| Book extracts: Page
1 | Page
2
 In
the summer of 1943, an Indian public-health official (Daddyji)
and his wife (Mamaji) were travelling with their six children
to the Vale of Kashmir for a holiday. During a break in the journey,
their blind nine-year-old son, Ved—the author of this exquisitely
composed memoir—heard two streams flowing and asked about
them. He was told that one looked clear, the other muddy. He said
he wanted to see the streams for himself, and the family climbed
down into a gorge where a narrow ledge separated the icy torrents
of the Jhelum, a powerful river fed by the snows of the Himalayas,
from a tepid, sluggish local stream. Ved squatted down on the
narrow ledge and put a hand in each stream. A sudden cloudburst
then caused the Jhelum River to rise, and the Mehtas barely scrambled
out of the gorge with their lives. The echoes of the author's
experience forty years ago in that gorge—one small incident
in this book—haunt the story much as the mysterious Malabar
Caves haunt E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and, like
Forster, Mr. Mehta presents us with a highly original, intimate,
and revealing portrait of modern India.
Mr. Mehta writes about the decade 1940-1949, a crucial time in
his life and the life of his native country. He recounts the day-to-day
joys and sorrows of a large, affectionate well-to-do Hindu family
in the Punjab, setting them against the distant thunder of the
Second World War and the waning light of the British raj. He describes
the growing strife between Hindus and Muslims, and the wave of
violence that engulfed India during Partition, which in the Punjab
alone left more than ten million homeless and a million dead.
He tells how he came to terms with his adolescence; how he learned
English, Braille, horseback riding, bicycling, touch typing, roller
skating; how he coped with blindness and came to live a normal
life. He shows how he became increasingly aware of the disparate
currents flowing through his life, much like the two streams:
a young man without sight determined to enjoy the advantages of
the sighted; a dutiful son daily confronted by the contrasting
personalities of his father, trained in Western medicine, and
his mother, bound by Hindu tradition; an intelligent boy, his
hopes for schooling in his own country thwarted by his blindness,
undertaking the adventure of leaving his home and family and coming
to the West. At the end of this work, he is on his way to the
Arkansas School for the Blind (the only school in the West that
will have him), convinced that there the course of the currents
will somehow be made plain to him.
Buy
this book / Buy
this audio cassette
 |
Easton Press in Norwalk, CT has
published a "Collector's Edition" (2003) of "Ledge
Between the Streams."
To order your individual copy, contact 800-367-4534. |
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
