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"A personal history" of desire and disappointment—that
is what the author calls this book, or what is really a book-sized
letter. The kind of subject that has something for all of us,
something even from all of us. But it wouldn´t have worked
if we were only listening in to a confessional about the four
women he loved and lost. Or because the extraordinarily obvious
twist at the end would stop us comparing echoes, most of us anyway.
It wrenches you out of any expectations of diary-reading with
its play of past and present. That maybe living through an experience
is only a part of living; what the mind does with it later is
another story. The relationships that were and then weren´t
happened in the mid-60s. The writing came 35 years later. It´s
a story of then, of making sense of it then, and of making sense
of it now as it never did then.
All For Love is the latest in the autobiographical
series Mehta calls Continents of Exile. None of the nine is as
painful as this letter. It´s addressed to the women. "I
was prompted to write this book about each of you individually,
and about the four of you together, because of a long and profound
inward journey that I started in 1970 and that has altered my
life.... I am taking the strangers who will read it into my confidence;
they will sit in judgement on us—on what was done, what was
said and what was not said.... One impulse for laying myself bare
in this uncharacteristic way is the wish to get at the truth of
exactly what happened." Another, he says, "is to understand
the effect of love on one´s sense of self."
Ved Mehta was in his early 30s in the mid-60´s, and had
found fairly early success living in New York as a writer for
The New Yorker. Blind from age four, he went to school and college
in England and America where "girls were prepared to be friends
with me but generally spurned any romantic overtures...it was
only after I started writing and publishing that any nice girl
seemed to take a romantic interest in me, as if my writing made
me less alien—more real and comprehensible."
His position as writer opened doors to parties, and to women.
And to women in a pattern that they did not know, and at the time
he did not. But one woman repeated the other in a way that made
it possible for him now to write to all of you.
Through those chapters you live the trauma of those relationships
with him. Judith the dancer and then the Englishwoman Vanessa
in New York (after those childhood wishes that a memsahib would
take me in her arms and whisper sweet English endearments to me),
above all, Lola Khanna from Delhi and fourth but not least Kilty
back in New York. It´s quite a book for letters, and that
exchange of letters with Lola Khanna over years of his life, and
three chapters in his book, are a life lived and ended with letters
that the writer found difficult to write. "Since I wrote
for a living, writing letters always seemed to me a little like
a busman´s holiday. Also, I had long become accustomed to
dictating everything, but dictating love letters to an amanuensis,
however sympathetic, was like undressing myself at the office.
And whenever I sat down to type a letter to Lola, my laboured
efforts seemed no match for her spontaneity."
You almost don´t notice that it´s the author´s
style that has taken you through that pain and made you live it
before you knew it. This is not an author who makes an exhibition
of his sentences. The words speak, and you don´t notice
the brickwork along the way. It takes you to people in life in
a way never possible through the clever wordplay of the likes
of Rushdie and Roy. You don´t look at his sentences, you
look through them into an experience, unmindful of the language
that took you into it. Mehta´s style stands out for what
it is not: so transparent you almost don´t see print on
paper. It´s the language of remorseless honesty at the end
of one relationship after another. The had-I-this and had-I-that,
the unacknowledged sense of how dreadfully wrong things are just
when they seem perfectly right, all that telephoning after all
those decisions not to, the secrets, the lies, the rubbishing,
the manipulation, the other. And yet the book goes into relationship
after relationship with feelings of warmth and respect for a woman
who wanted to leave him to sleep with another man because she
wanted to get over him, of a woman who set up the wedding with
him and a date with another. And he writes of her with warmth
and respect beyond the usual writer´s empathy. It took a
shrink to call her a bitch.
There are moments through witnessing these relationships when
the repetition of patterns among the women gets mildly wearying
to read, as it was more than mildly wearying to live through.
But the stories come with his innocence then, 35 years ago, call
by call, letter by letter, illusion by illusion. The last 70 pages
of sessions with a New York shrink can at times be heavy going.
But it is this last chapter that untwists the story, the one that
brings insight. It was there all the time. How did we not see
it?
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