Chatura Karunaratne’s reincarnation case

Step 1

Around 1992 · Chatura is three years old · Told by his mother

A three-year-old says that in another life he was shot

Chatura Karunaratne was born on April 20, 1989, in Metiyagane, a countryside area in the Kurunegala district of Sri Lanka. His father was a clerk at a bus company, and his mother was a nurse at a traditional medicine hospital.

According to his mother, he began talking about another life at age three. He said he was shot in two places and taken to the hospital in a helicopter. He said his other parents lived near Narammala, a town in the same area. According to her, the only name from that life that he gave was the name of that town. And he said his mother in Narammala was not thin like his mother now, but fat.

His mother says Chatura got scared every time he heard a helicopter. He was afraid of the other children’s balls, because he thought they could be bombs. He often talked about army trucks, camps, and soldiers.

Chatura has two birthmarks by his left ear, one on the jaw and one on the neck. He has another on the inside of one arm. His mother said the boy pointed to the two on the neck and said they were where he was shot. She said this in November 1992, when they already knew the other family. Neither the articles nor the notes from June mention the birthmarks.

His family looked in Narammala for the person the boy was talking about and found no one.

Step 2

June 7, 1992 · Published by the newspaper “Divaina”

A national newspaper publishes what the boy says

M. D. Banda, a local journalist, heard about the case from his wife. He went to see the boy with the village head and sent a report to “Divaina.” It is a newspaper from Colombo, the capital, sold all over the country. On June 7, 1992, “Divaina” published a shortened version of that report.

The article lists 14 things Chatura said. He lived in a town near Narammala, in a pink house with a tile roof. Nearby there was a hut with a thatched roof and, inside it, a small shop. Near the house there was a lake, and turtles lived in the lake. He was riding in a truck through the forest when a group of people shot at him and hit him in the neck. And his family had a tractor.

The article put on record what the boy said. What was missing was whether any person fit what he described.

Step 3

June 12 to 14, 1992 · Told by two journalists and an assistant of the psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson

They take him to Narammala to look for his house, and find no one

On June 12, Tissa Jayawardane visited the family and wrote down what the mother said. He worked with Erlendur Haraldsson, a psychologist at the University of Iceland who studied reincarnation cases in Sri Lanka. According to Tissa’s notes, the boy said that in that other life he was called Suduputha.

Around those days, Banda returned with Nandasena Suriyarachchi, another “Divaina” journalist. They took the boy to Narammala, where he said he could find his house. They found no one whose life fit what he said.

On June 14, “Divaina” published a second article, with 29 things the boy said. Many were already in the first one. This time, Chatura said he had been a soldier and that a helicopter took him and others to the doctor. He talked about a parrot that could talk, which his mother in that other life fed. And he gave names. His father was called Perera, his mother Mangalika, and his sister Kumari.

Twenty-five kilometers from Chatura’s house, a man had heard about the first article.

Step 4

Late June 1992 · Told by M. P. Martin, the soldier’s father

A dead soldier’s father reads the article and recognizes his son

M. P. Martin was a retired farmer and bricklayer from Henegedara, a village near Narammala. In a shop, he heard neighbors talking about the June 7 article. He got the newspaper and read it.

He thought of his son Dayananda. He was a soldier and had died in April 1986, after an explosion. The family then lived in a house with a tile roof. Next to it, in a thatched hut, Martin had built him a shop, and Dayananda sold groceries and sweets there. Nearby there was a small lake. According to Martin, turtles lived in that lake.

Martin didn’t want to go alone and went with the head of his village. Chatura’s house was 25 kilometers by road from his, in the opposite direction from Narammala, the town the boy named. The next day he came back with his wife. Martin and his wife became convinced that the boy was talking about their son. About two weeks had passed since the first article.

The two families say they didn’t know each other before.

In early July, a journalist took Chatura to Dayananda’s parents’ house.

Step 5

Early July 1992 · Told by “Divaina” in a third article, from July 5

Chatura visits Dayananda’s house, according to the newspaper

Nandasena Suriyarachchi took the boy, who was three, to Dayananda’s parents’ house. According to the newspaper, they welcomed him like a son. The mother brought out some of Dayananda’s old clothes. The boy complained that only his long trousers were left of his clothes, and that they were torn and someone else had worn them.

She asked him if he remembered the house. According to the newspaper, Chatura said he hadn’t lived in that house but in another one. That was true. The family had recently moved to a new house on the same land, and the old house was about a hundred meters away. In the old house, an elderly woman asked him if he remembered her. Chatura looked at her for a while and said she was his grandmother. Dayananda had lived longer with his grandmother than with his parents.

Inside the old house, according to the newspaper, Chatura said they now had electric light. When Dayananda was alive, they didn’t have it. He saw the shop’s scale hanging on the wall and asked if they no longer had the shop. The shop had been torn down. He also recognized Gamini in the crowd, a friend and brother-in-law of Dayananda.

The journalists asked Martin about the tractor. Martin said Dayananda planned to buy him a tractor at an army auction, but died first.

All this happened when the two families already knew each other. So it doesn’t count among what the boy said before they met.

In November, Haraldsson began checking everything.

Step 6

1992 to 1999 · Told by Erlendur Haraldsson and the army documents

A psychologist compares what the boy said with the soldier’s life

Haraldsson interviewed the two families in November 1992 and came back four times, until 1999. He saw the tile-roofed house and the lake, a quarter of an hour’s walk away. The turtles are reported by Dayananda’s father. With the help of a general, he obtained the army papers on Dayananda.

According to those papers, on April 15, 1986, Dayananda was on a patrol of two army trucks. A mine blew up one of the trucks. Dayananda was found unconscious next to the overturned truck. A helicopter took him to a hospital, and he died three days later in Colombo without waking up. According to Haraldsson, the report implies there was no clash with the enemy.

The report doesn’t say where he was wounded. It says no wounds could be seen on the outside. His parents say he had bandages on his head, his neck, and his left ear, and that’s how he appears in a photo from his funeral. No autopsy was found.

Haraldsson put together what the two articles and his assistant’s notes recorded, from before Martin appeared. Not counting repeats, there were 33 things. He checked them one by one. Sixteen fit Dayananda’s life, 15 don’t, and 2 others couldn’t be checked. All the names fail. According to Haraldsson, in Sri Lankan cases it is almost normal for the names to fail.

The question from the beginning remains. Did Chatura remember Dayananda’s life?