Delhi, 1930.
A four-year-old girl named Shanti Devi pushed away the plate her mother had just set in front of her.
“That’s not how you make it,” she said, frowning. “You need more cumin. And you have to add the spices in a different order.”
Her mother smiled. “You’re four years old. What do you know about cooking?”
“I cooked for my husband and children for years,” Shanti answered calmly. “I know exactly how he likes his food.”
Her parents laughed it off at first. Children say strange things.
But Shanti never stopped talking about her “other life.”
She described a house in Mathura, a city 90 miles away she had never visited. A clothing shop her husband owned. Three children—two sons and a daughter. The names of neighbors. The exact layout of streets she had never walked.
“When are we going home to Mathura?” she would ask every single day. “I miss my children so much.”
Doctors examined her. Psychologists observed her. Nothing was wrong—she was bright, healthy, and perfectly normal… except for this unshakable certainty that she had lived before.
By age seven, the details became impossible to dismiss.
She described the inside of a house in Mathura she had never entered. She knew recipes unknown in Delhi but common in Mathura. She spoke about giving birth in graphic detail no child should know—and about dying shortly after her last baby was born.
“I was in so much pain,” she whispered once. “I remember trying to stay, trying to see my children one last time. Then everything went dark.”
One day her teacher decided to test her.
“You say your husband’s name is Pandit Kedarnath Chaube and he owns a clothing shop in Mathura?”
Shanti nodded.
“What’s the address?”
She gave it—street name, landmarks, everything.
The teacher wrote a letter.
Weeks later, a trembling reply arrived.
Yes, Pandit Kedarnath Chaube owned that shop.
Yes, his wife Lugdi Devi had died in childbirth ten years earlier—the same year Shanti was born.
Yes, they had three children.
Kedarnath, now remarried, refused to believe it. He sent his cousin to Delhi, instructing him to pretend to be Kedarnath himself.
The cousin walked in and announced, “I am Kedarnath Chaube.”
Seven-year-old Shanti looked at him and shook her head.
“You’re not my husband,” she said instantly. “You’re his cousin. I recognize you—you used to visit our shop all the time.”
The cousin left white as a sheet. She then told him private family secrets only Lugdi could have known.
Kedarnath came himself next, arriving unannounced.
The moment Shanti saw him, she ran forward, then stopped—suddenly shy, as if remembering she was in a child’s body.
“You came,” she whispered. “I knew you would.”
She cooked his favorite dishes—regional recipes his current wife had never learned—exactly the way Lugdi used to make them.
She spoke of their children by their pet names, recalled private arguments, and then said:
“The money is still there. Under the floorboard in the corner of the bedroom. And my jewelry is in the brass pot at the back of the closet.”
Those hiding places had been Lugdi’s secret. Kedarnath asked how much money.
Shanti told him the exact amount.
In 1935, when Shanti was nine, a formal committee—including a member of parliament, journalists, and prominent citizens—was formed to investigate.
They took her to Mathura for the first time in this life.
The moment she stepped off the train, she started giving directions.
“Turn left here… the shop is down this lane.”
She led the entire group through streets she had never seen, straight to Kedarnath’s home and shop.
Neighbors poured out. Shanti greeted them by name.
“Hello, Auntie,” she said to an old woman. “You used to lend me sugar when I ran out.”
The woman burst into tears. That was exactly what Lugdi used to say.
Inside the house, Shanti walked to the exact spot where she had given birth and died. She pointed to the hidden brass pot—jewelry was still inside, unknown even to Kedarnath’s second wife.
Then Kedarnath brought his three children from his first marriage—now teenagers older than Shanti herself.
She looked at them with a mother’s eyes in a child’s face, called them by their childhood nicknames, remembered their favorite toys and songs, and cried.
“I’m sorry I left you,” she sobbed. “I never wanted to go.”
The committee’s 1936 report concluded that, after exhaustive investigation and dozens of independent witnesses, they could find no evidence of fraud. Everything checked out.
The story went around the world. Newspapers in India, Europe, and America carried headlines about the little girl who remembered dying.
Skeptics offered every possible explanation—coincidence, suggestion, hidden information—but none could account for all the verified facts.
Shanti Devi lived until 1987, dying at age 61. She never changed her story. She never married, saying she had already been married once—to Kedarnath—and could never love another man.
To this day, her case remains one of the strongest and best-documented claims of reincarnation in modern history.
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