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With this book, the Indian-born writer Ved Mehta brings full
circle the autobiographical saga, Continents of Exile,
on which he embarked in 1971. There are now 11 volumes in the
series, which starts and finishes with his father, the energetic
and endearing "Daddyji" whose life as a respected doctor
and medical civil servant began when India was still part of the
British Empire.
In this final episode, Mehta uncovers a family secret and learns
how hard it is for even the most loving and scrupulous son to
perceive the truth about a parent's emotional life. At the same
time, he asks us to recognise his "autobiographie fleuve"
as not just a series of stories but an investigation of the power
of memory comparable to the work of James Joyce and Proust.
Mehta himself, who became blind at the age of four, was sent
to America when he was 15 to pursue the kind of education India
could aid not give him. His father's belief in him, coupled with
his own hopeful, stubborn, courageous nature laid the foundations
for his triumph its over his blindness, which he simply refused
to allow to limit his life. After moving on from college in California
to Oxford, and then to Harvard as a postgraduate, Mehta found
his vocation as a writer for the New Yorker in the early
1960s, and has lived in New York (as an American citizen) ever
since.
Alongside this new book, his publisher has brought out new editions
of the preceding is two volumes which have already appeared in
America: Remembering
Mr Shawn's New Yorker, the best account among many of
the bizarre workings of the magazine, and Dark
Harbor, which Mehta calls "a comedy of social and
architectural imbroglios", the story of how he built a house
for himself, his wife and their two daughters on an island off
the coast of Maine.
Over the years, as the saga has unrolled, appearing first in
the New Yorker and then in book form, there have been
moments when even Ved Mehta's admirers have felt overwhelmed by
the sheer length and detail of his auto-biographical writings.
He has always been an exceptionally lucid and readable writer,
and is a natural storyteller; but as he as wanted each book to
be able to stand alone, a degree of overlap and repetition were
inevitable.
He had no idea, when William Shawn first encouraged him to write
about his family, that he would find himself producing such a
series; over the 30 years it has taken him he has also written
some dozen other successful books, lest including studies of contemporary
philosophers and historians, an account of modern India and a
biography of Gandhi. Now, in an afterword to The Red Letters,
Mehta offers the rationale behind his extraordinary enterprise:
"The series is predicated on the notion that the more particular
a story, the more universal it is."
The new book begins, characteristically, with a story he has
told before, of an awkward dinner party in New York in 1967 for
his parents and the Shawn family. Mr Shawn, as Mehta always respectfully
calls him, was not only his boss but his second father, a man
he loved and revered; it was painful as well as puzzling when
Mehta senior proceeded to drink too much and retreated in tears
to the bedroom.
This mysterious display of emotion leads Mehta on to describe
how, some years later, he found himself helping his father write
a story, at first presented as fiction, about how a young doctor,
well-educated and "England returned", became caught
up with a lovely, fair-haired shepherd girl from the foot-hills
of the Himalayas, and eventually had a passionate, guilty affair
with her.
Gradually Mehta understood that his father was the young doctor
concerned, and found himself having to rethink all his assumptions
about his parents long and apparently happy arranged marriage.
He knew the woman concerned, as a family friend; it was unnerving
to be presented by his father with a bundle of Auntie Rasil's
love letters, full of adoration and yearning. Mehta uses this
simple, poignant tale to illuminate the confusions that beset
his father's generation of educated, ambitious young Indians,
drawn to British standards and social attitudes and yet emotionally
conditioned by traditional values.
It is impossible not to admire Ved Mehta's nerve and stamina
as a writer. He has taken risks and overcome many obstacles, personal
and professional, to fulfil his aim, to tell "a cross-cultural
story of India, England and America". He has also succeeded
in creating a great tapestry of words, finely woven, full of brilliant
detail but whose structure and meaning deserves to be considered
as a whole.
Buy
The Red Letters
Buy
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
Buy
Dark Harbor
The Red Letters
book preview
Remembering Mr.
Shawn's New Yorker book preview
Dark Harbor
book preview
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The Red Letters
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