The Forgetting Time(23)

“Right. But the only recent American case you have here … you know, in which the child remembers being his own great-uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the other cases seem stronger somehow.”

“Well, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“When the subject is a member of the same family you can’t really verify the facts in the same way.”

“Right. What I mean is, we need one or two strong new cases. American cases. To anchor the book.”

“Oh. But—”

“Yes?”

He opened his mouth. The objections rose within him: My office is closed. I haven’t had a new case in six months.… There are not as many strong American cases, anyway. I’m not sure I can even write a cogent sentence, much less a chapter.…

“All right,” he said. “That’s fine. An American case.”

“A strong one. So we’re on the same page?”

He stifled a laugh. He was exhilarated, reckless. He was slipping down the mountain now, tumbling, head over heels. “Yes.”





Purnima Ekanayake, a girl in Sri Lanka, was born with a group of light-colored birthmarks over the left side of her chest and her lower ribs. She began talking about a previous life when she was between two and a half and three years old, but her parents did not initially pay much attention to her statements. When she was four years old, she saw a television program about the Kelaniya temple, a well-known temple that was 145 miles away, and said that she recognized it. Later, her father, a school principal, and her mother, a teacher, took a group of students to the Kelaniya temple. Purnima went with the group on the visit. While there, she said that she had lived on the other side of the river that flowed beside the temple grounds.

By the time she was six, Purnima had made some twenty statements about the previous life, describing a male incense maker who was killed in a traffic accident. She had mentioned the names of two incense brands, Ambiga and Geta Pichcha. Her parents had never heard of these, and … [none of] the shops in their town … sold those brands of incense.

A new teacher began working in Purnima’s town. He spent his weekends in Kelaniya where his wife lived. Purnima’s father told him what Purnima had said, and the teacher decided to check in Kelaniya to see if anyone had died there who matched her statements. The teacher said that Purnima’s father gave him the following items to check:

—She had lived on the other side of the river from the Kelaniya temple.

—She had made Ambiga and Geta Pichcha incense sticks.

—She was selling incense sticks on a bicycle.

—She was killed in an accident with a big vehicle.

He then went with his brother-in-law, who did not believe in reincarnation, to see if a person matching those statements could be located. They went to the Kelaniya temple and took a ferry across the river. There, they asked about incense makers and found that three small family incense businesses were in the area. The owner of one of them called his brands Ambiga and Geta Pichcha. His brother-in-law and associate, Jinadasa Perera, had been killed by a bus when he was taking incense sticks to the market on his bicycle two years before Purnima was born.

Purnima’s family visited the owner’s home soon after. There, Purnima made various comments about family members and their business that were correct, and the family accepted her as being Jinadasa reborn.

JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE





Nine

Janie closed the book in her hand and frowned into the depths of the diner. She was waiting for a man she didn’t know, whose work was either mind shattering or total baloney, and who now held Noah’s future in the palm of his hand. And she couldn’t even get through his book.

She’d tried. The book was a serious-looking thing—she’d had to order it online, since the academic publisher that had put it out twenty years ago was now out of business, and it had cost her fifty-five dollars for the paperback. She’d picked it up again and again over the past two weeks, as she’d planned this meeting; yet whenever she focused intently on one of Anderson’s cases, her brain began to fog up with confusion.

The book was filled with case studies, children in Thailand and Lebanon and India and Myanmar and Sri Lanka who had made statements about other mothers and other homes. These children behaved in a way that was at odds with their family or village cultures and sometimes had intense attachments to strangers, who lived hours away from them, whom they seemed to remember from previous lifetimes. They often had phobias. The cases were compelling and strangely familiar.… Yet how could they be true?

She found herself going over the same cases without finding any clarity of belief or disbelief. In the end she couldn’t read them at all but absorbed, like a clammy mist, the impression of something deeply unsettling. Children who seemed to remember lives spent selling jasmine or growing rice in a village somewhere in Asia until they were hit by a motorcycle, or burned by a kerosene lamp—lives that had nothing (or everything) to do with Noah.

Janie ran her fingers through her son’s soft hair, grateful for once for the television affixed to the wall above their heads. (When had restaurants joined airports in assuming their customers needed to be endlessly glued to the tube?) She pulled out the computer printout she’d tucked in the binder and looked again at the doctor’s qualifications: Jerome Anderson