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This is a book about a man's love affairs. Here, for instance,
he describes the woman he came closest to marrying: "Lola
came out of Customs haltingly, on crutches, looking somewhat pale
but, if anything, more beautiful than ever. Her silk sari, which
had a blue-green border that set off the colour of her eyes, was
fresh and uncrumpled and had perfect pleats."
What is remarkable about this passage, and about Mehta's whole,
highly moving memoir, is that the author has been completely blind
since the age of three. He has practically no memory of ever having
seen anything in his life.
How, then, can he describe a woman's appearance in such detail?
Is he a fraud? We get an idea of Mehta's working style when Lola
accompanies him on a visit to see Mother Theresa in 1966. As they
leave, Mehta asks Lola if she has noted down every detail of Mother
Theresa's dress and appearance. He will use them later in a magazine
article, and his readers will have no idea that he is blind. Indeed,
Mehta ascribes the successive failures of his love affairs to
the fact that for many years he lived in a state of denial, somehow
imagining that he could see. The claim is extraordinary; yet after
reading his memoir, it comes to make a strange sort of sense.
Mehta, a doctor's son, was born in India in 1934, and went blind
as a result of meningitis. His mother, an uneducated woman with
traditional views, was never able to accept what had happened,
and instilled in him the notion that his disability was a punishment
for sins in a former life.
Even so, Mehta wanted only to be like everyone else. He describes
how he used to fly kites and ride bikes with his friends, and
how he would run along parapets with them, risking injury. At
the age of 15 he was admitted to a school for the blind in the
United States, where he decided that the only way he could get
a girlfriend would be to have a car. "I bought an old Chevrolet
and, on one occasion, slowly drove it around the campus with the
windows open so that I could spot people or obstacles." This
"spotting" was done using what Mehta calls "facial
vision", a kind of echo location, in which changing sounds
indicate surrounding objects. Mehta got a girl, but drove so fast
with her that she became hysterical with terror. After studying
at Harvard and Oxford, Mehta became a staff writer with The New
Yorker; a job that put him right at the heart of American literary
life. His friends over the years were to include Robert Lowell
and Muriel Spark - we read of the latter giving him a copy of
her novel The Bachelors, inscribed: "To my
favourite bachelor." Mehta would work with the aid of assistants
who read to him, took dictation, or transcribed his typescripts
that were always full of spelling errors since he was unable to
see words in print. In every other respect, though, he was no
different from a sighted journalist, travelling far afield to
conduct interviews, and being careful to use visual imagery in
his profiles, basing these on clues picked up from sounds or chance
remarks.
Mehta, living alone in comfort in New York, was indeed an eligible
bachelor. In his "denial" of his blindness, he acquired
a taste for collecting art, and a devotion to beautiful women.
The first lover we meet in the book is Gigi, a ballerina, "with
a dancer's body and a serious but expressive mouth." Gigi
sets a pattern not only in her looks, but also in her free-spiritedness.
Time and again, women put aside loose relationships with other
men to fall into Mehta's arms. Their fickleness seems to be part
of the attraction for him, but it is also, of course, the source
of his misery, when they invariably move on to other men.
After Gigi comes Vanessa, a glamorous English woman who, like
her predecessor, represents the "cultured" West that
Mehta seeks. As he himself comes to realise, denial of his Indian
origins is a factor in his choice of partner, as much as an attempt
to escape his blindness. Once the relationship has ended, Mehta
realises that he never really knew Vanessa at all; his love for
her was a symptom of a deeper need.
It is his next lover, Lola, who dominates the book. She is to
travel with him as his assistant in India while he researches
a book; but immediately he is struck by her sophistication, her
cultured wit. She is half-German, half-Punjabi, and "did
not give off a powerful scent of coconut oil like other Indian
women". One woman he means in particular is his own mother.
Lola becomes, as Mehta says, his "eyes". Always in
his travels, he jots details of addresses and contacts; she will
have to turn these into a card index. The task of gathering visual
details for him to use in writing comes equally instinctively
to her. But at the airport, as they prepare to fly across India,
Mehta meets the boyfriend - "a tall, athletic-looking fellow"
- that Lola is leaving behind in order to embark on a working
trip that inevitably, and very quickly, becomes an affair.
This is the core of the book, and Mehta reproduces love letters
they exchange when he is forced to return to America, leaving
her behind. Mehta's assistants in New York enable him to conduct
the correspondence, in which it emerges that Lola has become pregnant
by another man.
After this heartbreak, Mehta takes up with Kilty, an intense,
brittle young woman who shares his literary life, and with whom,
as with Lola, he comes close to marriage. Yet the end is mental
breakdown; Kilty goes into analysis, and so too does Mehta, as
he embarks on the last and strangest affair in his memoir.
His "partner" now is Dr Bak, a Freudian analyst who
utters some of the silliest and yet also some of the wisest lines
in the book. Mehta resists Bak's interpretations, some of which
seem merely crass, such as his attempt to associate eyes with
sexual organs. Yet, as Bak says, "neurosis is unconscious
and knows no reason or logic", and through Bak's coaxing,
Mehta arrives at an understanding of the cycle of failed love
affairs that he himself has brought about, through his own unwillingness
to acknowledge the truth about himself. Mehta comes to realise
that some unconscious memory of sight must still remain with him,
and this re-emerges at last as a memory of seeing his mother naked.
She taught him that his blindness was really a punishment; and
he has been punishing himself ever since. Mehta's unravelling
of his inner conflicts is absorbing, moving, and ultimately uplifting.
He emerges at the end, ready to build a better life, to find a
wife, and to embark on a series of memoirs of which this book,
remarkably, is in fact the ninth volume. I shall be seeking out
the other eight.
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