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America-based writer Ved Mehta, who is seventy this year, was
born in Lahore in 1934, and his family moved to India after Partition.
He has been blind, caused by a childhood attack of cerebrospinal
meningitis, since the age of four. He attended Balliol College,
Oxford and Harvard University before beginning his writing career
at the age of twenty. Thereafter, Mehta joined the staff of the
New Yorker and remained there for thirty-three years. A recipient
of several awards and honours (beginning with a Phi Beta Kappa
in 1955, and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships later in his
career), he was written twenty-four books, which include accounts
of modern India and Mahatma Gandhi. And, happily for us, he is
still writing.
The Red Letters is the eleventh and final instalment
of Mehta's Proust and Joyce-inspired autobiographical series,
Continents of Exile, a series which includes Daddyji,
Mamaji, and Remembering
Mr Shawn's New Yorker, an account of Mehta's long career
at that venerable publication (a career that lasted upto the advent
of Tina Brown). Typically, in tracing the shifting landscapes
of exile, he writes about the many diverse influences on his life:
India, Pakistan, and Partition; then England, America, and the
New Yorker — and occasionally but in a matter-of-fact
way, the fact of his blindness. The first volumes in the series
were about his father, a public health official in Indian government
service, and his mother; about the Hindu family trying to enter
the modern age at the cusp of the two centuries, nineteenth and
twentieth; and about the circumstances that led up to his own
blindness from childhood.
A slim volume, The Red Letters is a retelling of what
Mehta calls his father's "enchanted period", his passionate
relationship with a rich, very beautiful, westernised and unhappily
married woman in Lahore in British India of the 1930s. Beginning
with the discovery that his father had first met this woman, Rasil,
when she was a naive shepherd girl in the Punjab mountains, Mehta
learns of the chance meeting, years later, when his father is
called in to treat a wealthy Lahore socialite, and discovers that
the socialite is none other than his shepherd girl of the past,
now trapped in an unhappy marriage and yet, for him, unchanged.
Exploring the many layers and implications of the unfolding secrets
of his parents' lives, Mehta confronts the tragic effects of the
unhappy triangle on the central characters in the family drama,
as well as on his own life.
This memoir is interesting not only for its insights into the
complexities of family history, arranged marriages and the quest
for love, but also for its honest descriptions of the writer's
business of shaping a narrative out of such material. At first,
trying to collaborate with his father on a sketchy account of
a meeting with a pretty shepherd girl in the hills, against the
backdrop of the misdeeds of little tyrannical princes and nawabs
with dominion over their individual states, Mehta is not satisfied
with the endings suggested by his father: "The endings were
all unsatisfactory...In any event, the scenes jumped ahead thirty
or forty years without giving any idea of what might have happened
in the interim. I felt I had no choice but to abandon the project
once and for all."
But then, gradually, he counters some new material. Sitting in
the India International Centre in 1974 when he is in Delhi to
research his Gandhi book, Mehta spends some evenings with his
father, who once again brings up the topic of the unfinished story
and its different possible endings. Listening to his father, Mehta
realises that the hill encounter was, in fact, his father's own
story: "His having slipped from conditional into indicative
mood, and then from future into present tense, all but confirmed
my surmise...I was trying my best to avoid admitting a certainty
that was now on the edge of my consciousness."
And what of the Red Letters? They are the letters exchanged by
Mehta's father and the woman who the young Ved knew as 'Auntie
Rasil.' "Once I started reading them," says Mehta, "with
the help of a trusted assistant, the curiosity I had felt somewhat
in the face of their jarring reality...they gave me the dizzying
sensation of being the voyeur that I had all along dreaded being.
Their belonging to another time and generation did not take the
edge off my discomfort." The letters of lovers are seldom
interesting, and those of star-crossed lovers are even less so.
Fortunately for us, Mehta is sensitive to the needs of his craft,
and quotes from the letters with remarkable restraint.
Besides, despite the title of this volume the letters are not
really his main subject in this memoir. In his typically lucid
and elegant style, Mehta explains the dilemmas that he faced while
writing this account, and how, in an effort to be honest both
to the people in the story and to the story itself, he found his
way through them: "I can't help but wonder if I am being
self-serving or vengeful by using his most private memories as
material for my writing. Anyway, by the nature of my vocation,
I am ill-suited to keep secrets. 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. He
also knew that I was always able to negotiate my way between the
feelings of the people I was writing about and the demands of
my craft — by disguising people and places, among other
strategems. In any event, 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 imagined would
far transcend his life — and maybe mine too."
That larger significance is the real subject of this honest and
moving memoir.
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