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Book clubs may become a whole new institution when instead of the members bickering back and forth or giving lengthy critiques on the current book, they will confront the author in person and listen to his or her point of view. That happened at our last meeting at Susan Weil's house in Bedford when all of the eight or 10 members arrived in full force, anxiously awaiting author Ved Mehta over a glass of wine or cider.
Ved Mehta, born in Lahore India, has been a staff writer of short stories at The New Yorker magazine for 33 years during the reign of William Shawn, apparently one of the most beloved of editors – most certainly so in the case of Ved, who saw him as a mentor. Ved wrote of Gandhi and 24 books on modern India , winning two Guggenheims and a MacArthur during his career. But perhaps the most extraordinary examples of his writing are the 11 books on his family called “Continents of Exile.” Could anyone imagine writing 11 books on their own family? All of this would be remarkable for any writer, but the fact that Ved is blind ups the ante considerably. He asked the book club to read “The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period,” the last of the series.
When Ved arrived with his American wife, Linn (a niece of Susan Weil), he entered with assurance, giving a bone-crushing handshake to all present before sitting down at the dining table. He has never used a cane or a seeing-eye dog, relying on facial vision, in which shadows thrown across his face give a sense of distance from objects. He believes that if blind people become too careful, they lose their powers of travel and “get glued to a rocking chair.” Not Ved, who has traveled great distances – sometimes hitchhiking in 1928 jalopies, riding in fuming buses, and rattling milk trains.
He wrote that in his 20's, he had “crossed the U.S. 14 times and visited in or traveled through 37 of the 48 (at that time) states.”
His father never doubted that Ved, blinded by meningitis at age 4 with a fever that almost killed him, would succeed in life. At age 15, Ved was able to read and write Braille, knew English and math. Determined to get as good an education as the rest of his six siblings, he applied to myriad schools in the U.S. despite advice that he would be better off in India . He was finally accepted by the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock , flew to New York City on his own, subsisting on orange juice during the flight because he did not know how to use a knife and fork on the chicken served him. Perfecting his English at the Arkansas School , he would later win a scholarship to Pomona College and take post-grad classes at Harvard and Oxford .
No wonder this man sits so straight in his chair at these accomplishments. His physical play is frightening – leaping from roof to roof in his boyhood while flying a kite, riding a bike with his wife who might warn of “a hole to the left or some gravel ahead.”
He dives into pools, skis downhill, walks the gangplank onto ships without railings when summering in Islesboro , Maine . He knows his friends by their walk. He appears more vivid to me than Superman.
We had come prepared, of course, and for once the book club was shy on asking questions or commenting. He told us that red in India meant love and danger, which was why he titled the book “Red Letters,” the story of his father's affair with a beautiful shepherdess hill girl. Untutored but chaste, she fled when Ved's father, Amolak, showed her some affection in his youth. He did not see her again until many years later when Dr. Amolak by chance treated her and he saw and remembered the Lord Krishna tattoo on her arm, the god she vowed to serve. Much had happened to the hill girl, Rasil, since then – captured by a mullah who was pimping for the Nawab, she was saved by a good Hindu gentleman from a low caste inspector who had raped her and then sold her to a rich but odious man whose social position depended upon her beauty. She had learned English, sophistication, and how to play mixed doubles tennis and bridge in Simla, the summer resort for the Raj crowd.
This sounds like something one of those love writers made up, but it is an autobiography and told in an intensely detailed investigative manner by Ved, who was concerned by the immorality of the affair. “In the beginning I judged my father harshly,” he told the book club. His father, a family man with 18 grandchildren, had led such a pure life in his arranged but contented marriage to Shanti. Such a scandal could even endanger any potential marriages of his daughters.
“Until involved in this project, I had contempt for writers who wrote about their parents' affairs,” Ved said. “When my father unburdened himself to me, I could see no way of writing about something that happened before I was born.”
Ved thinks that perhaps the affair, which lasted two years, would not have happened had the family not simmered in Simla, which Rudyard Kipling described as “riddled with frivolity, jealousy and intrigue.” We learn a good deal about the life of the rajas and the humble mountain people who must put up with them. Lord Amhurst was the first to arrive in the mountain town of Simla in the 1930's with 1,000 coolies hauling his baggage. Ved writes of one summer's social life made up of 12 large dinners, 29 small dinners, a state ball, a fancy ball, a children's fancy ball, six casual dances, two garden parties, two evening parties, and a charity fete. It makes Bedford seem rustic.
Even more peculiar is the fact that the wife, Shanti, and the lover, Rasil, are fond of each other, tender to each other. “You don't understand, child, I wouldn't be alive without her,” Mother Shanti tells Ved. Both women feel their lives knitted together forever.
When we come to the letters, they are love letters you can't imagine any American woman ever writing. At one point Rasil, annoyed with her hair, is about to cut it off, when she suddenly thought, “It belongs to you Amolak. Even then, I cut a little from the top which I am enclosing with this letter. I was sorry afterwards, and I do hope you will excuse me for this rashness.”
Amolak becomes ill and is confined to his bed for three months, while Rasil is closely watched by her husband so they cannot meet. Eventually the rift comes. Shanti suffers from asthma, Amolak dies, and Rasil lives in seclusion with her husband's son, guarded by ferocious dogs, and praying to Lord Krishna.
“But the book is not selling,” he said, asking the book club if we had any ideas. Someone suggested the title might be changed.
“Well, who would ever have thought a book with the title ‘Doctor Zhivago' would sell?” he asked.
Maybe he has a point. You'll have to read it and judge for yourself.
Ved Mehta takes
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