that something very interesting was going on. This merited serious scientific attention but could not be explained by contemporary theories in science which look upon consciousness as a part of brain chemistry and something that cannot survive death.
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Hari’s parents were emotionally overwhelmed and had no hesitation in accepting the child as a reincarnation of Hari. It was perfectly in harmony with their religious beliefs. The child was a Muslim by birth in his present life and because Islam doesn’t have the concept of reincarnation, his parents had found it difficult to believe him.
The child’s repeated cries eventually melted their hearts because he was desperate to go back to his ‘real’ house since the age of two. It was decided that the child would share his childhood with both sets of parents. The parents of the present life were obviously not very happy with this arrangement but they gave in to the will of their child.
The child also showed a phobia towards water and I wondered with all my skepticism, how a four- year-old could develop a phobia unless it was the result of some personal experience. Hari had drowned in the river five years ago trying to save a child.
As I checked out the topic of ‘reincarnation’ later, I realised that numerous scientific experts across the world were carrying out research on the phenomenon of children with spontaneous past life memories. Hari’s case was in no way unusual or exceptional. Why, I thought, should people not believe in what they see right before their eyes? Why should I believe that death ends it all despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary?
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What is wrong if this most unexpected return proves that our souls are not confined to the boundaries of religions and their orthodox thinking? After all, in nature, everything vanishes to make a majestic return, be it the spring or the sun which now throws its red beams as I am woken from the reverie. Perhaps to a believer no proof is necessary and to a skeptic no proof is enough.