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 Daddyji
is, at first glance, a biographical portrait of Amolak Ram Mehta,
a distinguished Indian public-health officer, written by his son
Ved Mehta, but in reality, as the story unfolds, it is seen to
be a recreation, in crystalline detail, of a whole world—the
everyday life of a legendary place and time. Seventy-five years
ago, when Daddyji—as he was to be called by his children—was
born, in a house consisting of a few windowless mud-and-plaster
rooms, in the village of Burkhurdar, in the Punjab, mustard oil
was poured down the drain of the house to ward off evil spirits,
the village band paraded through the lanes, and alms were distributed
to the poor. His horoscope was cast: he would grow up to ride
on the backs of elephants and sail upon the sea. Not many villagers
did. His great-great-grandfather’s travels had been limited
to his going on foot as far as the next village. His great-grandfather
had made a pilgrimage to Hardwar by bullock cart. His grandfather
had been a passenger on the first railway train between Lahore
and Saharan-pur.
His father had ridden in a motorcar. But Daddyji, just as had
been predicted, not only rode on the backs of elephants (while
making medical arrangements for a huge religious festival) but
also crossed oceans on steamships. He grew up in a series of Punjab
villages (his father was an itinerant patwari, a government official
who kept tax records), moved to the city of Lahore (he had always
heard that Lahore was “the educational center of the world”),
there encountered running water for the first time and entered
Government College, went on to study medicine there at the King
Edward Medical College, sailed for London to take degrees in Public
Health and Tropical Medicine, returned to India to do notable
work in cholera and bubonic plague, later journeyed to America,
Sardinia, and, again, England, to work in malaria and tuberculosis,
and finally returned to India to succeed his father as head of
the Mehta family and to join the Punjab Public Health Department.
Along the way, he married, built a house in Lahore, flashed about
the countryside on a motorcycle on medical errands, became a rationalist
and an Anglophile, an ardent clubman and an irrepressible gambler,
and raised a large, talented family of his own. The story ends
with Ved’s falling ill, at the age of four, with cerebrospinal
meningitis, with his being left totally blind, and with his being
sent off to an American mission school in Bombay, to prepare him
to study in America and to lead a normal life. Ved Mehta has written
about his father with an eloquent mixture of objectivity and filial
affection. He has written about India with pure magic.
Buy this book
Excerpted Reviews
"[An] example of the biographer's art....Blindness has not
inhibited Ved Mehta from filling this, his eighth book in fifteen
years, with images of color and light....This is a story of small
and steady victories and of two remarkable men." –
Peter Prescott, Newsweek
"In Ved Mehta's own words, Daddyji is a revisit to the
worlds described in Face to Face (1957), the first of
his autobiographies. This new work, however, is not merely a fresh
look at Mehta's own past; it is also a search into the complex
personality of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta, the [oldest member]
of the Mehta clan and a British-trained physician.... The picture
of Amolak Ram that emerges from this memoir is that of a remarkable
man, one possessed of great courage and virtue....The book's value
lies in the fact that Ved Mehta translates an individual experience
into one that is universal." – P.K. Sundara Rajan,
Saturday Review
"Ved Mehta is a remarkable writer-but then, he is a remarkable
man. His writings, sensitive, elegant, and evocative, reflect
a personality shaped by the fact that he has been blind since
he was four and a half years old....[This book] traces the progress
of the Mehta family from a mud hut in a remote Punjab village
to the comparative affluence of a block of houses in Lahore....The
considerable charm of this book is enhanced by the illustrations."
– Eric Britter, Christian
Science Monitor
"This is an absorbing little book. Ved Mehta gives us a
moving, but in no way sentimental picture of a Hindu village family
in the Punjab in the first half of this century....I shall look
forward to the sequels which we are promised." – Lord
Trevelyan, The Guardian
"Delightful...conceived as a series of cameos of village
and urban family life from the end of the last century to the
end of the first 40 years of this, Daddyji, intimate, personal,
is as well a history of modern India in the making." –
Paul Scott, The
London Times
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