The Forgetting Time(31)
The Nationals were a D.C. team. There was an Ashview in suburban Virginia. All he needed were some death notices; a dead child would always make the papers.… He would have a name by the end of the week, maybe sooner; he was sure of it now. It was as if Tommy had wanted to be found.
“So I’m guessing it was helpful, then? Those things Noah said?”
He looked at her more closely. She was pale, her lips tightly compressed. He ought to sit down with her and help her process what had happened, but his urgency was so powerful. It was like trying to stop a wave. “It was very helpful,” he said, trying to sound relaxed. “It was a good break. We’ll find Tommy now, I feel it.”
“Tommy. Right.” She shook her head vigorously, as if she could shake off her thoughts. “So, Doctor, which is it? Drowned or shot?”
“Excuse me?”
She shook her head again, and he wondered for the first time if she was mentally sound. “You think Noah’s this—other person, this Tommy, right? So I want to know: which is it? Was he drowned, or was he shot, or what?”
“It’s not clear.”
“Nothing’s clear.” She hurled the words at him.
Anderson sat back from the computer. “Science rarely is,” he said carefully.
“Science? Is that what this is?” She choked out a laugh and cast her eyes around her kitchen, lingering on a dirty pot half-filled with water in the sink. “Perhaps it’s unclear,” she said, “because Noah is making it up.”
“Why would he do that?”
She turned on the tap and began scrubbing the pot fiercely with her bare hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, over the rushing water. “I’m not sure I can do this.”
He looked at her back, groping for the approach that would work, the tone, the context, the possible benefits to her son.… He had employed it a thousand times.… How could he doubt himself now? He who had once been able to convince a Brahmin mother in India to let her daughter visit untouchables in the previous personality’s family. He could see it as if it had only just happened: her glistening orange sari gliding through the doorway of a hut made out of mud. At one point he had felt he could convince anyone at all through the sheer force of his will.
“Okay,” he said coolly. “I’ll leave, if you like. But what are you going to do?”
Her body went still. “Do? What do you mean?”
“You said you can’t go on this way,” he kept his voice soothing, reasonable. “That you’re running out of money, that the doctors haven’t helped. So—if I leave now, what is your plan for Noah?”
He felt a bit of chagrin; he was using her desperation against her. But it was in her best interest, wasn’t it? And her son’s? And his own best interest, and even Sheila’s, for hadn’t she wanted him to finish and publish this book? He wondered how much effort it was going to take to convince Janie to let him write about Noah. No matter.
“I’ll—” But she couldn’t get the words out of her throat. She turned to face him with raw, red, dripping hands, her fear written plainly on her face, and he felt sorry for her.
“Come here. Let me show you what I’ve found. It’s not much, but it might be a start.”
He patted the seat near him. She wiped her hands on her jeans and sat down. He turned the computer screen toward her: pretty houses clustered around a shiny green golf course. Welcome to Ashview!
“Do you know anyone from a Virginia suburb called Ashview?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s good. So we have someplace to begin. Of course, Thomas is a common name, and we don’t know what year Noah is referring to, though we can use the Potter books as evidence that it’s in the recent past. We’ll scour the local papers for any obituaries of a shooting or a drowning related to a child named Thomas. It may take a little time before we locate him. But I think we are off to a decent start. You know the Nationals,” he added, “are a D.C. team.”
“Are they?” She squinted warily at the screen, the green expanse. She didn’t trust him, he knew that; and yet he was necessary to her. They were necessary to each other.
Mahatma Gandhi appointed a committee of fifteen prominent people, including parliamentarians, national leaders, and members from the media, to study the case [of Shanti Devi, a young girl who, starting at the age of four, seemed to remember a previous lifetime as a woman named Lugdi from Mathura]. The committee persuaded her parents to allow her to accompany them to Mathura.
They left by rail with Shanti Devi on November 24, 1935. The committee’s report describes some of what happened:
“As the train approached Mathura, she became flushed with joy and remarked that by the time they reach Mathura the doors of the temple of Dwarkadhish would be closed. Her exact language was, ‘Mandir ke pat band ho jayenge,’ so typically used in Mathura.
“The first incident which attracted our attention on reaching Mathura happened on the platform itself. The girl was in L. Deshbandhu’s arms. He had hardly gone fifteen paces when an older man, wearing a typical Mathura dress, whom she had never met before, came in front of her, mixed in the small crowd, and paused for a while. She was asked whether she could recognize him. His presence reacted so quickly on her that she at once came down and touched the stranger’s feet with deep veneration and stood aside. On inquiring, she whispered in L. Deshbandhu’s ear that the person was her ‘Jeth’ (older brother of her husband). All this was so spontaneous and natural that it left everybody stunned with surprise. The man was Babu Ram Chaubey, who was really the elder brother of Kedarnath Chaubey [Lugdi’s husband].”