It wasn’t that they didn’t believe—that’s what Anderson remembers thinking. Oh, they believed it was possible that this was their daughter-in-law, reborn, all right. They wanted nothing to do with her, in that life, or this. They wouldn’t even give them the name of the previous personality’s parents, the town she had lived in before coming here. The little girl stood silently. Her memory had encircled this place only, and no other. Who knew why?
“May we see the daughter?” Anderson had said as the door was closing. “Sucheta’s daughter? Is she home?”
“There is no daughter.”
The neighbors said otherwise. There had been a little girl, years ago. She had died. No one knew how.
Preeta had taken the news silently. She had thanked the neighbors (identifying two of them by name) and walked purposefully down a path to the bank of the river that flowed through the village, where the women were washing clothing. Anderson stood and took notes rapidly with his blue pen, the yellow pad ruffling in the wind, as in a hoarse child’s voice she told them how her husband and her in-laws had treated her. How all alone in this village, so far from her parents, at the age of fourteen she had given birth to a girl and then, two years later, she had gotten pregnant and given birth to another girl. Her mother-in-law had been the midwife.
They took the second baby away from her instantly.
Stillborn, they had said later, but she had known better, she had heard the cries.
When she accused them of killing her baby daughter they had beaten her, kicking her in the face and stomach that very night, so soon after giving birth. When she felt the pain she thought maybe it hadn’t happened and the baby was still inside her, but she gave birth this time to a black sorrowful thing made of blood and tissue.
Maybe she would have died, anyway. She might have been hemorrhaging.
In any case, they would never know; she threw herself in the Yamuna River the next morning.
The girl, Preeta, told them this story; it poured out of her in fluid sentences far beyond the scope of the child she was then, standing hoarse-voiced on the bank of that muddy rushing river while the women slapped their clothes clean on the stones at river’s edge and the pages of his pad rose up and down like a fan, like breathing.
He had taken notes.
They had driven back the nine hours to her village in silence. Even the girl was silent.
He had told them he would come back next time he was in India, to follow up, to see how much she still remembered. He remembered how the father had shaken his hand with a good, strong handshake. How the girl had grabbed him about the legs, startling him, as he said good-bye.
Preeta, with her glossy hair and sober eyes, waving to him from across the courtyard …
Nothing to do but let the memory of it fill his mind like the scent of jasmine, like the scent of red mud.
He tried to follow up with his best cases every few years. But he was busy, at the prime of his life, pursuing cases in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Lebanon, building up the Institute, writing articles, writing his first book, then trying to get it reviewed in reputable places. All of this took time, and it was four years before he made it back to that part of India.
He wrote them a letter in advance of his visit but received no reply, so he did what he always did in those situations: he traveled across the country to see them.
The mother came to the door, distracted, a new baby on her hip. She flinched when she saw him.
They had gone back to the village without him. She explained this to him a short while later, in the same room he remembered with its shuttered window, its brass table glinting in the dimness, its ornately carved wooden Ganesh. This time the mother talked, while the father sat in the shadows, listening.
Preeta at nine. She showed him a picture. As lovely as ever, long-limbed and graceful, with a melancholy smile. She had been begging them to go back, to see the village again, and after a while the pleas were more than her doting parents could bear. Her father had business sometimes in that area, selling some textiles in a nearby town, so he took her with him. They had stayed in a small house in the village that sometimes served travelers.
By the time her father awoke the next morning, she was gone.
The same river, twice.
The villagers said she hadn’t hesitated. She had walked purposefully to the river and had slid right down the side of the bank, red mud staining the back of her sari, the bright sea-green color waving like a flag in the gray waters. It happened quickly. Not one of the villagers setting up for the morning market said a word. They simply stood in shock and stared down at the dark, pretty head with its set face bobbing on the river’s surface, the green fabric spreading out on the gray water and then sinking under its own weight, losing its brightness to the rush of the gray, as she went around the bend.
Nobody jumped in after her. They didn’t know her. She was a strange girl in a small village. The river was dangerous. They never found the body.