| Book extracts: Page
1 | Page
2
 In
this new volume of a remarkable life story, Ved Mehta takes us
through his college years—an adventurous young adulthood
in California. After his father—a retired Indian-government
health official—managed to secure the means to enter him
in Pomona College, Ved set out to prove himself as a blind student
among the sighted. For the first time, he was able to give his
intellectual curiosity full play and pursue academic distinction—flexing
and stretching and moving with newfound independence. Longing
for all the normal experiences of the average American student,
he joined a fraternity, revived the school’s International
Relations Club, wrote for the school newspaper, and even bought
a car. There were girls, too: Mandy, who shared a class with him
at summer school in Berkeley; Phyllis, who caught him up in an
emotional drama of her own making; and Mary, a deeply Christian
Southerner, who taught him that being cerebral needn’t prevent
him from being tender. Nevertheless, he remained something of
an outsider and continued to be dogged by the prediction of experts—made
even before he ventured to America for a high school education—that
he would be culturally maladjusted, unsuited to life in either
India or America. But, never for a moment accepting limits, Ved
seized all the knowledge and all the glory he could, though always
with a sense of stealing something that the world never intended
him to have.
 Mrs.
Ethel Clyde, a mercurial, globe-trotting Socialist millionaire,
who was his father’s patient and friend, helped support Ved’s
education and gave him the money to spend two summers writing
an autobiography. At first, Ved saw the project only as a way
of making a bid for the affections of the most important girl—Johnnie,
his reader, his amanuensis, his friend, and his real love, who
always remained romantically beyond his grasp. But by the time
the book was on paper, a rough yet promising beginning, he had
taken a big step toward coming to terms with his extraordinary
situation and creating a future for himself as a writer.
Telling of experiences wonderful and tragic, love fulfilled
and unfulfilled, and journeys sexual and scholarly, this is a
lyrical narrative of an unusually talented youth’s coming
of age. Ved Mehta recounts in touching detail how he reconciled
conflicting cultural forces and forged a world of his own, an
amalgam of East and West, Raj and California, learning and writing,
daring and hoping. He shows how it felt to be poor and lonely
and thoughtful and driven in a period that was as rich and fertile
and sunny and languid as California itself. In fact, the book
can be read not just as an intimate memoir of the author’s
college years but also as a social history of the sanguine American
fifties.
Buy
this book
Excerpted Reviews
"Ved Mehta's autobiographie fleuve, 'Continents of Exile,'
will surely rank as a masterpiece of our age....In his latest
volume, The Stolen Light, he describes how he faced the challenge
of competing for the first time with sighted students, at Pomona
College, California, having previously attended only schools for
the blind; also, how he began to be an author. A story of heroic
achievement, told brilliantly and with much humour." –
John Grigg, The
Spectator
"No one else writing in English today has powers of recall
so extraordinary....[Ved Mehta's] memoirs are much more than the
history of a person who happens to be handicapped; they are also
about what it was like for someone from another culture to grow
up in the United States in a certain time and place, and they
resound with universal experience and shared emotion....Rich and
fascinating realities of Mehta's life, vividly recalled in vigorous
prose." – Henry Kisor, Chicago
Sun-Times
"In a way [The Stolen Light] is the most exciting of his
books, and surely the hardest to write, because it deals with
adolescence, with first encounters with girls, with social anguish
about religious faith....Is it possible that his narrative skill
is ever so slightly a magician's and a myth-maker's? I believed
every word of his account, but at times I forgot I was not reading
fiction....The best course of action is to abandon oneself to
delight." – Peter Levi, The
Independent
"[Ved Mehta] illumines the darknesses of exile as though
he were born to give vision." – John Clute, Times
Literary Supplement
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. |
