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“Sweetheart, you don’t want to play with that. Here,
let me take you to mommy.” The speaker is Ved Mehta, and
the “sweetheart” is his one-year-old daughter, Sage,
who is advancing towards the flashing red light of PW’s
tape recorder with single-minded intensity. Ignoring a playpen
piled high with toys in the adjacent dining room, she navigates
her way across the living room, tiny fingers poised to seize the
desired object by its dangling strap.
Gently, Mehta lifts his daughter and carries her down the hallway.
When he reappears, he observes, in a characteristically dry fashion,
that yes, it is odd how small children can distinguish mechanical
objects. He adds, “That’s why psychologists call them
love objects, because it goes right back to infancy, the things
we choose to fixate on. I’m sure children perceive their
parents as objects at the beginning as well.” Seated in
the center of a blue couch, sipping from a coffee cup perched
securely on his lap, Mehta has a quality of seeming both attentive
and distant at the same time. On this particular morning, thin
slats of sunlight come through the tall windows facing busy 79th
Street, casting one side of Mehta’s face in light, the other
in shadow.
The 51-year-old Indian author has recently completed the fifth
volume in his autobiographical series. Entitled Sound
Shadows of the New World (Norton), the book covers
Mehta’s adolescence, from his arrival in the U.S. from India
at age 15 to his graduation from the Arkansas School for the Blind
three years later. Without exactly skirting the issue in his previous
books, neither has Mehta fully confronted his blindness as he
does in Sound Shadows.
(The phrase “sound shadows” refers to the echoes and
sensations in the air that a blind person perceives.) Mehta’s
sojourn in Arkansas was replete with complex, difficult situations,
illuminating discoveries, and large and small triumphs, all of
which he recounts with admirable candor.
Mehta next attended Pomona College in California, then read history
at Oxford University on a Hazen Fellowship before proceeding to
Harvard for graduate studies, also in history. After he joined
the staff of The New Yorker in 1961, Mehta became best
known for his articles for that magazine, many of which have subsequently
appeared as books. They range from political and social commentary
(Fly and Fly-bottle:
Encounters with British Intellectuals) to biography
(Mahatma Gandhi and
His Apostles) to fiction (Delinquent
Chacha) and include his autobiographical series:
the histories of his parents—Daddyji
and Mamaji,
a childhood memoir, Vedi,
and the sequel, The
Ledge Between the Streams, dealing with the partition
of India, a traumatic event for the Mehta family.
Though the bulk of his writings deals with India, Mehta asserts
that he is not motivated by a desire to explain or interpret the
Indian culture to the West. “I think I can leave that to
sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists. These
books in the autobiographical series are really to be read more
like a novel than a tract of any kind,” he says, adding,
“I have done certain political books, in which I’ve
tried to do that, reportage—although I don’t like
the word—essays and so on.”
“I don’t think I write for any audience,” he
continues. “I write for myself. I think the writer is always
the ideal reader. Anytime an artist gets involved in what the
audience is going to think, that’s the death of art.”
Mehta’s voice is cool and unruffled; his manner, eminently
dignified and cultivated. He does not remember a specific moment
in his life when he realized that writing was his calling. “I
don’t think you ever know,” he remarks. “I mean,
I still don’t know that I’m a writer. In a way, writing
is a lifetime apprenticeship. However good you are, when you face
the terror of a blank page, you find you don’t know anything.
It’s very mercurial, the whole enterprise—not like
law or medicine where you say, ‘Ah! Now I have my degree,
and that’s done.’ Talent comes, and talent goes.”
Though he is known for his disciplined working habits, putting
in eight hours most days at his office at The New Yorker,
Mehta insists that his approach to writing is idiosyncratic. “I
never know where I am with a book,” he admits. “I
work forwards and backwards. Sometimes I strike out like a racehorse
and sometimes I go as slowly as a crab. I don’t even know
what’s the beginning or the end of the book until it’s
near the finishing line.” For his autobiographies, “the
method is unique. I can be bold and say that,” he asserts
with a shy smile. “I do research in the sense that I dig
up land records, deeds, tax books, account records, diaries or
whatever, and then I interview many of the people in my past at
length.” Only after accumulating “hundreds and hundreds
of pages of notes” does Mehta sit down for a session of
what he calls “free association.”
“I think back to where I was when I was 15,” he explains.
“What did I do during the day? Where did I sleep? How did
I eat? Who were my friends? Why did they become my friends? And
so on—I imagine it’s rather like what people say analysis
is.”
This process of analyzing the past is, for the most part, unconscious,
but it enables him to “eliminate the unimportant experiences
and preserve the others. So only those experiences get written
about which still have some bearing upon my life.” The ability
to find meaning in experience is something Mehta finds lacking
in society today. “We’re living in a culture where
people have very little use for memory, very little use for history,”
he observes. “I happen to think that civilized life is impossible
without memory. If you don’t know why the Western countries
fought World War II, then you don’t know what civilization
is about.”
Recovering the past has both a rewarding and a dark side, as
Mehta has also discovered. “Certainly in reliving the past
as I’ve been doing, there’s a lot of psychic pain
involved,” he notes. “But I feel that in order to
live life fully you have to confront these issues; you can’t
sweep them under the carpet. Even though you think they’re
resolved, they continue to have psychic force. So even though
the autobiography series deals with experiences that are many
years old, they have personal relevance and that’s why they
come to the surface, and that’s why I write about them.
Just as I think each generation rewrites history, each generation
picks out that which speaks to it now. So the books in my autobiography
deal with my life now, even though each volume is set in a different
period of my life.” The rewarding aspect of looking into
his past is having the perspective of an older person, he adds.
“It’s rather like being an archeologist of oneself,
digging into oneself to see how one has become what one is now,
what kinds of decisions were made, and watching your development
. . . that’s really the wonderful, thrilling aspect of it.”
In 1982, Mehta received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation “genius” award—a total of $236,000
to support his writing projects. The grant has made it possible
for him to work on the next volume of his autobiography without
financial pressures. News of this no-strings-attached award was
“a happy experience,” Mehta recalls in a mild understatement.
“I haven’t had any job except writing,” he explains.
“I’ve only earned my living by writing, and when I
got the call from the president of the MacArthur Foundation, I
thought it was a prank—one of my friends having me on. So
I tried to stay very cool, but when I was asked, ‘What is
your social security number?’ I knew it was the real thing.
“You know, Virginia Woolf said that there is no independent
thinking without financial independence. I’ve always had
to write to pay the rent, and in some years, such as the five
when I was working on Gandhi,
my income was just a few thousand dollars.” But now, “just
the illusion of having independence for five years changes your
whole way of thinking.”
Evidence of this change in a more tangible form is Mehta’s
marriage in 1983 to Linn Cary Mehta, an assistant program officer
at the Ford Foundation. Sage, upon whom Mehta clearly dotes, is
their first child. The MacArthur award has enabled Mehta to continue
work on the next volume of his autobiography, dealing with his
college years at Pomona. “I really want to get on with the
story now,” he declares. “I began the series in 1972,
and here we are in 1985, and I’ve put aside the narrative
so many times to do other books. But now it’s so far along
that I feel it’s pushing me from behind, that I have to
get on with the series.”
What of the sudden interest in India with the Festival of India
art shows, the Raj Quartet TV series and a spate of films appearing
about India over the last two years? Mehta is unimpressed. “It’s
a funny thing," he observes, a note of disdain in his voice.
“I’ve been writing about India since 1956, and it’s
been a forbidden subject as far as publishers are concerned...to
produce a book about India is almost like giving a stillbirth.
They’re just not interested.” He draws a distinction
between substantive and faddish interest in the country. “There’s
been frivolous interest in yoga, in Indian clothes and food for
many years, and now it’s boiled over into art exhibitions
and this entire festival we’re seeing.” Mehta compares
the sudden curiosity about India to the excitement displayed when
Kissinger went to China in 1973. “You couldn’t go
to New York parties without hostesses serving Chinese food and
having Chinese decorations,” he recalls. “Today it’s
India, tomorrow it might be a country in Africa, who knows? These
are public relations events, which is not, to say that these things
aren’t good, but they hardly touch the tip of the iceberg.”
Mehta faults the media for focusing on the cultural and historical
aspects of India while ignoring its poverty and manifold social
problems. “Here is a country which has more people—600
million—than any other nation in the history of the world,
but you won’t hear much about that. Most of the Festival
of India is art from the richer and older part of India. Nobody
is interested in the fact that perhaps 70% of the Indian people
suffer from malnutrition or that malnutrition inevitably leads
to brain damage. It’s all on another level, but if you want
to help India, those are the questions you have to think about.”
Mehta’s autobiographical series is sometimes described
as the Indian equivalent of Paul Scott’s The Raj
Quartet. Mehta claims to be flattered by the comparison,
but, he notes, Scott was really writing about the English in India.
“I think one reason people were so interested in the television
adaptation was because so much of it was about Edwardian England;
it was really all about the English, and even the main Indian
character went to an English public school.” Mehta’s
books, on the other hand, in addition to not being about the English,
are “written from the perspective of the inside looking
out, not from the outside going in,” he comments. “They’re
just very different in flavor. Also, I’m writing about actual
living people, although I’ve used the techniques of fictional
writers.”
Is Mehta as widely read an author in his native India as he is
in the U.S. and England, we ask. “Practically all my books
are available in Indian editions,” he points out. “But
whether I’m as well known there as I am here or in England
I can’t say. Certainly the books would be read by more Indians
if books weren’t so expensive there; for a book to really
make an impact in India it has to be quite cheap.” His reputation
in the U.S. is helped, he adds, by the fact that many of his books
appear first as articles in The New Yorker . “More people
read my pieces in The New Yorker than will probably ever
buy my books in this country. So it’s possible that my work
is more familiar to Americans than to Indians.”
Mehta’s association with The New Yorker has been
a major influence on his writing. When he speaks of the magazine,
it is with a mixture of reverence and awe. “The New
Yorker has done more for writers than any other institution
in the world,” he maintains. At its heart, says Mehta, the
publication “is a free association of writers,” one
which, “unless you’ve been a part of this association,
it’s hard to imagine. But see yourself going to an office
at a place where you can see some of the leading writers of the
Western world—some of the most creative people around—and
to be a part of that group is a wonderful thing. We’re aware
of each other’s writings, preoccupations and obsessions,
and we feed off each other.” About those qualities defining
the “New Yorker culture,” Mehta has definite views.
“The magazine stands for certain civilized values, for certain
wonderful things in prose—courtesy, clarity and harmony,”
he pronounces. “These are the old values—of what art,
good art—is supposed to be.” True art, Mehta believes,
“is timeless. And however particular the art might be, it
has to be universal. Look at Conrad, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky ... they
wrote about particular experiences, but here, nearly 80 years
later, we can read and understand what they were say-ing.”
In his own work, Mehta notes, “I’m not just slavishly
following a chronological framework or trying to interpret. India
or blindness or any of that. All I’m trying to do is to
tell a story of not one life, but many lives—and through
those stories, to try to say something that’s universal.”
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. |
