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I first came across Ved Mehta not in an Indian bookshop, but
when I was abroad on holiday. The book I picked up was a second-hand
copy of Face To Face,
his first book in his autobiographical series Continents Of
Exile.
Later, from Delhi's second-hand bookshops, I picked up a bound
volume of two more of his series—The
Stolen Light and Sound-Shadows
Of The New World. I wasn't aware that the rest of the
series existed, and really, by this time, thought I had enough
information on Mehta to last me a lifetime.
Of course, I had a fondness for him, the same way you would about
an old friend whom you haven't caught up with in ages, but whose.
life you were once intimate with, and every now and then you think,
"I wonder whatever happened to them." So when the final
volume of his autobiography The
Red Letters—a slim paperback of under 200 pages—reached
my desk, I took it home with interest.
Red Letters bears the subtitle My Father's Enchanted
Period and as the blurb says it is a "work of extraordinary
intensity and candour" about "Mehta's discovery of his
father's love affair with a married woman in the 1930s."
The prose, like in all of Mehta's work, easy to read, but slightly
whiny. For instance, when his father, visiting him in New York,
proudly gives a cobbler an inscribed copy of Face to Face,
Mehta's reaction is: "He was acting as if I were still a
dependant child, whom he could show off like a monkey on a chain."
Though the book was written after his father died, there is an
anger that shows itself in the words, an anger of a son coming
to terms with the fact that his father and idol was not the perfect
person he had visualised.
I think this book worked as a catharsis for Mehta and so, while
there may not be the loving detail about what people were like
and how they felt, there is a lot of dialogue mainly between Mehta
and his father. That and excerpts from the letters make up the
body and so this book is not one that can be read on its own.
As an ending it is a little sad, but it should be read by long
time Mehta fans, just because the narrative voice here is so different.
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