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How long ago was it—15 years—that Ved Mehta’s
long piece on Calcutta, “City of Dreaded Night,” appeared
in The New Yorker? What an amazing piece of writing that was;
what an accumulation of images—the simple dredging of an
Indian river made a cosmic exercise in futility; the sudden grotesque
picture of a prepubescent prostitute standing next to a bicycle
in a forlorn boardinghouse; Mother Teresa, the lepers: “City
of Dreadful Night” accomplished the nearly impossible. It
made Calcutta live, utterly, as a vision of terrestrial hell;
but it also made that city so seductive in its misery that the
reader longed to be there.
After reading Portrait
of India, the monumental book of which the Calcutta section
was only a part, it was impossible not to begin to think that
this Ved Mehta, this Indian, after all, might not simply be the
best “travel” writer, the best manager of nonfiction
writing in English. Who could do it better? Hunter Thompson with
Las Vegas? John McPhee in his Coming Into the Country when
he did magic with that little town of Eagle, Alaska?
Then, when Mehta began writing about his family—the small,
related volumes of Mamaji
and Daddyji—this
reader, at least, felt the way Steve Allen says he does when he
watches Sammy Davis, Jr. He wants to cry, Allen says, not for
the sentimentality of it, nor from envy but for the sheer smashing
exhilaration of watching a marvelous performer giving a marvelous
performance.
Tortures of the Damned
When Ved’s father, a Western-educated physician, asks the
matchmaker for a wife who can sing to him, who knows English,
who has Western savvy; when he is swindled instead into marrying
a kindhearted, unmusical, non-English-speaking little lady who
suffers the tortures of the damned when the car she’s driving
runs out of gas and she thinks she’s broken it forever; well,
you have to be there, in those pages, to see the beauty of it.
When Mehta shows us the building of a dam; hundreds of brightly
clad peasants carrying just a few bricks at a time; when in Mahatma
Gandhi and His Apostles, Mehta conjures up the evenings
when the movement was still young, when the fragrance of blossoms
was everywhere and Gandhi’s followers stayed up late, out
of doors, laughing, rubbing each other’s backs—it’s
a literary miracle—a whole world is given to us, and of course
the kicker in all this is that Ved Mehta is blind.
For a long time in his career he didn’t write of it, didn’t
mention it. When he did, it was at the end of one his family chronicles:
At the age of 5 he caught meningitis. His father ignored the fever,
went to play a line of tennis; this slight delay may have been
what caused young Ved’s blindness; then again, maybe not.
He was packed off to a school for the blind for a while, then
returned home....
And this is when The Ledge
Between the Streams picks up. Ved is home once again,
in Lahore, in the this or that, or what color the new car is,
or why one stream is muddy and warm, the other clear and icy cold.
What’s a kid to do? The family sets Ved to studying Indian
music; his tutor tiptoes across the room and sets the clock ahead
half an hour. All the sisters and brothers have bikes to ride
on: Ved finds a broken bike at the back of the compound, fixes
it himself. He’s already bonked and dented himself almost
silly by depending on “facial vision,” a form of radar
that only sometimes works. Mehta has already stopped walking and
started to run. Now he careens about madly on his bike.
He takes up roller-skating. Because there are no decent schools
for the blind in India, his life is a skein of misery and thwarted
energy. What can he do in his life: It seems that marriage, a
vocation, education, everything will be denied him because of
his “affliction.”
The book breaks, in the middle, from the anguish of a child
to the anguish of a nation. Mehta’s family, well-to-do Hindus,
live in Lahore, which after World War Il and the British pullout
will be given over to (made into) Pakistan. Can it be possible
that Muslim and Hindu, who have lived together in relative harmony
for so many years, will turn to massacring each other? As it turns
out, Mehta says, it was the Muslims who slaughtered, and the Hindus,
still acting under Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings of nonviolence,
who stood still for being slaughtered, (And Mehta’s grisly
accounts of post-Partition refugee camps explain the sourness
of his account of Gandhi’s life: You can only practice nonviolence,
Mehta suggests, against people who are essentially decent to start
with.)
After Partition, the family starts again, as refugees. Life
goes on, as they say. Still, young Ved has had only four years
of education, and in desperation goes to a school for blind Indian
soldiers, where he nearly perishes of loneliness, but learns Braille,
some English and how to type.
The typewriter is his passport even then as, once again home,
he pounds out letter after letter in shaky English to every blind
school in England and America he thinks might take him, and suffers—before
he even thinks of writing for a living—hundreds of rejection
letters. Finally a school in Arkansas takes him on. Is it a school
for Negroes, perhaps? His family is too tactful to ask. Taken
for a ceremonial interview with Pandit Nehru, Mehta is asked by
the leader of his country, “Why Arkansas?” Ved, only
14, answers, “That’s the only place that would have
me.” But now, what triumph! Fifteen successful books. A fine
career. Success. That he can remember and convey such strong emotions
as well as those visual details he magically conjures up testifies
at once to his genius and his bull-headed courage.
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