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3
 “Namaste.”
Vedi’s father bade him the Hindu farewell. “You are
a man now.” It was the first step in Ved Mehta’s long
journey toward independence. He was a month shy of five years
old, and he was to spend much of the next four years thirteen
hundred miles away from home and family, at Dadar School for the
Blind—really a mission orphanage, in a sooty section of Bombay,
that had only the barest facilities but was run by an American-trained
Indian Christian principal with Western ideas about education.
Before Vedi was four, he had been left blind by meningitis. His
father, a well-to-do, England-trained Hindu doctor, was determined
that his son not experience the usual lot of the blind in India—begging
alms or caning chairs—but receive the best education that
India could offer a blind child.
 At
the school, Vedi at first felt isolated. There was the obstacle
of language: he spoke only Punjabi, the other children spoke only
Marathi, and the principal was determined to teach him English.
There were the differences of class and age: Vedi was from “a
cultured home,” and therefore wore shoes and proper clothes,
took his meals with the principal’s family, and had a special
soft bed in the boys’ dormitory; many of the other children
were waifs from the streets, and most of them were much older.
As a consequence of what may strike some as an incomprehensible
act—a father sending a child to a kind of foster home—Vedi
learned to get along without his parents, without his sisters
and his brother, without familiar sounds and scents and tastes,
long before any ordinary child learns self-reliance. He also learned
to read and write English Braille, to add and subtract, to play
the games that all boys play—sometimes adapted by the principal
for his pupils—and to get along with his school-mates. Not
all his experiences were happy, of course. He had many illnesses;
like any child, he got into “boy-mischief” and was subject
to the discipline of the principal’s ruler and to the harsher
punishments of the Sighted Master, who lived in the boys’
dormitory. When it looked as if the Second World War were coming
to India, Vedi left Dadar School and returned home—as much
a victim of events in his departure as he had been in his arrival.
Yet, as his father knew, and as he himself came to know, the education
he received at the school afforded him a chance for a meaningful
life. He grasped it eagerly.
 Vedi
is Ved Mehta’s memory of ordinary childhood experiences—of
trying to find out, of struggling to fit in, of wanting to be
loved, of playing, of dreaming—during the years that ordinarily
make up childhood. But Vedi, in a sense, ceased to be a child
before he was five. In the school, he learned what it was to feel
apart from his peers even when he was among them; at home, on
holidays, he learned what it was to feel apart from his family
members even when he was among them. In the narrative, two voices
alternate: the voice of a child and the voice of an adult. When
the child speaks, even grim events seem innocent and funny; and
when the adult speaks, even ordinary moments seem sad, reflected
in a memory that brings together past and present and conveys
them with eloquence in this extraordinary work.
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Excerpted Reviews
"The author's masterpiece to date. Incidents, trivial or
traumatic, are recalled with electrifying intensity. Every word
is made to tell, and the reader is led, by an art marvellously
free from false sentiment or self-pity, into the enclosed world
of a blind child." – The
Listener
"This new book describes Vedi's own experience when he was
sent away to a boarding school-cum-orphanage for blind children;
a 900 mile journey to Bombay where no one spoke Vedi's native
language. He was four. By an outstanding feat of memory Mr. Mehta
has travelled back into the soul of the child he was, the child
for whom time in unquantifiable, and each experience total."
– Sunday
Times (London)
"Fate, which cursed Mehta with blindness, gave him the enormous
gift of a way with language. His memory is based on the feel of
faces, the smell of people, and the sound of the headmaster's
shoes in a school where all the other feet were bare. This truth
telling gives the book a remote, Kafka-like quality and makes
you wonder where the blind child gets the courage to endure a
life which must have so much unexpected terror in it." –
John Mortimer, Times Literary
Supplement
"More than a decade ago, Ved Mehta embarked on a project
of extended self-location-in history and society as well as in
family-and his family biographies (beginning with Daddyji
in 1972) are reflections of larger themes....His objective world
is inevitably remote from ours, but his inner world...is as close
as art can make it. His is obviously a singular life....I urge
you to begin catching up with it." – Clark Blaise,
New York Times Book Review
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