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In 1949, the fifteen year-old Ved Mehta, who had been totally
blind since the age of four, left his native India and travelled
alone to Little Rock to attend the Arkansas School for the Blind.
For the next three years, he lived and studied with about a hundred
blind and partially sighted boys and girls at the school. There
he ran afoul of an Evangelical Baptist piano teacher who believed
him to be damned because he was a Hindu, and a physical education
instructor who maintained that only combative blind people could
survive in the sighted world. Girls were also a big problem; like
his new friends, he wanted to have dates and “go steady,”
but he had been brought up in a country where romantic love was
virtually unknown and marriages were arranged.
Still, the years in Arkansas were a time of education and liberation
for Ved. He learned how to get around Little Rock byhimself, perceiving
objects and terrain by means of “sound-shadows.” Eventually,
he taught himself how to travel around the country. By adapting
and persevering, he slowly came to be accepted in the New World.
He worked for a summer at an ice cream plant alongside sighted
workers. He swam and played chess at the local Boys’ Club.
His fellow students elected him president of the student senate.
An American girl fell in love with him. During all this time,
he struggled with depression and home sickness, and when things
became too much for him he withdrew into an old broom closet,
the only quiet place in the boys’ dormitory, where he read
adventure novels, tape-recorded classical music off the air, listened
to news broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow, and made entries in his
journal.
Writing now, more than thirty years later, about his adolescent
yearnings and humiliations, Ved Mehta reconstructs his past in
a prose that is intimate, sometimes comic, sometimes sensuous,
and always lucid. The result is a compelling narrative that reveals
the internal universe of a blind boy-man and also maps out for
us the textures, smells, and sounds experienced by a mid-century
immigrant.
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Excerpted Reviews
"As a record of self-reliance and tenacity, Sound-Shadows
of the New World is extraordinarily moving; but as an account
of one boy's ambition, it is equally remarkable...[It] opens with
his journey, at the age of 15, from India to the United States
in order to attend the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little
Rock; it ends with his graduation from the institution...Mehta
records his life throughout the period in extraordinary detail;
it is as if his fall into blindness had broken open his perception
so that nothing escapes him, and his account has a clarity that
is sometimes like clairvoyance...He sees the world very clearly;
he describes it so carefully, and yet from such an oblique angle,
that in parts it is rather like reading some compelling travelogue
of an unknown country." –Peter Ackroyd,
Times (London)
"He has written what may become a classic American coming-of-age."
– Ben Yagoda, Philadelphia Inquirer
"[A] richly detailed and moving memoir." – Arnold
Isaacs, San Francisco
Examiner-Chronicle
"A wonderfully entertaining book, conveying the predicament
of the blind without self-pity and with great pugnacity. Deprived
of his sight, Mehta developed a visionary appreciation of the
external world and it comes across vividly in this splendid segment
of autobiography." – Scotsman
(Edinburgh)
"Inspiring...the vivid, detailed descriptions of this homesick
boy's gradual adaptation to an alien culture are uplifting and
enthralling." – Spectator
"Like Dickens, Mehta publishes his work as he goes along
(in the New Yorker). Unlike Dickens, the humour in Mehta, and
the pathos, shines out of the extraordinarily plain surface of
the prose. We leave him at the end of the book at the age of 19.
Presumably the work could continue until, very nearly, his dying
day. We must hope so." – Guardian
Ved Mehta takes
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