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It is a well-known fact that the writer Ved Mehta is blind. The
fact acquired particular significance because of Mehta's habit
of writing, with absolute plausibility, as if he were a sighted
person. Readers of Fly and the Fly-Bottle, a series
of interviews with intellectual figures living in Britain in the
1960s, may remember the oddity of this aspect of his work. How
was it that he could say that he was instantly drawn to Iris Murdoch
by her St Joan-like appearance, "a celestial expression cast
in the rough features of a peasant, and straight blond hair unevenly
clipped"? The description was exact, but Mehta himself could
not have known it. Why, the reader might have wondered, did Mehta
so badly need to pretend that he saw?
The puzzle, partly answered in the autobiographical works Mehta
has been writing over the past 30 years, is directly addressed
in this excoriatingly truthful and heartbreaking account of the
pursuit, and loss, of love. In the opening pages Mehta alerts
us to the fact that he was nearly four years old, an energetic,
daring little boy, when he lost his sight. Already active, he
saw no reason to restrict himself. Defying the insistence by his
mother that some dreadful fate was at work and that a cure must
be found, Mehta simply behaved as though he still had his sight.
He chased runaway kites over rooftops, bicycled with his siblings
and took up the offer of schooling in America, where there was
a less prejudiced attitude towards the blind. Pursuing dates in
his teens, he learnt to drive a car and drove a new girlfriend,
under her understandably hysterical direction, along a Californian
highway.
That bizarre excursion was the last time that Mehta allowed blindness
to play an acknowledged role in a relationship. A handsome young
man, well-employed on The New Yorker, possessed of a fond circle
of friends, he felt able to defy this one disadvantage. Like a
fairy-story character, he imposed only one condition in his love
affairs. The beloved had to comply in the understanding that his
blindness was irrelevant, insignificant. Mehta himself appeared
to have complete mastery of his surroundings, to see like other
people. Seeming almost wizard-like in his power, he was deemed
invulnerable and thus well able to resist pain. Pain was, with
dreadful regularity, inflicted.
Readers may find other explanations for the torments Mehta suffered.
There is, for a start, the question of fatal attraction to a type.
Other than two gorgeous photographs of the author, in youth and
maturity, we are shown only the first beloved, a ballet-dancer.
There is no denying her beauty; she is ravishing, and the fact
that she is dancing the role of Persephone, flowers upheld, on
the verge of the dark underworld, presumably indicates her role
as a goddess of light, resisting the truth of Mehta's darkness.
Beauty is one quality shared by the four deities by whom Mehta
is in turn obsessed. Cruelty is the other. It comes in the form
of a spectacular indifference to the emotional damage they cause.
Each goddess-girl appears to him in a friendly guise, smiling,
available, almost housewifely. Each in turn reveals another relationship
to which Mehta will be condemned to take second place. Love is
presented as a trial of endurance, a challenge to his inability
to keep up his role as the invincible hero, master of the universe.
The first two tales, of Gigi and Vanessa, are relatively mild:
not so, their sequels. Lola, a German Punjabi girl who seems,
in Mehta's search for perfection, to answer his need for a fusion
of eastern and western cultures, carries echoes of Nabokov's Lolita,
even in her name. Here, in a story of pain and humiliation the
like of which I have rarely encountered outside fiction, Mehta
plays a version of Humbert Humbert, the kindly instructor, the
wise academic to a girl he foolishly despises for her lack of
college education. Lola's compliance increases his assurance.
There is a wonderful sense of appropriate injustice in the fact
that Gus, the man who finally wins her, who has perhaps always
been the greater love, is a handsome layabout, capable of offering
her none of the glamour, culture or wealth with which Mehta, increasingly
possessive and distraught, had endeavoured to keep her. It is
an awful story, and it is to Mehta's huge credit that the reader
feels complete sympathy for Lola, not him. He was, as he shows,
clinging and imperious enough to draw the demon out of any girl.
That, in my reading, is the intriguing undertow of this confessional
work. Kilty, the last love, is shown as a friendly, homey beauty
who suddenly discloses herself as monster- goddess, driven by
friends to perform acts of considerable imaginative cruelty. But
would the demons emerge in this way if Mehta himself wasn't seeking
them? I kept thinking of Robert Graves and his muses, of women
chosen as ritual killers, as rechargers of emotion and creative
power. Whatever the cause, the book is remarkable. Mehta is a
great stylist; combine this with a story of searing honesty and
you have a book that demands an intense response.
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