| Book extracts: Page
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Page 2 | Page
3
 In
this deeply affecting chronicle of a high-caste Hindu family,
Ved Mehta tells of his mother, Shanti Devi Mehta—Mamaji,
as her children called her—and of her forebears. Mamaji’s
grandfather hawked lengths of cheap cloth through the fetid gullis
of his native Lahore and the alien lanes of Peshawar. Mamaji’s
father rose to be a lawyer in the Punjab High Court, a Senate
Fellow of Punjab University, and a director of the Punjab National
Bank, and received a title from the British. In time, Mamaji herself
became the shy, orthodox wife of a cosmopolitan British and American-trained
physician who held high posts in the public health service under
the raj. The book is a layering of the stories of all those whose
lives touched Mamaji’s life—not only her forebears but
also her other relatives and her friends and neighbors—and
so brings close to us a place and a civilization that could hardly
be more remote from our own: India in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
 Mamaji
grew up believing that she brought bad luck to herself and others,
and so it seemed at first. She received only a few years of schooling,
and her early life revolved around neverending household duties,
ancient home remedies, and orthodox Hindu rituals that were proscribed
by her father but were practiced in secret in the women’s
quarters; before she was fifteen, she had lost five sisters and
three brothers through illness or accident. When she was seventeen,
she could only listen while her father discussed the terms of
her dowry with her husband-to-be, Dr. Amolak Ram Mehta—Daddyji,
as their children were to call him—because custom forbade
her to see him until the day of her marriage. Little in her experience
had prepared her to share her life with Daddyji, who spoke English,
frequented clubs where he played cricket, tennis, and bridge,
and, as a man of science, regarded her orthodox Hindu practices
as superstition. Yet Mamaji could say many years later that she
must have sacrificed pearls and diamonds in a former incarnation
to have deserved to become his wife.
 Mamaji’s
story is taken to the point where Ved Mehta’s own story begins:
his bout with meningitis when he was nearly four, which left him
permanently blind; Mamaji’s inability to accept his blindness;
and her impassioned search for a miraculous cure.
Mamaji is a companion book to
Mr. Mehta’s highly acclaimed Daddyji,
and together the two biographical portraits form the cornerstone
of the Continents of Exile series.
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Excerpted Reviews
"The story of Shanti Devi Mehta by her blind son is perceptively
and beautifully written, and has resonances for all of us about
our mothers." – Philip Howard, London
Times
"Not just an interesting biography but, I think, a work
of art." – John Gardner [just a blurb, no publication]
"Mr. Mehta is artful in the balance he strikes between accepting
Old India on its own terms and viewing it, sceptically, from his
own New York perspective....This is a book fastidiously organized
by a writer whose mother was not wholly wrong in imagining that
he could see...." – Frederic Raphael, London
Sunday Times
"I enjoyed reading Mamaji very much. It was charmingly strange
yet prosaically familiar, as if I were reading my own family history
transposed into the Indian key." – Dwight Macdonald
"As direct and mysterious and shrewd as a folktale....[A]
wonderful book." – Kirkus
Reviews
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