| Book extracts: Page
1 | Page
2 | Page
3 | Page
4 | Page
5 | Page
6
With Father's Day coming up, give the tie, but give a book, too.
A book that many men will like is Ved Mehta's "The Red Letters
: My Father's Enchanted Period" (Nation Books $22.95). In
1967 Ved was working at The New Yorker magazine for William Shawn,
the Editor-in-Chief. Ved, who is blind since age four, was born
in India and had graduated from Harvard College. His parents were
visiting from India and Ved gave a small dinner party for them
with Mr. and Mrs. Shawn and their two grown sons. The Shawn family
did not drink, Ved's father did. Halfway through the evening,
Ved's father , who was a doctor, excused himself and went to lie
down. It became a dinner party from Hell for Ved , when he discovers
his father lying face down on his bed and sobbing, and his dinner
guests trying to act as if nothing had occurred.
The next day he asked one of the guests "What Happened?"
It seems his father talked about his responsibility for Ved's
blindness. He had not recognized that Ved had meningitis and had
delayed by a day taking him to the hospital because his English
superior was visiting and he had arranged a tennis party. This
was the first that Ved knew of the events leading to his blindness.
When he confronted his father with the facts, he asked him why
he had not told him thirteen years before when he had started
writing his autobiography.
Ved Mehta wrote his first book when he was twenty-two and had
been speaking English for only five years at that time. The book
and the subsequent autobiographies were a success. His father
suggested that they could collaborate on a novel from his medical
experiences. The story had to do with a young Indian girl from
the hills who was forced into an early marriage at fourteen to
a man who attacked her and who was rescued from this situation
by a young man.
The young man was the young Doctor Mehta with a wife and two
children. Later Dr. Mehta will give Ved the love letters that
were written and will reveal that the woman in question was a
friend of the family. There is an eloquent scene with his mother,
who knew everything that was going on but who chose to close her
eyes to her husband cheating with her supposed best friend. The
woman, in question, ended up living with her step-son whom she
had accused of raping her. Ved makes the comment that he never
liked the sound of the woman's voice.
Buy
The Red Letters
The Red Letters
book preview
Read other reviews of
The Red Letters
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
