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Ved Mehta's acclaimed Continents of Exile seires ends where
it began—with a portrait of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta.
But this, the final installment of the eleven-book series, which
has been appearing over the last thirty-two years, is its emotional
crescendo, the story of the author's discovery of his father's
affair with a married woman in the British India of the 1930s.
The story has its origins in the 1960s, when Mehta by chance
finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother's shoulder
during a New York dinner party. As a result, the son begins to
unravel a family mystery that thakes him on a painful and revealing
voyage into his father's British past in Simla, the magical hill
station and summer capital of the Raj. Step by step, he is forced
to confront his father's passionate clandestine affair with Rasil,
an exquisite beauty who in her teens was abducted from her poor
family and raped. She was subsequently rescued by a Hindu philanthropist,
only to end up trapped in an abusive marriage to a rich businessman.
Years earlier, when the Daddyji of the story was working in the
Punjab Himalayas as a medical student, he had met a young shepherdess
on his rounds, and been intoxicated by her greenish-blue eyes,
fair skin, golden hair, and the Nepalese lilt of her voice. At
one moment, he caught sight of her concealed tattoo of the consort
of Lord Krishna. She said that she, too, intended to marry the
voluptuary deity.
Some fifteen years later in Lahore, Dr. Mehta encounters a socialite
whom he recognizes as the hill girl of his youth by her tattoo.
They reestablish contact and in time become lovers. Their affair
is kept alive by the exchange of love letters, or Red Letters—sublime
if eccentric works in themselves—that Mehta's father treasures
for the remainder of his life as a memento of his enchanted time.
Mehta's exploration of his father's love affair proves painful,
as the son realizes that the entanglement, a passing episode in
sixty-one years of a loving marriage, had shattering psychological
side-effects on his mother—a close friend of Rasil's—and
also on his own life.
The Red Letters is Mehta's masterpiece, a work of extraordinary
intensity that perfectly re-creates the exotic, closed world of
British India.
The appearance of this book is a major literary event, signaling
the conclusion of Continents of Exile, one of the most remarkable
literary achievements of the twentieth century.
Excerpted Reviews
"Ved Mehta's autobiographical fleuve, Continents
of Exile, will surely rank as a masterpiece of our age."
–John Grigg, The Spectator
"As a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961
to 1994, Ved Mehta became famous for seeking universal truths
through the close examination of the particulars of his own life."
– Edgar Allen Beem, Boston Globe
"Like the best memoirs, Mehta's is more than the life story
of a person who later happened to write it down. Instead, it understands
its own being as entangled in the life it tells, comprehending
that life and life-writing must endorse and justify one another
with the reciprocity of lovers. It is the prehistory of itself,
the story of how it came, through the very events it retells,
to be, first, thinkable, then necessary, and finally written."
– Paul Saint-Amour, Pomona College Magazine
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