Overview
Sunita Khandelwal was born on 19 September 1969 in Laxmangarh, a small town in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, the sixth of eight children of Radhey Shyam Khandelwal and his wife Santara Bai, a family less well off than the one she would describe. At birth she had a bleeding mark on the right side of her head. At about two she began saying ‘Take me to Kota’, and when her puzzled family asked what she meant, she said her Kota was ‘Bundi-Kota’, meaning the city. She said she had two brothers and was the only daughter, that her family had a silver shop and a safe, a car and a scooter, and that her mother had many saris. Pointing to the mark, she said she had fallen.1
By three she was refusing food unless she was taken to Kota, and became so undernourished that she spent time in hospital. Her family took her to Jaipur and pretended it was Kota, but she said they were lying. She then added that the shop was in Chauth Mata Bazaar and the house in Brijrajpura, both quarters of Kota, that she had been a Bania (a business caste), that her cousin had pushed her down the stairs when she asked for water, and that she had died at eight. She never gave any personal names.1
Identification
For two years her parents did nothing to check. In 1974 a lawyer friend of the family, Kranti Modi, sent a summary of her statements to H. N. Banerjee in Jaipur, who arranged to take Sunita and her parents to Kota, probably early in 1975. A photographer related to Banerjee, Pratap Singh Chordia, directed them to Prabhu Dayal Maheshwari, a jeweller in Chauth Mata Bazaar, though he later could not say clearly which details had led him there. Sunita reportedly picked out Prabhu Dayal in his shop and told him she was his daughter, then led the way to his house, where she said it was their new house and pointed out an older one, both correct.1
Prabhu Dayal and his wife Krishna Devi had lost their only daughter, Sakuntala, born in 1960. On 27 April 1968, playing on a balcony with a younger cousin, Radhey, she fell over the low railing at least 5 metres onto the concrete floor of the courtyard. She was admitted to hospital unconscious and bleeding from the right ear, and died about nine hours later. At Kota Sunita did not recognise Sakuntala’s mother, uncle or brothers.1
Investigation
A correspondent told Stevenson of a newspaper report of the case in January 1975, and he asked Satwant Pasricha to study it. She began interviews in November 1975 and continued in 1976 and 1978; Stevenson joined her in March and October 1979, and there were follow-ups in 1981, 1986 and 1990. They interviewed fifteen people, including Sunita, in Laxmangarh, Kota and Jaipur. Kranti Modi kept no copy of his list, so no written record from before the families met survives.1
Stevenson listed 34 statements and recognitions. Nearly everything Sunita had said in Laxmangarh fitted Sakuntala’s life, including that her father’s mother had died but his father was alive, and that she had an uncle older than her father but none younger. Two statements were wrong: the family bought a car only in 1974, six years after Sakuntala’s death, and it was her mother, not her father, who had applied mehandi (henna) to her hands in a ritual a few days before she died. Stevenson gave little weight to the recognitions in Kota, since those with Sunita may already have suspected the family.1
Because she gave no names, he also asked whether another girl might fit. Hospital records showed only three other females dying of head injuries in Kota’s main hospital in 1968, of any age or cause, and he judged it extremely unlikely that another silver dealer in those quarters had lost a daughter in a fall.1
Birthmark
In 1979 the mark on the right side of Sunita’s head was a roughly round, hairless, darker patch about 2.5 centimetres across, slightly raised and puckered. It had bled for three days after her birth. Sakuntala’s hospital notes recorded bleeding from the right ear, a sign of a fracture at the base of the skull, but no head wound; her father remembered a slightly bleeding wound on the top of her head but not on which side. There was no autopsy. Stevenson thought Sunita’s own link between the mark and the fall had probably been prompted by her parents.1
Behaviour
Sunita complained that her food and clothes were poorer than before, and missed a dish of oranges her ‘mother’ used to make; Sakuntala’s family did prepare one for temple offerings. She used the word for vegetables that Sakuntala’s family used, and more English loan words than her own family. In Kota she asked for ‘my specs’, meaning the glasses Sakuntala had worn for a squint, and for her school bag. She had no fear of heights. Early on she described being taken up after the fall to a bearded holy man, who checked her record and sent her back.1
Assessment and later life
The families said they had never met, but Stevenson and Pasricha found one link: Sunita’s maternal uncle, a jeweller also named Radhey Shyam, knew Prabhu Dayal through business. Both men said they had no social contact, and the uncle said he had not heard of Sakuntala’s death until 1975; although he went to Kota monthly while Sunita was talking about Kota, he never tried to check her statements. Stevenson thought it implausible that he had passed all this to Sunita and then forgotten doing so.1
Sakuntala’s parents, especially her mother, accepted Sunita, gave her gifts and wanted her to live with them. By 1981 she no longer spoke of the previous life but still visited Kota, and by 1986 her mother thought she had forgotten it; the birthmark had not faded. When she married in July 1989, Sakuntala’s family paid perhaps half the costs and performed a ritual usually carried out by the bride’s parents.1 The case is also discussed by Rawat and Rivas.2