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Ved: the truth about my father |
By any standard, Ved Mehta is a literary phenomenon of our times.
He lost his vision when he was four years old. He did his schooling
in institutions for the blind. He had as full a life as anyone
of his age. He was an active member of the RSS during his years
in Lahore. He went on to Oxford, then to Harvard and finally on
the staff of the New Yorker for 33 years. He is the author of
24 books. Among the many awards he won is the Guggenheims and
the MacArthur Fellowship. He had many love affairs and is now
a happily married man, father of two daughters and lives with
his family in New York.
Quite understandably, many of his books are about members of
his family and immediate surroundings. Whenever he did venture
beyond his pale, he had to see the world through other's eyes
and often went wrong in his descriptions. But the portrayals of
his family were true to life. Of them the best known is his father's
biography, Daddyji.
Much later his father himself owned up to having cheated on his
mother for some years which he described as the "enchanted period".
Daddyji's dalliance has an idyllic beginning. On a summer vacation
in the hills, he ran into a girl tending her father's flock. She
was unsurpassingly fair — light skin, brown hair and large
almond-shaped eyes. They got talking. He was bewitched by her
beauty. When he returned to the hills the next summer, the girl
was gone. He complained to the British collector but was told
to mind his own business. He returned to Lahore to pursue his
studies, got selected for the Medical Service, married and proceeded
to sire children. Meanwhile, the girl, who had been abducted by
an inspector of police, was rescued by a Kashmiri Pandit family.
They adopted her, educated her, taught her to play tennis and
learn how to conduct herself in upper class society. In due course,
they looked for a husband for the girl. And surprisingly, gave
her to a pot-bellied widower named Fatumal who had two sons, the
elder almost the same age as the girl. But he was rich; he had
made his money as a government contractor. One day Daddyji was
summoned by Fatumal to attend to his sick wife. She turned out
to be the same shepherd girl he had met in the hills, now grown
into a ravishingly beautiful woman. The two families became friends.
They met in Lahore's elite Cosmopolitan Club, shared the same
house during the summer months in Simla. Ved's mother got on well
with Mrs Fatumal. So did her children, to whom she became Auntie
Rasil. Behind everyone's back, Ved's father and Rasil became lovers.
They wrote soppy love letters to each other. Their dalliance got
known. But no one kicked up a shindig. For Fatumal, keeping up
with the highly-placed government doctor was essential for staying
in high class society. Ved's mother also accepted her husband's
infidelity with good grace as she had no other options. She bore
him more children. When Fatumal died, Rasil became her stepson's
mistress-wife.
This tangled tale was put together by Ved Mehta when his father
told him about what he had missed out in Daddyji. What
compelled him to do so, we are not told. The Red Letters
are a judicious mix of fact and fiction. There is also a lot of
padding — a long chapter on the history of Simla, an Afterword
following an Epilogue. Nevertheless, the story holds the
reader's interest because it is a true portrayal of how a Hindu
middle-class family managed to hold together when others would
have split apart.
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