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"I must complete my Western education before I settle in
India," writes Ved Mehta. This is an interlude, a lightening
focus on the India in which he was brought up and to which he
will return, a country about which he says, "My bummy holiday
is finished for ever. Indian summer has changed into another and
better season."
This short autobiographical account of his return to India is
an outline of the promise that lies ahead, beyond the bummy days.
Ved Mehta knows how to keep his tongue in his cheek over long
periods and he leaves Oxford quite prepared for the journey. "Now,
sir," the cutter says to me, "I understand you are going
to the tropics. How would you like a Prince of Wales design?’
Most of his time in India is spent with Dom Moraes, whose Gone
Away is the corollary of this narrative: and a singular penny
this is to be the other side of. Ved Mehta writes, "Life
is a bundle of little truths; art is a way to greater truth."
This might be the motto for their journey.
But the bummy days come to an end with Ved Mehta paying a traditional
visit to the Panda of his village at Hardwar, and then having
lunch with Nehru. "I feel the real secret of one free India
lies in the Prime Minister. His character reconciles the various
Indias." Nehru shatteringly says, "While India needs
people like you, I’m not sure she can at present really afford
them." The bummy days are quite at an end.
A Balliol friend writes to him, "What is this awful word
bummy with which you make so free? I never heard it from you—or
indeed from anyone—in Oxford. Nor were you really so dissolute
or irresponsible as you try to make out... I have a mind to denounce
you to the public as the moral man you are."
For this is the secret. Ved Mehta has a unique gift for expressing
himself with sensitivity and delicacy. It is quite unsentimental,
folded in beautiful prose, and handed out with humour. He is a
natural writer furthermore and no phenomenon whose asides are
more impressive than his narrative. By revealing India through
himself, Ved Mehta has produced something that seemed difficult,
a worthy successor to the autobiography of his childhood, Face
to Face.
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