When I was about fifteen I went to a friend’s house during the annual Holi celebrations. His mother offered me some pakoras which she had made for the festival. I happily ate two. As they were very tasty, I asked for some more. Surprisingly, she refused. I could see that she had been making them in large quantities, and that she planned to make a lot more, so I couldn’t understand why she was restricting me to two. The answer, as I was to discover later, was that she was putting bhang [cannabis leaves] in them and didn’t want me to ingest too large a dose. In those days it was quite common to put a little bhang in the food on festival days. At weddings, for example, the bhang would make the guests very happy and would also in­crease their appetites. Weddings were great occasions for overeating. With appetites stimulated by bhang, the guests would get ravenously hungry and would perform great feats of gluttony.

I went home and sat down to my evening meal. My mother was making chapatis. After consuming all the ones she had cooked I asked for some more because I still felt hungry. She made extra, but even they were not enough to satisfy my hunger. I ate them as fast as she could prepare them and kept on asking for more. It was not until I had eaten about twenty that she realised what had happened to me. She laughed and exclaimed, ‘You’ve been eating bhang, haven’t you? Who has been feeding you bhang?’ I told her about the pakoras and she laughed again. I was now begin­ning to understand why my friend’s mother had restricted me to two. In addition to being extremely hungry, I was also beginning to feel a little intoxicated.

That night we all slept in the same room. At about mid­night I got out of bed, sat in the padmasana position, and called out in a loud voice, ‘You are not my father! You are not my mother!’ Then I went into a deep meditation. My parents woke up but they were not very alarmed by my behaviour. They just assumed that I was still suffering from the effects of the bhang I had eaten.

At 3 a.m. I was still sitting there with my eyes closed. My parents woke up because strange and unrecognisable sounds were coming out of my mouth.

They tried to wake me up but I was in too deep a meditation to be roused. My mother, thinking that I was getting delirious, persuaded my father to go out and find a doctor. He had a hard time persuading one to come because it was the middle of the night and a festival day. Eventually, though, he found one and brought him back to the house.

This doctor gave me a thorough examination while my parents watched anxiously. I was aware of what he was doing and of my mother’s worried comments, but I couldn’t bring myself out of the state or behave in a normal way. The doctor finally announced his decision.

‘Congratulations,’ he said, addressing my parents. ‘You have a very fine boy, a very good son. There is noth­ing physically wrong with him. He is just immersed in a very deep meditation. When it is over he will come out of it quite naturally and be perfectly normal.’

For all of that night and for the whole of the next day I was immersed in that state. During the day I continued to utter strange sounds which no one could understand until a local pandit passed by our house. He heard what I was saying, recognised it, came in and announced, ‘This boy is chanting portions of the Yajur Veda in Sanskrit. Where and when did he learn to chant like this?’

The answer, most probably, is that I learned in some previous life. At the time I knew Punjabi, my native lan­guage, Urdu, the language of the local Muslims, and a little Persian. I knew no Sanskrit and had never even heard of the Yajur Veda. The bhang must have triggered some memories and knowledge left over from a previous life. As the doctor had predicted, I eventually returned to nor­mal—with no knowledge of Sanskrit or the Vedas—and resumed my usual everyday life.