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When Ved Mehta left Arkansas School for the Blind, one of the
teachers asked him: “Son, what’s the most precious thing
you’re taking from us?” Ved Mehta answered: “Mobility.”
This story comes at the end of his fifth volume in the family
history-cum-autobiography. Judging by earlier volumes, mobility
was never much of a problem. Mehta went blind during a bout of
meningitis at the age of four, but when he was 10, for instance,
he was able to ride a bike about as freely as most sighted boys.
But mobility takes on different hues, and in Little Rock, Mehta
learned mobility in social intercourse and in dealings between
the sexes.
Little Rock had the only school for the blind in the United
States that would accept an Indian boy of no academic attainments,
and in India itself there were no specialist schools for the blind
at all. So the 15-year old Ved was dispatched from the bosom of
a close Punjabi family.
All the adventures befell Ved that might befall a youngster
from a strange culture, separated from family, struggling with
an unfamiliar language. The two travelling companions to whom
Ved’s father committed him at the airport in New Delhi abandoned
him from take-off. Ved’s baggage was rifled on his way to
the States. He arrived at Little Rock days too early and was abandoned
to his thoughts and a lonely dormitory.
At first Ved and his father ("Daddyji" of the first
of these five volumes) worried that Little Rock might be a school
for blacks. Totally blind, Ved made an inquiry as delicately as
he could of one of his partially sighted school friends, to be
informed that Ved himself wasn’t all that white, at which
Mehta solemnly explained the difference between the black Dravidian
Indians of the South and the pale Aryan Indians of the North.
Like Dickens, Mehta publishes his works as he goes along (in
The New Yorker). Unlike Dickens, the humour in Mehta, and
the pathos, shines out of the extraordinarily plain surface of
the prose. We leave Mehta at the end of this book at the age of
19. Presumably the work could continue until, very nearly, his
dying day. We must hope so.
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Ved Mehta takes
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