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As of the way into this graceful memoir, and just before he starts
to unfold the tale-within-a-tale concerning tile eponymous 'red
letters', author-narrator Ved Mehta admits to a moment of agonising
self-doubt: "In writing a series of books about myself and
my family, among other things, with the title Continents of
Exile, I have often been torn between loyalty to my family
and loyalty to my craft, to which any kind of censorship is anathema.
My father, who served as a source for some of the material, knew
all too well how such conflicts tormented me."
Mehta is especially troubled by the material at hand in the
current book. While all the eleven volumes of his long autobiographical
series have been immensely revealing about his family and himself,
the revelations in question have been more of an intellectual
and cultural nature, concerning themselves more with the impact
of a lifetime spent abroad (in exile, as he calls it) upon a writer's
mind and relationships. The series to date, as anyone who has
been following it even occasionally since the first volumes, Daddyji
and Mummyji,
were published decades ago, are gentle, self-probing intellectual
studies that are, as much observational records of their place
and time as literary autobiography.
But in this book, he is about to introduce an unexpected 'twist'
in the title. Mehta's father, a genial public health official
with unfulfilled literary ambitions ("I may still surprise
you, son, by writing a bestseller one of these days"), comes
to New York with his wife for their daughter's confinement, and
behaves peculiarly at a party hosted by the author.
After his return to India, the father makes good his literary
threat, and begins to send Mehta chapters of a "novel"
he claims to be writing. He later reveals that the "novel
is nothing more than a thinly disguised memoir of a certain period
in his life, dating back forty years. As Mehta reads on, and then
agrees to collaborate with his father in this joint act of turning
remembered history into literary fiction, he learns with growing
unease that his father is really confessing to a secret extramarital
love affair from that period. To make matters worse, rather than
wallowing in guilt or self-remorse, his father seems quite unabashed
about revealing the more intimate details of the matter: "Sex,
as you would call it today."
In the end, Mehta agrees to proceed with the work because as
he puts it in one of the quietly eloquent passages which mark
his work, "he, like me, sensed, even as he was confiding
in me, that the story had a larger significance, something neither
of us could yet verbalise, but which we imagine would far transcend
his life — and maybe mine too."
What follows is a fascinating narrative, like one of the Russian
dolls-within-dolls-within-dolls that so fascinated Mehta during
his childhood. Unpeeling the onion of the past in carefully revealing
layers, he proceeds to give us his father's transparently autobiographical
'novel' fragments, alternating with the events described in those
fragments, then his own reactions to these revelations. This being
Ved Mehta, there is nothing sordid or truly shocking about the
revelations. With painful grace and elegance, he winds his way
through past and present, mind and body, real and perceived, to
weave an enticing tale. In the end, the real relationship being
explored and studied is not really that of his father and the
'other woman': it is Ved and his father themselves. Completing
— and, often revising — the first novel of Continents
of Exile, Daddyji, Mehta produces a deceptively
simple, impressively artful book, one that manages to fulfil its
aspiration to transcend mere autobiography and achieve the status
of literature.
Interestingly, the red letters of the title don't exist. They
are a fictional device suggested by his father to Ved as a means
of conveying the details and passion of his remembered liaison.
After all, as Daddyji points out, Mehta has frequently altered
important details such as names, places, and some events to make
the material of life more suitable for purposes of literary recreation.
And in any case, this particular story, by Mehta's choice, will
only be published after all parties concerned have passed away
and are far removed from any potential hurt which such revelations
or alterations may cause. It's a significant reminder to all vicarious
readers and over-zealous critics that the final work exists as
a literary entity unto itself, not merely as a bare documentary
record of real people and events. The best autobiography, as this
book is, transcends itself to become a tale of the human condition.
Mehta may not have achieved the heights of his self-declared literary
aspirations, Proust and Joyce, but he has produced a valuable
insight into the Indian diaspora that deserves a place on our
shelves beside the best work of Naipaul and Rushdie.
In a chapter at the end of The Red Letters, Mehta provides
a brief synopsis of the themes covered by the previous ten volumes
and readers who may have missed entries in this long roman fleuve,
running into some two thousand pages, flowing through the disparate
lands of India, England and America, covering events from the
late 19th century to the early 21st (though not in strictly chronological
order), would do well to start at the beginning and work their
way through to this very satisfying and illuminatory work. It's
rarely that an author gets to write 'The End' not only to a long
series of novels but in effect to his own life story. With The
Red Letters, Mehta performs that miraculous literary act.
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