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There are two marble statues in the hallway of Ved Mehta's New
York apartment, both beautiful in their very different ways. Once
is a reclining, strangely androgynous Buddha with a Mona Lisa
smile, and the other is a deliciously chubby classical cherub
with tiny wings sprouting from its cool white back. Mehta smiled
as he showed me into the drawing-room." 'They are lovely, aren't
they? East and West. Not unlike me." Dressed in an elegant grey
checked suit and a silver and pink heavy silk tie, he then disappeared
into the pantry, returned a moment later with a bottle of chilled
Meursault and a couple of glasses , and said very politely, pulling
out a chair for me, "Do sit down, please." The room is furnished
with floor-to-ceiling books, stunning oriental carpets and antique
furniture and an eclectic collection of modern art. "Ah yes",
he said, as I complimented him on the decor, "I picked out all
the carpets and furniture myself." I realised I was with somebody
who cared deeply about how things look. People as well as objects.
Witness the only photograph in his new book, All
for Love: A personal History of Desire and Disappointment,
published by Granta this month. On the very last page, there she
is, wild flowers entwined in the her waist-length hair, a generous
mouth, enormous eyes: irresistable. She's a ballet dancer named
Gigi, who is one of the four past lovers Mehta has chosen as the
subjects for this fascinating and revealing memoir.
We chatted away about life, love, men and women - and just as
my glass was almost empty, he said, "Please allow me to give you
some more wine," and went off to get another bottle from the fridge.
Now, none of this would be the least bit remarkable, or worth
describing, were it not for the fact that Ved Mehta has been totally
blind since the age of three.
He was born in Lahore in 1934. Just before his fourth birthday,
he became blind after contracting cerebrospinal meningitis. His
father, a doctor, was Westernised in his education and outlook
on life, while his mother was a devout Hindu with very little
schooling, which explains their different attitutes towards their
son's blindness. His mother was convinced that his affliction
was a passing curse brought on by the evil eye, and dragged him
around to healers and astrologers, refusing to believe that the
condition was permanent. But his father knew that his optic nerves
had been destroyed , and instead of his wife's denial and magic,
he looked to Milton for inspriration and encouraged his son to
feel that he could do absolutely anything he wanted if he worked
at it.
But work meant education, and at the time there were no serious
schools for the blind in India. So, as a child, Mehta was kept
at home with the women, where he began to teach himself how to
piece together his own vision of the world using his other senses.
He could tell by touch the shape of someone's face, or the texture
of a plant or fabric, and learned over the years how much of a
person's character -even their weight, and most certainly their
mood and temperment - is revealed in their voice. He also became
adept at filing away all kinds of information about people that
picked up from listening to the grown-ups chattering away. These
random fragments were then fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle
inhis head until he was able to describe somebody in amazing detail:
"Aunt Kimmi has fat cheets, a narrow forehead, a tight little
mouth, a big nose and when she walks her chest almost seems to
go ahead of her." He made sounds visible. In his book he writes
about his need to live as though he could see, and speaking to
one of his lovers he says, "As you know, within hours of meeting
you, I was able to surmise what you looked like—even the
shade of your lipstick. But what you were not to know was that
I had reached this level of mastery only after years upon years
of using alchemy to transform my ears into my eyes—of developing,
in Keats's words 'blindness keen.'"
Mehta and his father spent many years applying, without success,
to schools in England and America and finally, when he was 15,
he was admited to the School for the Blind in Little Rock, Arkansas,
and set off alone, with a one-way ticket. It must have been terrifying,
yet he knew he had to escape from India where his disability was
seen as a permanent barrier to education and to living any kind
of normal life.
"In India," he said, "I was told from the day I lost my sight
that I would never get married and have children." At the school
in Arkansas he was forced to compress 12 years of missed schooling
intro three, graduated at 18 and went off to college in California.
From there he went to Oxford and then Harvard. But while his intellectual
life was zooming ahead, his emotional life was paralysed. Not
only did he have to deal with his blindness, but there was also
the question of exile, being a stranger in a foreign land. As
he writes, "There was hardly a day I did not feel defeated, condescended
to and humiliated."
Paradoxically, his skill at getting around by himself (he has
always refused to use a white stick) only complicated his feeling
towards others. "I had to prove every day, to everyone I encountered,
that I was able to do things they thought I could not do. Whenever
people tried to help or protect me, they jarred my self-confidence
and dulled my senses." A former colleague at The New Yorker magazine,
who was never a close friend, believes "Ved made a conscious decision
that it was more important to be taken as sighted than be liked."
In 1957, while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, he published
his first book, and then, a couple of years later, he was put
in touch with William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker.
Mehta told me quite simply , "Shawn was a genius and a saint."
A genius who fulfilled the role of mentor, father and protector."
I had never met such acceptance from anyone before," he said.
He went on to become a staff writer at the magazine, and to publish
lengthy articles on subjects ranging from Oxford philosophers
to theology, Mahatma Gandhi and what some critics have described
as "interminable" essays on his family in India. Mehta is a self
confessed addict and fanatic when it comes to his work ("my mistress,"
as he described it to me, laughing) and rarely takes any time
off. He works seven days a week, and intends to go on doing so
until he is summoned by "the big editor-in-chief" to his corner
office in the sky.
Shawn had admitted Mehta into the sunlit uplands of The New
Yorker, but he still longed for love. Which is where the
four women he writes about in All
for Love come into the picture. The first was Gigi, the beautiful
ballet dancer. He met her at a party and their relationship started
almost immediately, but ended when she abruptly announced that
she intended to marry someone else. About six months later he
ran into Vanessa, an elegant English girl he had known at Oxford,
on a snowy New York street one December evening. After dinner
that night, they ended up in bed together, and Mehta touchingly
decribes the effect her English accent and the word 'darling'
had upon him: "When I was a child I used to wish that a memsahib
would take me in her arms and whisper sweet English endearments
to me." But the dream was short-lived. Soon after the love affair
started, Mehta went off to England to work on a series of articles
about theology, and when he returned, there was Vanessa at the
airport to meet him—with a man called Robert in tow.
His next romance started in India where he went at the end of
1965 to write another series of articles for The New Yorker.
Lola was his secretary, and when she arrived at his parents' house
his mother exclaimed, "Your new secretary is so beautiful that
I'm sure she turns heads wherever she goes." Lola was also bright,
highly efficient, attentive and sympathetic. And, like Mehta,
a mixture of East and West. They traveled around India for five
weeks, became lovers, and after Mehta returned to New York, it
was agreed that she would join him there. After endless delays
and visa problems, she finally arrived, but during their separation,
had met Gus. Eventually she abandoned Mehta and he was once again
alone. The last lady in the quartet was Kilty, a highly neurotic
model/graduate student at Yale, who arrived in his office one
day with a bundle of her poems which she asked him to read.
Although there are moments of great happiness and fulfillment
with each of these women, there is also a great deal of sadness
in this moving and extremely courageous memoir. The subtitle of
the book, is after all, "A Personal History of Desire and Disappointment."
There has been an unspoken understanding with each of his lovers;
they had to go along with the fantasy that he could see; his blindness
must never be alluded to. And so each relationship was built upon
an insurmountable and monumental lie. "In order to live in the
world," said Mehta, "I had to live as if I could see, and yet
that way of living was a hurdle to acceptance by others, especially
by a woman I loved, for as long as I continued to hide from myself,
how could I expect her to truly know and love me?"
After his particularly traumatic split with Kilty, who ended
up having an abortion and going into psychotherapy, he decided
that he might benefit from psychiatric help himself. Enter Dr.
Bak. All Mehta's independence of spirit and intellect rebelled
against the idea: "I thought the people who went to psychoanalysts
were either pathetic lunatics or rich wastrels." Neither one nor
the other, Mehta embarked on a disturbing, weird and magical mystery
tour of his subconscious. It would be far too simplistic to say
that analysis transformed his life, and yet he told me, "The truth
is that I can't imagine what my life might have been like without
it. And yet, nor can I be sure precisely what gains and losses,
if any came from it."
It was only after many years of disappointing love affairs, and
being on his own, that he married Linn, the daughter of old family
friends, in 1983, when he was almost 50. Their first daughter,
Sage, was born a year after their marriage, followed by Natasha
a few years later.
As we sat chatting in his apartment high above Lexington Avenue,
surrounded by books (including the 23 he has written himself),
I realized what an extraordinary journey his life has been—"a
triumph of the will," as his friend, Kennedy Fraser, put it. But
why, I wondered, had he written this book, the emotional and intellectual
equivalent of stripping yourself naked in full view of the world?
"I needed to write about the woman I have loved for self-understanding,
to sort out, all these years later, a complicated welter of emotions."
And what did his former lovers think of the project? They all
give it their blessing and, with permission, he has quoted from
their letters, although names have been changed to protect their
privacy, with the exception of Gigi who, as a published author
herself, said she could handle the exposure.
As I was leaving, Mehta walked me to the front door and we both
stroked the two statues, East and West, and I asked him what he
was doing for the summer. He said he was going to Maine for a
month, with his wife and daughters, to their house by the sea-accompanied
by his new "mistress," the book he has just started writing about
his father, set in the Thirties. Idylic. And, just as important,
triumphant.
All for Love: A Personal
History of Desire and Disappointment, by Ved Mehta (Granta,
£14.99), is available for £12.99 Call 0870-155-7222 or write to
Telegraph Books Direct, 32-34 Park Royal Rd. London NW10 7LN.
An extract from All for
Love starts overleaf:
It was November 1968, one and a half years after Lola had left
me. As if to soften the edge of a miserable wintry day, a shy,
exquisitely beautiful young woman whom I had encountered at parties
around town walked into my office. Her name was Kilty. "I see
you're busy," she said, backing out of my office and starting
quickly down the hall. I dashed after her and caught up with her
just as she reached the elevator. "Don't go away, Kilty." "I don't
want to disturb you," she said. "You are not disturbing me-you're
brightening my day". I was surprised at my words, by her shyness
encouraged me. Kilty laughed in a girlish, high-pitched way and
her laughter ripped along the quiet, narrow halls. We walked back
to my office. The following month, she asked me what I was doing
for Christmas, saying, "I think you should have a Christmas tree".
"But I don't have any ornaments". "I know, I'm going to make you
some." "Oh, Kilty, It all seems such a fuss, Why? It makes your
apartment feel very homely. Perhaps I shouldn't be the one to
tell you, but the tree adds a kind of feminine touch that's woefully
missing around here". The evening after we installed the tree
she arrived with a sewing basket full of pipe cleaners and colorful
scraps of fabric and pieces of felt. While we sat and talked.
She stitched together some birds. Her sitting on the silk sofa,
bent over the sewing in her lap as my mother, my sister and my
aunts had done, knitting, stitching and embroidering at home-gave
the room a family feel. Her presence awakened in me certain emotions
that had lain dormant since Lola left me. When she had an assemblage
of bright birds, she showed me how to bend their pipe-cleaner
legs around the branches; we worked rapidly until the tree was
alive with the small, auspicious things. In attaching the last
bird to the tree, I noticed how warm it felt. You lucky thing.
I thought. You've been nestling in her hands. Now and again, by
design as much as by accident, I touched Kilty's hand: it was
long, shapely, and competent. Kilty finished up by hanging candy
canes, an angel, and a Santa Claus that materialized from her
sewing basket. And last we put on a string of lights that I had
bought at her request. With the table lamps on, the room seemed
to her to be too bright. I turned the lamps off. Then it seemed
too dark to her. I brought out some candles, which we lit. The
scent of the tree had probably been there all along, but suddenly
I noticed that the whole room was filled with its fragrance.
Walking home after Christmas dinner, I put my arm around her
cautiously, fully expecting her to disengage herself gently. Instead,
she turned her face toward me and rested her head on my shoulder.
I found myself kissing her. We circled the block, kissed again,
crossed over to the park side of Fifth Avenue, kissed again and
yet again. The morning after the first kiss, just as I walked
into my office and was wondering about the appropriate time to
call Kilty, the telephone rang. "It's me," Kilty said. Perhaps
because of her little girl's voice the greeting sounded very intimate.
"Beware," I told myself. "Go slow. It takes you for ever to recover
from a love affair." Last night was wonderful, I said, not quite
certain whether I was saying the right thing. You have such a
pure, sweet smile. I was just going to say something like that
about you, I said stupidly. Copycat, she said teasingly, and added.
I miss you. What are you doing tonight? That's a question that
I should have asked, I though. I'm taking you out to dinner, I
said quickly; I seemed to veer from caution to boldness, from
one extreme to the other. The same German restaurant? She asked.
I thought you might like a change. This little mouse is a house
body. She likes the same nibbles again and again. I found the
way she talked about nibbles both exciting and threatening. I
was reminded of my mother, who had a girlish side, and who, like
a child, was by turn sweet and arbitrary. What a pleasure to talk
to a woman with a light touch, I thought. What could be more appropriate
for me? Yet, even as I thought this, I wondered about my sanity.
I had imagined the Gigi was appropriate, yet she was a ballet
dancer, and I had no interest in or knowledge of dancing, I'd
thought Vanessa was appropriate, too, yet she ended up becoming
a follower of a self-styled holy man, And, of course, I'd thought
Lola was appropriate-indeed, that no other woman could ever be
right for me-and yet here I was having exactly the same feelings
about Kilty. I wondered how much of what she was and how much
by my imagination.
I could only conclude that each woman had appealed to a different
identity of mine. Gigi to my ericanself, Vanessa to my English
self, and Lola to my Zindian self. Could it be that because of
my confided identity, my instincts were so skewed that I don't
know what I really want, so I left it up to a woman to decide
whether she wanted me? Or was there something in me that was drawn
to women who were destined to leave me? You seem to be in deep
thought. Kilty said. What are you thinking about? I was just wondering
if you minded that I wasn't an American. You are such a wondrous
bird. Don't you know that we Americans are all originally immigrants?
So you don't mind? I find you very exotic like baklava. Ordinarily,
I was superstitious person, but as I paid the bill for our dinner,
I thought it was promising that Kilty and I, though born poles
apart, had had identical dinners-chicken liver pate. Wiener schnitzel,
fruit salad and coffee. Instead of the insistent tume of Chhuthe
asha kai tare nah hon, the song Lola used to sing in India. I
heard in my head the soft, gentle melody of Vivaldi'sSpring, with
its slumbering shepherd and sheepdog, and its murmuring brook,
the strains passing over le like a benediction. It'd been a long
winter, but now I'm strolling into the spring. On the street corner,
I hesitated between turning south and taking her to her parents
apartment and turning north and inviting her to my apartment.
Kilty instinctively turned north, and I fell in step.
Where shall I put the question? I asked myself. The apartment?
There's no romance in that. In a restaurant? That's a public place.
On the Top of the Sixes, with a stunning view of the city I love.
That's touristy. On a boat the Circle Line? That's certainly romantic,
but also public and a bit tacky. Take her away to an inn somewhere
in the Catskills? That's sort of middle-aged-OK for divorces and
widowers but not right for young love. Walking along the Brooklyn
Bridge? That's right for spring, but not for the winter. Still
I don't want to let another day go by. We'd been together now
for only and irrevocable love. Trying to learn from what I thought
of as my past mistakes, I was determined not to be tardy and casual-as
I'd been with Lola in India. I felt that I had to take control
and act quickly. Perhaps Gigi, Vanessa and Lola had all been wrong
choices, but now I wanted to lay claim to Lilty with a love as
lasting as that of my parents, who by then had been married for
nearly 45 years. When I was in high school, I had fallen under
the spell of JD Salinger and his toy epic, The Catcher in the
Rye, and had been mesmerized by Holden Caulfield ingenuou question
to a New York taxi driver: "You know those ducks in that lagoon
right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance,
do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all
frozen over?" In my adolescence, I had identified with those migrating
ducks. I decided that as soon as Kilty and I got together that
evening, I would coax her to take a walk with me in Central park
and steer her to the duck pond. I picked Kilty up from the lobby
of her parents' building and took her for lunch at a little Italian
restaurant on Madison Avenue, and afterwards we walked, through
cold, sunless afternoon, to the pond. It was windswept and bleak,
and there was not a single duck or child in sight. "Well?" she
prompted. I was flustered. "Will you marry me?" My words came
out in a single breath. I wondered whether I had surrendered to
her what should have been entirely my initiative. In books, men
kneel on one knee, I knelt down, and she seemed happy. "But I'm
waiting for your answer," I said. "You know so little about me.
I gave you my answer when I slept with you". I was hoping for
a definitive response, sweet". She flung her arms around me and
kissed me powerfully, murmuring, "Yes-yes-yes-yes." As Kilty and
I were walking back to my apartment, after the formalities at
the duck pond, I said to her giddily, "The moment we get home,
I'm going to telephone my parents in New Delhi, and Jasper and
Miriam, my friends in Oxford" Her hand went rigid in mine. "Are
you all right?" "Yes," she said, in a distant voice. Then she
said, "You are not to breathe a word about marriage to a soul".
"I won't if you don't want me to-but why not?" "Don't ask me any
questions unless you want me to flip". "I won't," I said accommodatingly.
Her spell-or whatever it was-passed, but the rest of the way home
I stepped along hesitantly, my balance had been shaken. Finally,
in the evening, when she was her relaxed, flirtatious self again,
I asked her the reason for the secrecy. I must speak to Pappy
and Mother before anyone else hears about our marriage. You can't
have any idea how much persuading it will take to get them to
agree. I'll have to find just the right moment, or everything
may go kaput. A few evenings later, after dinner at my apartment
I poured a little brandy into a couple of crystal snifters and
we settled down together on the sofa. Coby called today, and I'm
going to Philadelphia to see him tomorrow, she said without any
preliminaries. I broke up with him last October, just before I
went to Paris with Michael. I was stunned. You've never mentioned
Coby before, I said. You've never mentioned any of your ex-girlfriends
to me, either. Her tone was defiant. But there hasn't been a woman
in my life for a long time, I protested. I know, she said, putting
her head on my shoulder. Don't be alarmed. I said in my most encouraging
voice (the one I used for interviewing reluctant subjects). Tell
me more about Coby. He sounds fascinating. You know the way people
refer to Frank Sinatra as Old Blue Eyes? Well, everyone at college
used to refer to Coby as Bedroom Eyes. I flinched. Then I said,
"What does 'Bedroom Eyes' mean?" It tells me nothing about his
eyes. Are they restless, or deep or penetrating, or seductive?
Is his gaze so intense that you feel you are in his power? Are
you, unclothe you? Don't overdo it, she said. I know how you feel.
I'd really like to know who my competition is I said. He's not
your competition. Besides, you must control your jealous impulses.
Is Coby very handsome? When I first saw him, I ran in the other
directions, because he looks like a movie star, she said. But,
don't torture yourself. I've broken up with him, and that's the
end of it. But it's not the end of it if you want to go and see
him. I want to go and be with him, not for my sake but for his.
He can be really violent, and I want to make sure he doesn't harm
himself.
Summer came and went. Every two or three weeks Kilty would go
to Philadelphia or Coby would turn up in New York. She arranged
matters so I was never able to meet Coby and judge for myself
how much of a threat he was. One Saturday evening, as I was kissing
her goodbye outside her building, she said, "I'll be leaving for
New Haven tomorrow. I have been accepted at Yale to work toward
a PhD in English literature." I berated her for not telling me
her plans. I applied as a lark. I was sure I wouldn't get in.
The next day, I took Kilty to Grand Central Station, and hauled
her case full of clothes and books from the taxi to the platform.
It won't be too bad for you, sweet, will it? She asked. I felt
like yelling. What do you think? Why are you doing this to us?
But instead I said, No, it won't be too bad. I'll try to come
up on weekends. And so life went on, until she finally agreed
to come back to New York for the wedding. Kilty had vacillated
so much about marriage that I didn't allow myself to take her
coming for granted until she actually arrived on November 28.
This was such a heady period that for years I remembered each
date as if I were making off days on an Advent calendar. As luck
would have it, I had won a free trip to New Delhi in an airline
raffle the Friday that Kilty was to the city to set our marriage
plans in motion. I had a good reason to go to India-my father
was not keeping well-but when I mentioned the free trip to Kilty
I immediately regretted it, because after that, she would not
hear of my passing it up. As Kilty is tackling her parents I will
be giving the good tidings to my family, I though. For many years,
my relatives near and far, had been waiting for news of my marriage.
I was 35 and, in their eyes, long past the Hindu stage of a householder-of
becoming a family man in my own right. The Hindu life cycle calls
for a man to devote his first 25 years to learning, his second
to raising a family, his third to doing community service, and
his fourth to preparing to take leave of worldly cares. Separation
from Lola and Vanessa had had such disastrous consequences, however,
that the idea of putting thousands o miles between Kilty and myself,
even for only a week, filled me with foreboding, and that was
deepened by the fact that every time I turned on the radio to
catch the weather report or the news headlines I would hear the
song Leavin on a Jet Plane. In the song's plaintive refrain I
heard echoes of my own predicament. I would then scold myself
for not being much better than the soothsayers who try to divine
the future from tealeaves or the entrails of a bird, and above
all, for not trusting in Kilty. I was flying out December 4, and
as I was saying goodbye to Kilty I made her promise three things:
she would talk to her parents promptly; regardless of what they
said, she would telephone the guests and invite them; and she
would keep me informed by cable. As I was leaving New Delhi, I
picked up a blue silk suit that I had ordered on the day I'd landed
to be made up for her as one of my wedding gifts; it matched her
eyes. I now intended to give it to her and pretend that I had
casually picked it up as a travel present=glossing over the fact
that, until so very recently, it had signified my hops in New
York, I reached her on the phone at her parents' apartment. Usually,
when we hadn't spoken to each other for a day or two she sounded
giddy and excited, but this time she sounded far away. Kilty entered
the apartment with a heavy step and returned my embraced a bit
self-consciously. How did you get on in my absence? I asked, after
a while. Vedkins, Kiltykins was hoping you'd tell her all about
India. If you really want to know what went wrong, you should
have known that without your being near me I could do nothing.
But you insisted that I go, I didn't want to, I now realize that
without your presence I was paralyzed.
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. |
