Overview
Kumkum Verma was born in 1955 and grew up in the village of Bahera in northern Bihar, in a family whose language was Maithili; her father was B. K. Verma. As a small child she spoke of a life as a woman called Sundari in Urdu Bazar, a district of the town of Darbhanga. She named her son, Misri Lal, and her grandson, Gouri Shankar, described her house with its pond, trees and nearby Shiva temple, and said she had kept a pet snake and a sword by her bed and had lost her life in a quarrel.1
Her aunt, Swarna Probha Verma, wrote many of these statements down before anyone tried to check them. Ian Stevenson marked 18 items in his list as coming from her notes, and all of them proved correct, though a few, such as a pond by the house, were not specific.1
The previous life
When the statements were checked in Urdu Bazar, they fitted Sundari, who had lived in a brick house on the main street with her two sons by her first husband, Bikan Mistry: Misri Lal, a blacksmith, and Shiv Nandan. She later lived with a second husband, Jhapu Mistry. She slept in a room on the north side of the house overlooking a pond, where she kept an iron safe and a sword, and she kept a black cobra as a pet, feeding it milk and puffed rice; the snake was still alive in 1959. Her father lived at Baijitpur, across the Bagmati river.1
Sundari was devout, kept the Ekadasi fasts, lent her jewellery to her daughters-in-law and took them to fairs. She gave a bed to Misri Lal and his wife when they married in 1938, about twelve years before her death. She died during an altercation, though not necessarily because of it, and Kumkum’s father heard a rumour in Urdu Bazar that she had been poisoned.1
Investigation
Professor P. Pal visited the family at Bahera in 1963 and talked with Kumkum, whose memories were fading by then; she gave him some of the relationships wrongly. Stevenson’s team, which included Dr Jamuna Prasad, took testimony from her father, mother, aunt and grandparents in 1964 and 1965, and Stevenson worked from an English translation of the aunt’s notes. In 1969 he went to Urdu Bazar, where he saw the much-altered house on the main street, the Shiva temple close by, a guava tree Kumkum had mentioned and the ponds, and interviewed Misri Lal, his wife Saro Devi, Gouri Shankar and a son of Jhapu Mistry.1
Stevenson listed 56 statements, most of them confirmed. Several were not specific: ponds are common around Darbhanga, many houses have swords, and the vegetables she said her daughters-in-law cooked were eaten in both families. Others were only partly right or unconfirmed. A cinema was about 400 metres away, but whether it lay to the east was not checked; Misri Lal said the bed was not coloured, while his wife said it was red; neither recalled legs carved like tiger’s paws; and the word ‘zalli’, which Kumkum used for the snake’s food, was never identified. Stevenson put some disagreements down to translation, for example between the words for cot and bed, and his two interpreters disagreed over one item.1
Behaviour
Kumkum resembled Sundari in several ways that lasted until she was about fourteen: she preferred salty food to sweet, was unusually religious, was generous to beggars, was fond of small children and was noted for cleanliness. She also tended to dominate others and showed an interest in snakes, which faded. Her strong wish to go to Urdu Bazar stopped after about the age of seven. There were differences too: she would not eat fish, which had been Sundari’s favourite food, and was careful with money where Sundari had been careless.1
Not knowing the word for blacksmith, she described her son’s work by miming a hammer and a smith’s bellows.1
Assessment
The strength of the case lies in the aunt’s notes, made before verification. Most of the other statements are reported by Kumkum’s own family, and their accounts sometimes differed: a family friend said she had called Gouri Shankar her son and Misri Lal her grandson, though three other informants gave the relationships correctly. Her claim that her older daughter-in-law had poisoned her was never confirmed, and in 1965 she said instead that her husband had done it; Stevenson thought the daughter-in-law she meant was the wife of Sundari’s stepson, Laxmi Mistry. Some memories were still present when she was eight and ten, and her religiousness and generosity remained strong at fourteen.1