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Ved Mehta has been a staff writer with The New Yorker
for 17 years. This Thursday at 9 P.M., Channel 13 will televise
his first film, an hour-long documentary, entitled “Chachaji:
My Poor Relation.” While it is not uncommon for writers to
turn from their typewriters to the world of purely visual images,
this documentary may well be a first in the history of filmmaking
inasmuch as Mr. Mehta is totally blind and has been so since the
age of 4, when he almost succumbed to a bout of meningitis.
I recently visited this writer-turned-filmmaker in his Fifth
Avenue apartment. Mr. Mehta, a trim, erect, 44 year-old bachelor
was nattily-attired in a dark gray pinstriped suit, a pale lavender
shirt and a deep lavender tie. The clothes were custom-made—and
English. Neat displays on his living-room walls included original
Saul Steinberg drawings and 19th-century miniature painting from
North Indian kingdoms.
Mr. Mehta said that he considered himself as being part Indian
(he was born of affluent Indian parents in India and lived there
until the age of 15), part English (he has a degree in modern
history from Oxford University) and part American (he studied
at the Arkansas School for the Blind, Pomona College, as well
as Harvard University, and he is now an American citizen). But
mostly, Mr. Mehta considers himself an expatriate. “To be
a writer,” he said, “is, in a sense, to belong to no
place. Writers are outsiders. They carry the universe in their
heads and are alienated from the society they live in.”
Why did Mr. Mehta turn to filmmaking? “Last fall, I was
sitting in my New Yorker office when I received a call from David
Fanning of WGBH in Boston. He said he was putting together a series
of unusual international films. The series would be called ‘World.’
David wanted to see me about their doing a film on India.”
Mr. Mehta suspected he was being called in as a consultant to
provide background information. As it turned out, Mr. Fanning
wanted him to suggest a subject, write the script and then go
to India with a crew—which would include a director and a
cameraman—and actually shoot the film. Mr. Mehta agreed,
but on his terms. The subject would be his father’s 83-year-old,
ne’er-do-well cousin, Chachaji (Respected Uncle), a very
poor relation who lives partly by working at two low-paying jobs
(he is seen being fired from one of them during the course of
the filming) but mainly by sponging off his wealthier relatives.
“This way,” Mr. Mehta said, “the documentary
would not be about the India but about my personal India. The
only way to know a country or a people is to get involved with
someone specifically. Abstract India, with facts and figures about
its poverty or birthrate, would mean very little.”
There was to be no written script as such, just rough guidelines
drawn up by Mr. Mehta. The crew would then fly to India with Mr.
Mehta and improvise their way through a documentary film. If Chachaji
turned out to be elusive or difficult to photograph, Mr. Mehta
would switch to another subject. “How could we miss with
a country like India? There are hundreds of films to be made there,”
he said.
What made Mr. Mehta pick his uncle as a subject? “As a
youngster,” he explained, “I always identified with
Chachaji. His education was limited and so was mine. By the age
of 15, I had had roughly four years of schooling. My English vocabulary
was limited to about 300 words. Although Chachaji worked at several
jobs—he was a rat-catcher once—he was dependent on the
family for support. What with educational facilities for the blind
being so limited in India, I would think of Chachaji and say to
myself, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Chachaji
was odd because he had a double thumb on one hand. I was odd because
I couldn’t see. In my childish imagination, I felt we had
a lot in common. Besides, I had a brush with poverty in India
at a very early age, and I am guilt-ridden about it. (Mr. Mehta
spent three years of his life, from the age of 5 until 8, in a
Bombay orphanage where some of India’s poorest and most unfortunate
Dickensian creatures learned about survival and caning chairs.
His upper middle-class parents sent him there, because it was
the only school in India where some instruction was available
for the blind.) There were people all along in my life—in
the Bombay school, in the Arkansas school—who were really
gifted. But they never got a chance. There is a lot of guilt connected
with that. I feel lucky to have surmounted my problems, but I
feel I have to recreate the world of poverty I knew for other
people. That world is summed up much better by Chachaji than by
people who go to East Hampton.”
Because of his early years of enforced idleness (between the
ages of 8 and 13, Ved Mehta stayed at home flying kites, riding
a bicycle, gossiping with the servants and doing little else)
he now works almost without pause.
“If I am lying on a beach,” he said, “I think,
‘I could be reading.’ It takes me four times as long
as most people to do everything. Even reading requires certain
apparatus—books in Braille and readers. I have to organize,
arrange for readers. I really think of work as salvation in the
sense that work anesthetizes one’s problems. I feel most
alive when I’m working. It must have to do with those years
of idleness when I had nothing to do and when I had this exaggerated
sense of time passing by and my just falling behind in the world.”
Mr. Mehta, unlike his uncle, became self-sufficient as soon
as opportunity presented itself. In his first of ten books, Face
to Face, an autobiographical account of his early years,
he wrote that at the Arkansas School he was taught how to use
a cane to assist in walking. He broke his cane in two, convinced
that he could manage very well without it. It did mean falling
into open manholes, but his “facial vision”—the
sense of objects close to him—has served him very well. He
is fiercely independent, taking buses, taxis and airplanes without
trepidation—or assistance.
Mr. Mehta originally turned to writing out of a sense of loneliness.
“I thought I was a one-book writer,” he said, referring
to Face to Face,
“that I had only one story to tell. But then I met Mr. William
Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, who encouraged me
to write more.”
Was it difficult for Mr. Mehta to deal with film, a medium in
which he would have to rely so much on other people’s judgment?
“Writing, for me,” he said, “has always been an
act of imagination. I don’t actually see the people I describe,
but I can imagine them. In that sense, television is not all that
different. Since I knew India, I knew the language, I knew my
uncle and my family. I could lead the director, Bill Cran, to
the pictures. Of course, he had to decide whether the pictures
were worth taking.”
I asked if it was easy to place his complete trust in the collective
vision of the film’s director and crew. “My whole life,”
he answered simply and gently, “has been of one long trust.
I trust that when I say a sentence, it will be written as I said
it. Also, writing is an act of individual imagination, but television
is an act of collaboration.” (Mr. Mehta chooses such things
as clothes and furnishings with the help of others, but makes
all final decisions himself according to his own “sense of
color and style.”)
In as much as Mr. Mehta has lived all of his adult life—29
years—in the West, most of it in America, why was India so
often the subject of his writings and now of his film? “The
writers’ universe,” he explained, “is their childhood
and their family. The world we know through our childhood and
our mothers remains the most important one. In that sense, I am
completely Freudian. I used to think it would be a terrible liability
being torn between East and West and not belonging to any national
tradition, but when I look around me in New York, I find that
we are living in a rootless society, in a world where there is
no sense of community. Perhaps that is why I have written almost
a million words explaining the country of my childhood to myself
and to others.”
Was the subject of Mr. Mehta’s documentary, “Chachaji,”
with his Buster Keaton-like face and his shuffling gait, a man
who seems to have suffered all the world’s indignities, including
having his wife run away with the lodger, and who openly calls
himself “the family representative of the starving millions,”
at all difficult to photograph? Had he ever got self-conscious,
pursued as he was, by a camera crew for several weeks of his life?
Chachaji was watched as he made tea, went to the toilet, as he
missed buses, visited relatives in a village that was being pelted
with giant hailstones and even as he clumsily stumbles in the
holy waters of the Ganges while taking a ritual bath.
“You know,” Mr. Mehta said, “Chachaji never,
for a moment, understood what was happening to him. He referred
to me as ‘King of New York’ and thought I was putting
together a photograph album. He even asked for pictures to give
his son. When I said, ‘This is a movie, ‘ he countered
with, ‘But I am not an actor. ‘ Chachaji never could
make the connection between Indian movies he had seen in cinema
houses and documentary films.”
Mr. Mehta clearly feels very enthusiastic about making films.
As he offered some coffee from his Georgian coffee pot, his face
broke into a grin. “Perhaps I’ll make a feature film
some day,” he said.
Madhur Jaffrey is an actress and author, who frequently writes
about the cultural scene.
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