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At the beginning of this 11th and concluding volume in his Continents
of Exile series (All for Love, 2001, etc.), the India-born, blind
author Mehta recounts an incident that occurred when he was a
young man living in New York. The neighborhood cobbler addresses
him as “Mr. Mehta” and tells him how much he liked
his recent book. Mehta’s appalled reaction (“How dare
he be so familiar with me?”) suggests the burden laid on
him by his sense of propriety. And propriety will be sorely tested
when his father suggests that Mehta help him with a novel he’s
writing, the story of an idealistic young doctor working in the
hill country who falls in love with a shepherd girl and rails
against the abuse she suffers at the hands of the local Nawat:
The tale’s verisimilitude ignites in Mehta a suspicion that
this may be creative nonfiction, but he can only approach the
subject gingerly: “In the balance were my lifelong glowing
notions of his rectitude and the purity and stability of his forty-nine-year-long
marriage to my mother.” Mehta cultivates the ground of his
father’s affair with great sensitivity, painting the peerless
backdrop of the Simla hill station and explaining the norms at
play. (“Nothing was more important than to keep the reputation
of the family pure and unbesmirched.”) His mother handled
the situation “with good humor and good cheer,” observing
of the lover, who was also her close friend: “She came like
a butterfly and went away like a butterfly.” At the heart
of the story are the pair’s love letters, each of which
Mehta displays to best advantage in all their fragility, expressing
wonder at their survival in a world of rapid transformation. A
story of enough provocative, sensual graces to have fueled Scheherazade
for a 1,002nd night.
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