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He was four years old and his mother wouldn't accept that meningitis had left him unable to see.
She was flipping the light switch faster and faster, asking him: "Can you tell? Is the light on or off?" "I can't tell." "Look. Open your eyes. On or off?" Click click click click click.
"Off."
Her asthmatic breathing got harder and harder. "Try again." Click click click click click.
Five clicks. "On," he said.
"You sure?"
"Yes." "Then you can see a little."
"Yes."
"Try again." Click click click click click click click.
"Light or dark?"
Seven clicks. "Dark," he said.
"Oh loving God, you have heard my prayers." She stopped wheezing and wept... From his mother's denial of his blindness sprang Ved Mehta's own refusal to accept it as the overwhelming factor in his life.
His account of his triumph is the heart of a volume of autobiography he has written.
At 55, he's a magical story-teller. His description of how he first fell in love at 18 -- undeclared and unrequited -- has the degree of talent that made Erich Segal's Love Story such a romantic milestone. By rights The Stolen Light should be a bestseller. The Express will print an extract next Sunday and, to give you advance word, I am at Oxford where Mehta, an American citizen, is a visiting Fellow at Balliol. In his room a pleasant-looking young woman sits at an old-fashioned, bow-legged table in one corner, knees tucked neatly under it. She is one of a succession of helpers who have threaded their way through his adult life -- one of his lifeline of readers.
CURIOUS
When Mehta was 15 his father, a retired Indian government health official, took him from India, where blind beggars are two for a penny, to America for an education. At 18 -- sexually curious, burning with ambition and determined to prove himself "in the cold world of the sighted" -- he entered the Southern California university of Pomona.
"There's a lot of money in that part of the world," he tells me, sitting with his back to the window, an immaculate guru in grey lightweight suit, pale pink shirt and toned-in tie. "And, of course, there's Hollywood." He smiles engagingly.
"The actor Richard Chamberlain, Kris Kristofferson and the son of heiress Barbara Hutton were there in my time."
Mehta himself was an exotic novelty but very hard up. He hired fellow students at 75 cents an hour to read course material, type his papers, help him hold on to his place in class. He refused to use a cane or guide dog, taught himself to cycle about the campus and, for a dare, drove a car around it. How he fell in love unsuccessfully and unforgettably with one girl reader nick named Johnnie is the story you will read next week. Women, particularly students, were a source of constant, unbearable frustration. Some became friends who taught him tenderness; another willingly tumbled him into bed. But the memory of Johnnie never faded.
Today Mehta is happily married with two daughters, aged four and 22 months.
"I didn't get married until very late -- 49 in fact. Until that time you might say I was wedded to writing.
"Since I was 18 I've supported myself by writing and with university fellowships."
The new book, parts of which have appeared in the prestigious New Yorker magazine, will be the sixth in the autobiographical series titled Continents Of Exile. In between autobiography he has written 12 other books including a massive, colourful Portrait of India and a biography of Gandhi.
His descriptions are astonishingly vivid. He relies in the main on casual remarks of strangers to build up his picture, delighting in delicate and discreet use of detail, as he puts it.
Nowhere outside his autobiographical work does he allow the reader to know he is blind. He has sought to be a writer. Not an Indian writer, not a blind writer.
"Some people say Homer was blind but there is no mention in the Odyssey of whether he can see or not. Milton was certainly blind at a later stage. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote his Ninth symphony. They don't talk about that. You just listen to the Ninth or read Paradise Lost without worrying about whether he can see or not."
DENIAL
"I confront the issue of blindness head-on where it's relevant and simply don't go into it where it isn't. My mother," he explains, "denied I had lost my sight for as long as she could. But that denial has played a very important part psychologically in shaping my attitude to my blindness."
What intrigues me is how long it took Mehta to get over that disastrous first love for Johnnie. What he tells me about his present love is that she is not to be found in The Stolen Light but, no doubt, is destined for a future volume.
True love when it came late to Ved Mehta did so in all-American style. In the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York, he married Linn Cary, the great-great-granddaughter of the legendary James Fennimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans. She was 11 when they met. "She was first the daughter of a friend and then she herself became my friend. And then something thunderous happened in the spring of 1983.
"We went to the opening performance in New York of a film by a friend of mine -- and suddenly we were holding hands."
She was 28, he was 49.
"Linn has extremely blue eyes, a very delicate face and light hair that falls to the middle of her back. She's five foot two and a half inches tall..." He culls the details lovingly.
"She's a singer, a soprano with the most exquisite voice. Johnnie's voice had an underlying sadness. With Linn there is natural laughter.
"I could describe her better before we married and started living together. Once you marry, you can't see a person separate from yourself.
"I can't tell you what a solitary life that of a writer is. Linn has totally changed that. It's like discovering one's lost self, a certain magic."
There have been three or four other very intense relationships in his life.
"My problem was when they didn't work out it took me five or six years to get over it, as you will gather from what I wrote about Johnnie. She happened when I was 18 and I'm still in some way mourning about it."
He had lived with his partners in those relationships "but not for any length of time. Each relationship had its downward spiral, probably because I was chasing the wrong kind of person.
"I think there was too much fantasy and probably flight from my mother. Had I been closer to her, I probably would have married an Indian."
ROOTS
"Then there was the wound of blindness. I had come to terms with that befor I could really establish a successful relationship, I imagine." He shows me through the college grounds to the gates. Walking the paths, turning corners and mounting steps with the certainty of the sightd and talking the while. Softly, confidently.
He tells me the title of the book has its roots in Greek mythology. Prometheus was the Greek who stole light -- or rather fire -- from the gods and brought it to man.
Fire symbolizes knowledge. In Mehta's case there is self-knowledge too.
Ved Mehta takes
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on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
