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Every good autobiography raises the question of whose story to
credit—that of the intelligent, critically observing, narrating
adult or that of the uncomprehending, dumbly accepting, experiencing
child. In Vedi, Ved
Mehta’s extraordinary memoir of the four years he spent as
a young child in an appalling place in Bombay called the Dadar
School for the Blind, the tension between the two “I’s”
is particularly pronounced. The adult “I” is outraged
by what his father did to him when he abruptly removed him—a
blind child not yet five—from his affectionate and comfortable
middle-class home in the Punjab and sent him a thousand miles
away to an orphanage for destitute blind children located in a
mosquito-ridden industrial slum, where he was to contract typhoid
within three months (and suffer repeated bouts of it), and where
he lived for four years under the harshest of physical conditions
and received the most pitifully rudimentary of educations. But
the child “I” is unconcerned about the things that pain
and appall the grown up “I.” He is a high-spirited,
strong willed, eager little boy, so intent on exercising his child’s
prerogative of enjoyment that he seems almost unaware of the cruelty
and difficulty of his predicament. In George Orwell’s bitter
memoir of his boarding school days, “Such, Such Were the
Joys...,” the narrating adult dwells on the gratuitous sufferings
of children caused by their ignorance of reality. The child Orwell
cringes and cowers before the ghastly couple who run the school
Crossgates, seeing them as all powerful monsters, rather than
as the mere “silly, shallow, ineffectual people” they
are. But in young Mehta’s case, the reality is worse than
the child knows. Thus, in Vedi,
paradoxically, it is the knowledgeable narrator who suffers over
the monstrous events of the story, while the ignorant child at
their center accepts them with composure, and even, amazingly,
a kind of gaiety.
In Vedi, for the
first time in his mature writing, Mehta writes from the perspective
of total blindness. The book is entirely without visual descriptions.
We follow the blind child into the orphanage, and, like him, we
never learn what the place or any of the people in it looked like.
We hear, we feel, but we see nothing. We are dislocated and disoriented.
As the child misses the familiar persons and things of home, so
the reader misses the customary visual clues of literature. One
feels a kind of sensory deprivation throughout the book—almost
a lack of enjoyment—even as one experiences the excitement
that an original work engenders. Not the least of Vedi’s
originality is this very stylistic denial, which amounts to an
approximation of the experience of blindness. As we grope through
the early sections of the book, trying to get our bearings in
its alien literary environment, we are like tourists in a foreign
country who have to struggle with themselves not to commit the
absurdity of rejecting the very foreignness they have traveled
to experience. The country of the blind is exotic indeed, and
Mehta takes us to places in its bleak, impassable terrain that
no one from the sighted world has previously penetrated. (The
term “sighted world” is itself newly learned from the
book—being a term for which there is no need outside the
community of the blind, in the way that the term “goyim”
has no currency among non-Jews.) Mehta relates, for example, how
All of us totally blind boys were constantly hitting ourselves
against something or other. We would feel each other’s
bumps and injuries, and we would joke about them. “Let
me feel,” we would say. “Is it on your hood or your
mudguard? Or is it the wheel again?” “Hood” was
our slang for a forehead, “mudguard” for an eyebrow,
and “wheel” for a shin.... Even as we made light of
our injuries, we endowed whatever we hit—or whatever hit
us, as we came to think of it—with the malevolence we attributed
to the entire sighted world. It seemed to us that a stationary
object, like a wall, no less than a familiar object in an unfamiliar
place, like a chair that had been moved, would willfully loom
out of the sighted world to vex us. Whenever we hurt ourselves
on anything at all, we would kick it and beat it and cry out,
“The sighted bastards!”
The principal of the school, Mr. Ras Mohun, though sighted,
was somehow exempted from the resentment and fear that the blind
children extended to the sighted world, perhaps because of his
benignity and genuine interest in the blind. He was a man in his
early thirties, a Bengali Christian convert, who had worked with
missionaries among the blind and the deaf and had studied at the
Perkins Institution for the Blind in America. His wife, who “was
the same height he was,” was a little less kind, though hardly
a villainess. The villains of the book are poverty, disease, and
blindness; Vedi arrived at the school a healthy, sturdy little
boy, with fat cheeks that the other children kept pulling at in
wonder. “At five, I was the youngest boy in the boys’
dormitory, and the other boys could not understand why I seemed
so healthy: why they never heard me scratch my head, why I never
coughed at night, why I never complained of a stomach ache in
the morning—above all, why I never had a fever. The boys
kept coming up and touching my forehead and exclaiming, ‘He
still doesn’t have a fever.’“
In a few months time, Vedi became as sickly and fever-ridden
as the rest, and when he went home for Christmas vacation, his
parents removed him from the school. Unaccountably, they sent
him back a year later, and once again he fell into a brutal physical
decline. When he came home for his second Christmas vacation,
his clothes hung from him and his head was so severely infested
with ringworm that his father, a doctor, decided to risk baldness,
and even brain damage, by having him undergo X-ray treatments,
then the only remedy for the condition. Years later, Mehta writes,
his father confessed, “Looking back, I blame myself for not
having gone to the school and seen for myself the conditions there.”
But he still justified his decision to send the small boy away
from home. “When you lost your sight, I didn’t know
anything about the blind,” he told his grown son, who became
blind at the age of four after an attack of meningitis. The father
continued,
“Like everyone else, I had, course, often seen blind people
stumbling along, groping their way down a city street. They
usually carried a staff in one hand and tin cup in the other.
Also, as public-health officer, I had visit many villages and
seen blind villagers being cared for by the joint-family system,
which in those days took in any and all relatives. But all those
blind people lived little better than wounded animals. I made
up my mind that my blind son would never have to depend the
charity of relatives. I wanted you to be independent, like your
sisters and brother. I wanted you to be able to hold your head
high any company. I started looking around for a school for
you….”
The irony was, of course, that school the father selected (after
some perfunctory correspondence with its head) plunged the boy
into the society—the indigent blind—that the separation
from home was supposed to protect him from. In his books about
his parents, Daddyji
(1972) and Mamaji,(1979),
which form a trilogy with Vedi,
Ved Mehta draws a sharp contrast between his rational, decisive,
tough-minded, Western-educated, physician father and his superstitious,
backward, uneducated, childish, tender-hearted mother. Typically,
when her son went blind, the mother refused to accept the fact
and dragged him around to faith healers and quacks, in the confident
belief that blindness was a temporary punishment for some transgression
in this or a previous life. And typically, the father clutched
at the idea of “progressive, Western methods of educating
the blind” as the answer to his son’s tragic predicament
(for which, as Mehta unhappily suggests in Daddyji,
recounting the events that led up to the loss of his eyesight,
he may have been responsible).
But, paradoxically, it was the emotional, irrational, childish,
fanciful, “Indian” parts of Ved Mehta’s nature
that were his strongest defense against the harsh actuality of
Dadar. The Western values and qualities that his father represented,
and that he mistakenly believed the school to embody—realism,
pragmatism, stoicism, common sense—had little survival value
in the extreme situation that the five year old blind child was
placed. The following passage, about Vedi’s first bath at
the school, wonderfully illustrates the power that the childish
imagination may exert over an unpleasant reality.
The ayah had me sit under a tap. The water was cold and came
out in a strong jet, making me shiver all over. I howled. I
begged for a bucket of hot water and a dipper, as at home, so
that I could wet myself slowly.
The ayah held me fast under the tap and said, “Come on
now, Vedi, be a brave boy.”
“No, I don’t want to!” I cried.
“It’s just like going out in the rain,” she said.
I thought a moment, and then laughed.
The ayah let go of me.
“Rain, rain!” I yelled, and turned on the tap full
blast. The water poured out in a heavy stream and splashed all
around me on the cement floor.
I ran to the ayah, who wrapped me in a little towel.
“Brave boy,” she said, hugging me.
Because of his family’s superior status—and, more to
the point, the money that his father sent every month—Vedi
received special treatment at the school. He ate his meals with
the Ras Mohuns instead of with the other children, and was exempted
from chair-caning instruction. But Mrs. Ras Mohun found it inconvenient
to honor the agreement that he also sleep in the principal’s
quarters, and so he was put into the boys’ dormitory, though
he was given a special bed, with a mattress and mosquito netting;
the other boys slept on bare wood slats, unprotected from mosquitos.
The move to the dormitory was a fortunate one: it brought the
child into the life of the school, its real life of mischief,
gossip, fighting, ghost-story telling, sex play (called “boy
mischief”), cruelty, savagery, camaraderie. His special situation
as a boy who wore silk shirts, ate toast and mutton, and slept
on a mattress was apparently accepted, without rancor — perhaps
because these things did not spare him the common lot of disgusting
sanitary conditions, pitiful educational facilities, disease,
and blindness.
It is again interesting to contrast the situation of Vedi at
Dadar with that of he young George Orwell at Crossgates, who,
as a boy from a poor family among well to do boys, was subjected
to humiliating distinctions made between scholarship boys and
those whose parents paid. But Vedi, no less than the young Orwell,
wanted what the rest had, and just as Orwell recalls with bitter
rue the longings of his younger self for the small treats and
privileges so cruelly and unnecessarily denied him, so Mehta writes
with mild irony of the hankerings of his younger self after the
harsh food that the indigent orphans ate, and of his desire to
learn to cane chairs and to play the musical instruments that
many of them would end up playing on the streets of Bombay.
Irony of a sharper character is reserved for the efforts of Mrs.
Ras Mohun to educate Vedi in what she believed to be refined behavior.
At table, she taught him to ask for food and water by raising
his hand with the fourth and the little finger held up when he
wanted food, and just the little finger held up when he wanted
water. When he was asked “How are you?” he was to answer,
“I’m quite well and happy, thank you,” and smile
pleasantly, and when he laughed, he was to cover his mouth with
his hand. Mrs. Ras Mohun’s stock response to behavior that
displeased her was to say, “Don’t be a jungly boy,”
or “That’s what jungly boys do.” There is a very
funny scene at the Mehta home during Christmas vacation, when
Vedi, at the dinner table, holds up his hand and raises this finger
and that one, with nobody taking the slightest heed of him. Finally
his sister Umi says, “What do you think you are doing? Why
are you holding your hand up in that absurd way?”
"Water and vegetables," I whispered. "Little
finger for water, both fingers for water and food."
" Speak up," she said. "Why are you whispering?
Why don’t you say, "I want water and vegetables?'"
" That’s what jungly boys do."
There is a scene toward the end of the book that freezes the
blood. It takes place at Dadar in the boys’ dormitory and
it concerns Jaisingh, a boy who is blind, deaf, dumb, and retarded—a
large, helpless, miserable, barely human creature, whom Mr. Ras
Mohun calls “the Dadar School’s Helen Keller,”
and whom the other children dislike. “In fact, we scorned
him, as we as we imagined that the sighted scorned all of us,”
Mehta writes. Jaisingh is given to crying at night, making eerie
moaning and wailing sounds, and when this happens, the Sighted
Master, who is in charge of the boys’ dormitory, subdues
him by beating him with a shoe. The Sighted Master is a sinister,
shadowy figure without name or any other characteristics besides
his brutality and lowness. One night both Jaisingh and another
pathetic child named Ramesh begin howling together, awakening
everyone in the dormitory. Vedi hears the Sighted Master get up,
and as he passes his bed he hears him mutter, “I will finish
Ras Mohun’s Helen Keller.” Vedi hears the Sighted Master
walk toward the howling boys, and hears him remove a plank from
one of their beds. As Vedi and the other boys listen in terror,
Ramesh’s howling and then Jaisingh’s abruptly stop.
The next day, both Ramesh and Jaisingh are gone. They are never
seen again at Dadar. Whether the Sighted Master actually killed
the boys—as the other boys speculate—is unclear. What
really happened is never known.
What really happened? This is the question that impels every
autobiographer, and that gives autobiography its special epistemological
interest. In Mehta’s taut, strong, ironic memoir, he restively
ponders the question of what his experience at the Dadar School
had been, worrying it and turning it this way and that and finally
letting it lie there in all its unanswerability—like the
question of what happened to Ramesh and Jaisingh, like the question,
perhaps, of what happened to all of us in our childhoods. The
retrieval of childhood experience is one of the most mysteriously
unpropitious of human endeavors; memory is the most feckless and
epistemologically useless of our psychic faculties. Neither of
the two “I’s” through which the story of a childhood
is told is trustworthy: the testimony of the child, who was there,
is lacking in understanding; the testimony of the adult, who is
omniscient, is lacking in authenticity. At best, an uneasy truce
between the child (memory) and the man (understanding) is achieved.
In an epilogue, Mehta states the problem of the two “I’s”
with almost shocking explicitness. As an adult, he returns to
the school, and finds it unchanged in its dirtiness but changed
in its occupants. He reports,
The school and the entire building now housed only girls and
women, with thin, shrinking, demented voices—it was as
if the new residents were not only blind but also retarded.
This made me wonder whether the school of my childhood had had
the same atmosphere. The thought was depressing—the more
so because I knew there was no way I could dispose of the question
to my satisfaction, since the answer was a matter not of memory
but of judgment and experience, which, as a boy, I could not
have had.
He learns that many of his classmates had died of consumption
at an early age. He reports a depressing meeting with Deoji, his
best friend at the school, who “confirmed this fact and that
fact, but what he really succeeded in confirming was the divide
between us—both before, during, and after our first meeting,
when I was a child, and before, during, and after our last meeting,
when I was a man.” His final encounter is with Rajas, a girl
at the school, now a destitute woman living in a squalid tenement
in Dadar. He does not remember her at all. He presses her for
details about himself at the school. To the narrator’s disappointment—and
to the reader’s elation—she has only one thing to say
about him: “I remember that you were a very jolly child.”
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