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This made the principal curious and he called Shanti Devi and talked to her in isolation. Making her comfortable, he asked her about her Mathura connection. Once she trusted the principal, she told him that her husband’s name was Pandit Kedarnath Choubey and he belonged to a prosperous Brahman family of Mathura. The inquisitive principal wanted to verify the facts. He wrote a letter addressed to Pt. Choubey, in which he mentioned - “One of my students, Shanti Devi, daughter of Mr. Rang Bahadur Mathur, a resident of Delhi, claims that she was your wife, Lugdi Devi in her previous birth. This letter is not meant to tease you, but if this description is true, then kindly contact me.”
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The principal of Raneja School, Lala Kishanchod, had not even imagined that such a weird letter, on which even the address of the receiver was
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Finding no solution to their problem, eventually, they took the matter to the principal of the school where Shanti Devi was studying. By this time, Shanti Devi had already
completed eight years of her life and her revelations had begun becoming the subject of discussion in her neighborhood. The principal apprehended that some fellow students of her class were misleading her and that was why she was uttering all that. Upon investigation, he found that she conversed with only few pupils and told them - “I am already married and a married woman does not converse with others unnecessarily.”
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Some days later, this incident occurred again, but in a different way. Shanti Devi then refused to consume the non-vegetarian food cooked at her home saying that the food was not pure. She elaborated - “I am a vegetarian and only vegetarian food is cooked at my home at Mathura.” After this incident, her parents began preferring vegetarian food. However, they realized that their daughter had something unusual.
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“This house is not mine. My home is in Mathura, where my husband owns a garment shop. He is one of the richest persons of the city.”- when the four year old Shanti Devi began saying things like this to her mother, she thought that her daughter had learnt something from her friends while playing. Although she felt strange that how such a small girl could have such information about some other city and how does she know about the owner of a garment shop, but she didn’t took the matter seriously. Shanti Devi was born on December, 11, 1926 at Delhi. Since childhood, she liked solitude. This was the first occasion, when she spoke so much to her mother.
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Rebirth: A Reality
“God [is] the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.” – Physicist and chemist Robert Boyle 26
Akhand Jyoti November - December 2014
