In the softly carpeted lobby on an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment building, the early-morning rituals of Manhattan are being discreetly observed. The mail is being sorted, a uniformed doorman is hunting down a taxi, winged armchairs are tweaked into their exact positions. Form a far elevator an Indian in his late forties emerges to stride along the corridor and past the attentive staff.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, Mike.”
“Good morning, Mr Mehta.”
“Good morning, Martin.”
There is something substantial about Mr Mehta, as is to be expected in these moneyed surroundings.
In part it is his meticulous turnout; the Savile Row suit, the McAfee shoes, the Turnbull and Asser shirt. In part it is his large, owl-like head, held high over his slight, straight-backed body. There is something else, though – a hint of pride in his soft voice, a way of moving and talking which suggests enormous will. The clues are in long, delicate hands left uncovered despite the wintry Manhattan day outside – the hands which for years have been his eyes. And there is his voice, too, quick to acknowledge those uniformed attendants he cannot see. Everything Ved Mehta will allow others to know of him is there in that short walk through this building, in which residence itself is a mark of success and social acceptability.
Blinded at four by meningitis, his whole life has been an attempt to capture the power of “sight” – both physical and mental. He walks stiffly but with tremendous purpose, as if his work cannot be kept waiting. His very appearance is surprising – writers, by tradition, being more casual. “One reason I dress well,” he says, “is because I don’t want to be an object of pity.”
And there it is. He left India 33 years ago, at the age of 15, and still he is haunted by that country where to be blind is to be at the mercy of the catastrophe. But the deference with which he is treated in this hallway owes nothing to his disability. It is one of the imperceptible ways in which America rewards a man – those who serve always sense the exact measure of achievement.
Mehta’s success is an oddly self-contained one. He has written 14 books, all of which have met with critical acclaim. They range from The New Theologian, a study of Christian theology and contemporary philosophy, to the autobiographical Daddyji, Mamaji, and now Vedi, about his childhood in India.
He is still virtually unknown to many Americans, although his tiny by-line has appeared for over 20 years beneath long stories in The New Yorker. But to that magazine’s half million subscribers, America’s literary elite, he is among the most respected of writers. He has written more than a million words trying to explain the country of his childhood – “the country of dreadful night” – almost all of which have been published first in The New Yorker. Since he joined as a staff writer in 1961 it has been his true home, the one place in which he has a sense of belonging.
A year after he went blind, Mehta’s father sent hi way to school. He gave the blessing of his own life; the curse of exile. “I live in at least four cultures,” he says. “British culture, American culture, Indian culture, and blind culture. I’ve been confused in all of them. I can’t get away from the fact that at the age of five I was pushed out of a warm, loving home, supposedly for my own good, and very early on, hen I was 20, I became married to my writing. I literally took refuge in my solitary obsession.”
That solitary obsession marks him now. The doorman finds him a taxi, opens the door but offers not even the smallest show of assistance. Ved Mehta guards his dignity fiercely; it must have been hard won.
Manhattanites like to talk of their time in the areas of the city in which they live and work as their “village life.” It is not a phrase Ved Mehta would use.
To him a village is somewhere like Nawankote in the Punjab, a crowd of hovels where his great-grandfather, with two cows and a little land, was well-to-do. His father was even wealthier – a British – and American-educated doctor, director of public health for the Indian Government.
It is one of the cruel contradictions of Ved Mehta’s life: the father who worked to fight illness and epidemic; the son who grew up in constant pain. “When I had to fill in the medical form to come to this country.” He says matter-of-factly, “I had had every disease on it except syphilis and insanity.”
The story of those years, from the time he left home at five, is told in Vedi which starts as he is sent 1,300 miles away from his prosperous family to a blind orphanage in the slums of Bombay. “Children are tough,” he says of his survival there. “I came from tough stock.” What makes Vedi moving is not just its simplicity and vividness, but the absence of self-pity.
This is not to suggest that the man upstairs in his shabby New Yorker office is either saintly or humble. When he is uncomfortable he is tetchy. When he feels defensive, he will sting. When he is tired he seems to despair of reaching out to others, to feel the strain of being sightless among the sighted – a “donkey in a world of horses,” as he once called it.
Some colleagues revere him; they talk of his prodigious output and lean, fine prose. Others, jealous perhaps of the 100 or so pages at a time given to his pieces, say he has become the magazine’s “sacred cow” (especially cutting in view of his Hindu origins). In some strange way they hear him, as if his blindness were a source of almost primitive power.
“It’s unnerving,” explains one, “to meet Ved in the men’s room and have him know who you are before you say anything. He makes a point of being all-seeing and all-powerful.”
One glance around his book-lined office reveals the burden of his dependence. There is almost nothing he needs to read that is available to him except through others. A team of readers and typists both in the office and at home sustains the gargantuan effort of his work.
For one book alone, Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles, there were 400 biographies and 80 volumes of Gandhi’s work which he had, at least, to be acquainted with. Merely to skim Sunday’s New York Times costs him 25 dollars for the reader’s fee (It’s like having very expensive sawdust for breakfast”).
He dictates to an assistant, who reads and then re-reads to him through scores of revisions and rewrites: “I am a perfectionist,” he states simply. Ten to 15 hours a day, five days a week, he works at The New Yorker.
“What I do,” he says, “Requires a lot of tie and energy. It’s true that my life is uneventful, unless you consider mental events. It’s true that I have a lonely life.”
There’s a cello and piano recital at Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center. Ved Mehta is there with an attractive young woman, his companion for the last year.
“Perhaps in a way my life has been a failure,” he says. “I have no wife, I have no children. But I was brought up in a country where it was assumed as long as I can remember that a blind person couldn’t get married. I’d like to give a woman everything she wants, and in a million little ways I feel I would fail her. I think unless a woman can be seen, she feels neglected.”
He listens attentively during the concert; it seems to please rather than move him. He was himself raised to be a musician, it was one of the few fields thought to be open to him. “Part of my rebellion against my parents,” he says, “was to turn away from Indian music and to do something no one expected – to be a writer.”
He seemed to fit so well into this privileged, middle-class American setting. It is hard to imagine the huge leaps of culture which he has managed in his time. At 15, with almost no formal education, he left India by himself to go to a state blind institution in Little Rock, Arkansas – a by-word in those years for Southern bigotry.
He won a scholarship to Pomona College, California; another to Balliol. His first book, Face to Face, was published just as he went up to Oxford. “Balliol,” he remembers, “was the first time I felt totally accepted for years.” He was then a post-graduate student at Harvard and came to the attention of The New Yorker, where he has been ever since.
After the concert there is a stir at his presence: in these smarter, New York circles, the donkey has become a lion. There is talk of a celebration at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Mehta is invited, but such large gatherings are not to his liking.
The next morning finds him spry and refreshed, eager to make coffee or offer juice, every inch the gracious host. His apartment is formal; there is a long dining table with an imposing centerpiece, there is damask and velvet. The style is latter-day Maples or Harrods.
Until he was awarded the 235,000-dollar McArthur Prize Fellowship “for creative genius” last year, he had no stable income except what he earned from the magazine.
“To write a book,” he says “you have to suspend life.” And yet, in a way, he is full. He is taking piano lessons and learning to swim. If walking in Central Park has become too treacherous for someone who is blind (“the joggers are so belligerent these days”), there are still dinner parties, lectures, the fellowship of friends. Above all, there is the life of his mind, crowded with a million memories, many of which he has translated into the written word.
He has talked enough, it seems. Conversation starts to irritate him. He is anxious to get back to the real world of his books. Before leaving, he turns over one last question. “You ask, ‘What if you could have seen? What might you have done…’ Ifs and cans like that are just a parlour game. Some people have sight but they cannot see beyond their noses. I have literary imagination – I can honestly say I’ve been lucky."
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