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Ved Mehta is a man of the world because he had no choice. Blind
since age 4, rootless since his teens, Mehta, a California-educated
native of India and author of 18 wide-ranging books, has lived
on three continents through the whims of history and personal
fate. Rootlessness is a kind of home, he believes, one that he
shares with many other modern writers, including his fellow countryman,
novelist Salman Rushdie, under a death sentence from Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini for his novel The Satanic Verses.
“In order to feel dislocated, you have to belong somewhere,”
says Mehta, currently a visiting fellow at England’s Oxford
University. “I feel I really don’t belong anywhere.
I really belong to the 20th-century population of displaced persons,
refugees.”
Yet Mehta, a naturalized American citizen, has maintained connections
with his past, occasionally visiting his native coun-try and other
wellsprings of his long-running autobiography, “Continents
of Exile,” whose sixth volume has just been published. This
option, he fears, may never again be open to Rushdie, who is in
hiding somewhere in Great Britain.
“Some of this reaction [to Satanic Verses]
was predictable from square one—not the death sentence,”
Mehta said in an interview while on a visit to Southern California.
“But I wish someone had told him along the way that you
just can’t write this particular way because certainly he’s
going to be cut off from the very source of his creativity.”
Considered Blasphemous
Rushdie’s bitter, satirical, allegorical novel—the
spark of riots, bombings , and more than a score of deaths in
India and Pakistan—is considered blasphemous by many Muslims
because it casts doubt on central tenets of the Muslim religion.
Among other things, it suggests that the Prophet Mohammed wrote
the Koran, Islam’s holy book, rather than receiving it through
the divine inspiration of God.
Mehta, a Hindu who met the Muslim Rushdie when the two were doing
a series of television appearances, seemed more saddened than
angered by the furor.
“I think it’s a great tragedy because I can’t
imagine his ever being able to live and move freely the way I
can or the way any writer must because even if he repents or the
Ayatollah withdraws his sentence, there are enough fanatic Muslims
that sooner or later somebody will try to kill him,” he
said. “So I think that there’s practically no place
he can go unless he gets a new identity like some of these FBI
witnesses do. But what kind of life is that?”
In contrast, Mehta’s life is a study in freedom of movement—despite
his blindness. This week he came back to California, to one of
the places he has called home in 40 years of exile.
The autobiographer, biographer, novelist and journalist recently
returned to Pomona College to be honored as a globally respected
author and a distinguished alumnus—he’s a member of
the class of 1956 and has just published the memoirs of his college
days.
Now 54, Mehta wore a gray suit, blue-striped shirt and a red
tie as he stepped back on campus for a series of lunches, lectures,
interviews and other events to officially mark his passage into
Pomona stardom.
Clearly he was no longer the uncertain, shy, desperate young
man he portrays in The
Stolen Light, published this week by Norton. Just
as clearly, Mehta retains the determination, aloofness and fierce
independence of the young man who walked around the campus unassisted,
often going so fast he passed his sighted classmates like a speeding
train.
Much of the six volumes of the extended tour of his life have
been published in The New Yorker, where he has long been a staff
writer. The other volumes are Daddyji,
Mamaji,
Vedi,
The Ledge Between
the Streams and Sound-Shadows
of the New World. The books are profiles of his family,
himself and chronicles of the events that shaped all their lives
as refugees from what is now Pakistan following the partition
of India in 1947.
Rode Bicycle on Campus
The best-known aspects of Mehta’s life probably are his
meningitis-induced blindness and his subsequent struggles to deal
with his handicap. That struggle took him to America, to a school
for the blind in Arkansas and, through a chain of events reported
in the current volume, to Pomona where as a blind, dark-skinned
foreigner he was more than exotic, perhaps almost extraterrestrial.
But in the 33 years since he graduated, Mehta said he has become
at ease with the once-strange culture of California and the rites
of passage he experienced at Pomona. In fact, he has come so far
from his beginnings that he no longer feels the pull of nostalgia
for his native country.
“My experience is totally English and American, so what
would I miss anymore?” he asked as he strolled across the
campus quadrangle where he once rode a bicycle to the consternation
of his classmates. “I don’t particularly like Indian
food that much; I find it very debilitating. I love it when I
am in India. But outside I’d rather eat Western food; it’s
lighter and I can work longer hours on it. I miss my family....But
now I have my own children and my own family. So, you know, one
moves on.”
By moving on, writers such as himself and Rushdie have become
a part of the 20th century’s millions who have become cultural
hybrids through their dislocation, Mehta said.
“To be an artist is to be alienated from the society in
which you live. Alienation is built into the artistic temperament,
I think,” Mehta said. “What we are now talking about
is an alienation that is kind of an overlay on top of being an
outsider, which I think has to do with being outside the national
tradition, of belonging to a community of expatriate writers and
artists.” Rushdie, himself and other prominent expatriate
Indian writers “might be said to belong to English tradition
more strongly than to Indian tradition because after all we write
in English,” he added.
“I think that many of us perhaps have a double vision.
We have the vision of our antecedents and then we have another
vision that has to do with our education. After all, Rushdie was
educated at Rugby and Oxford, I believe. His sensibility has been
honed by his English experience. It’s true the antecedents
have been important because his parents live in Pakistan and he
was born in India. But in a way his cultural experience is not
that different from [Indian-born British novelist Rudyard] Kipling,
most of whose adult educated life was outside India.”
Novel Is Extension of His Story
In The Stolen Light,
Mehta said, the story of a fellow student called “K”
who committed suicide is “by extension also my story. We
were both culturally maladjusted. We belonged neither to East
nor West. He belonged neither to Japan nor America. I belonged
neither to India nor America....How did cultural maladjustment
lead in his case to suicide while I somehow escaped it?....I was
from India where marriages were arranged like real estate transactions,
and found myself in the car culture of California where in order
to have dates you had to have cars.”
In Mehta’s view The
Stolen Light is “ruthlessly honest.”
Besides “K’s” suicide, Mehta tells of his own
sexual involvement with a woman that leads to an abortion, and
of his romantic longings for other female students. It also is
a litany of the additional labors of a blind student—finding
people to read books to him, finding others to type his papers,
the constant race just to stay current in his classes.
In moments of frustration and stress, Mehta—who refuses
to use a cane or a seeing-eye dog— recalled that he sometimes
would ride a bicycle around the college, one of many feats that
he has taught himself in the struggle for independence.
As he arrived at Pomona this week, he swiveled his head around
the campus, trying to recall those moments.
“I would ride along College Way and then—is that
3rd Street down south there?—and then I would go right,
or left to Kenyon House,” he said, summoning up a mental
map.
How he gained his skills, the sacrifices his family made to educate
their blind son, the often funny daily events of his extended
family, are told in the volumes of Continents of Exile. But Mehta
stressed that they can all be read independently and that each
book is meant to stand on its own.
Apparently responding to the assertions of some critics that
he has gone on at too much length about his life, Mehta stressed,
too, that he has written many other books in between the volumes
of autobiography, which began appearing in 1972. His other works
include a biography of Mahatma
Gandhi, a novel, a book on television and several
books of intellectual reportage, a genre he is credited with inventing.
Although he thinks “my books don’t get the attention
that I think they deserve,” Mehta believes that ultimately
he will be vindicated.
“It’s always hard when you’re living to get
the attention,” he said. “There are 50,000 books published
every year and it’s very difficult for critics and people
to sort out. What I do know is that there is a body of readers
and critics that is slowly building up. When that will come to
some kind of maturation, I don’t know. But it doesn’t
matter.”
Ironically, Mehta’s certainty wavers when he’s asked
why he has chosen to explore his life in such great detail. He
talks about the subject for a time and then concludes: “Anyway,
I’m not quite clear why I’m doing it at this length.
All I can tell you is that I’ve lived on three continents
and I’m exploring myself, but by extension I’m exploring
the continents of India and America and, now, England.”
To an observer the answer seems obvious: Ved Mehta has made a
home by writing books.
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
