Archives: Books

In this 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.

There can seldom have been a more unpromising subject for a film or a book than Chachaji, and yet he became the hero of a celebrated documentary film, CHACHAJI, MY POOR RELATION: A MEMOIR BY VED MEHTA. He also became the hero of this book, which is, among other things, an account of the making of that film. Indeed, he has become, in a sense, a metaphor for the whole of India in all its splendid contradictions.
Mr. Mehta and an Anglo-American filming team—led by a Tasmanian-born Canadian producer—travelled to India, where they were soon joined by the producer’s wife, a great-great-grandniece of William Wordsworth. The team spent a month filming Chachaji, an eighty-three-year-old man who weighed eighty-nine pounds and was a messenger-clerk for the Pharmacy of Prosperity in New Delhi. (He was the author’s second cousin; the nickname Chachaji means “respected uncle.”) They recorded the doings of Chachaji: how he lived by his wits, working eight hours a day for sixty cents, and cadging meals, money, and (to preserve his dignity as a clean-shaven gentleman) razor blades from his better-off relations. They followed Chachaji through his typical day—performing his ablutions, waiting in queues, battling bazaar crowds, and bucking bureaucracy. They were also able to capture on film Chachaji’s red-letter days of attending a family wedding, of going on a journey to his village, of bathing in the Ganges—a penitential act of salvation for Hindus. Chachaji, as the object of all this attention, was nothing if not unconcerned; even when throngs were frantically showing off in front of the camera or threatening to destroy it in some burst of pious indignation, he stoically trudged on with a dead-pan expression worthy of Buster Keaton, at most saying, “Never mind. Let it be.” Chachaji never caught on to what a moving picture was—he had never seen one—and throughout the filming he talked about the shots as “the photographs.”
The documentary film that the team eventually made was broadcast, among other places, on PBS and the BBC, and was awarded the duPont Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism—the citation commending the film for “its delicacy, its humor, its reflection of a whole nation.” It was acclaimed “an extraordinary memoir” by the Christian Science Monitor and “a classic” by the New York Times. Since this book is both about the making of a documentary film and about Chachaji, it depicts a confrontation, by turns poignant, frenzied, and funny, between two utterly different ways of life—the Western and the Eastern, the modern and the traditional. Writing with ironic detachment, Mr. Mehta brings his distinctive skill as a storyteller to this saga while further exploring themes that have preoccupied him for most of his life.

In this book, Ved Mehta tells the story—hitherto obscured by a combination of censorship, propaganda, and ignorance—of the “new India” that began in June, 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, convicted of corrupt electoral practices, under popular pressure to resign, and constitutionally threatened with the loss of her office, in effect carried out a coup in her own country and set about rewriting the constitution to fashion a dictatorship. Opening with a brooding portrayal of the Indian capital in the days before the “new India” began—a time of signs and portents, as in an Elizabethan drama—Mr. Mehta draws up a powerful brief against Mrs. Gandhi, recounting how, with her son Sanjay (whose dynastic ambitions were growing ever more blatant), she ruled by decree; jailed and tortured political opponents; suspended civil liberties and judicial safeguards; silenced the press; and levelled inner-city slums, relocating their inhabitants in barbed-wire-enclosed camps and subjecting them to a program of forced sterilization. He goes on to review Mrs. Gandhi’s life and career, and to disentangle the web of reasons for the downfall of what he calls her “Orwellian regime,” placing the story in its historical and social context, narrating it without polemic and without moralizing, and presenting it piece by piece, as though each event, each figure were part of an engrossing jigsaw puzzle.
This account, written in the elegant and incisive style for which Mr. Mehta is known, is the first accurate report and analysis we have had of the “new India”; it affords a searching look at the world’s most populous democracy in the light of the rise and fall of one of the most mercurial leaders of our time. The elections that in March, 1977, brought about Mrs. Gandhi’s precipitous defeat are, Mr. Mehta concludes, “the most hopeful sign in recent years for the growth of democracy in a poor country.”

Unsurpassed as a prose stylist, Ved Mehta is an acknowledged master of the essay form. In this book—the first special collection of Mehta’s outstanding writing—the distinguished author demonstrates a wide range of possibilities available to the narrative and descriptive writer today. Addressing subjects that range from religion to politics and on to education, and writing with eloquence and high style, Mehta here offers a sampling of his works.
Mehta provides a splendid, insightful introduction on the craft of the essay, meditating on the long history and diverse purposes of the form and on the struggle of learning to write in it himself. In the eight reportorial, autobiographical, and reflective essays that follow—each a self-contained examination of cultural, intellectual, or personal themes—he writes on his experience of becoming an American citizen; on Christian theology, with a focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer; on Calcutta and the poorest of the Indian poor; on the disastrous fates of three of Mehta’s brilliant Oxford contemporaries; and on a variety of other subjects.

A Family Affair is a sequel to Ved Mehta’s much acclaimed The New India. Together the two books recount the political history of India since Independence, in 1947. Mr. Mehta holds that India, although it is the world’s most populous parliamentary democracy, remains a feudal society, organized around principles of caste and family: Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, between them, ruled India as Prime Ministers for all but four of its first forty years as an independent nation, and by the mid-seventies Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay, had become the second most important person in the country, even though he had never been elected to public office. The so-called “dictatorship of the mother and son” fell in the 1977 elections (a defeat that Mr. Mehta calls the greatest modern political upset), but Mrs. Gandhi’s successors as Prime Minister, Morarji Desai and Charan Singh, were in their turn forced out of office—in the main because of questions about the political influence of their families.
Mr. Mehta shows in detail how Mrs. Gandhi survived charges of nepotism and corruption to sweep back into power in 1980; how Sanjay was at last elected to office, as a member of Parliament; and how mother and son reëstablished their court autocracy in New Delhi, with Sanjay assuming the role of heir apparent. Then, in June, 1980, at the age of thirty-three, Sanjay was killed while executing a dangerous flip in a plane over the city. Mr. Mehta goes on to show how Mrs. Gandhi’s older son, Rajiv, carried on the Gandhi “dynasty” in the Indian “democracy,” and Mrs. Gandhi continued to face India’s age-old problems—poverty, overpopulation, a rigid caste system, warring states—amid gathering unrest.
Mr. Mehta disentangles the threads of connection and corruption that weave the fabric of Indian politics, pulling here to expose flagrant examples of nepotism and there to uncover illegal electoral practices. He marshals an array of facts, but his narrative reads like a good story. The personalities he describes, and occasionally interviews, take on life. There is Desai, who says that God’s will placed him in the Prime Minister’s office, but who is unmistakably an astute politician; his Minister of Health, Raj Narain, who reportedly campaigned from inside a monkey cage; Charan Singh, who, before he was named Prime Minister, made a career of being a malcontent, resigning eleven times from various offices; and, of course, Sanjay, who recklessly indulged his passion for power both in fast machines and in politics. The story, fascinating in and of itself, with its elements of mystery and Greek tragedy, is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding a complex and increasingly influential country.

In the summer of 1943, an Indian public-health official (Daddyji) and his wife (Mamaji) were travelling with their six children to the Vale of Kashmir for a holiday. During a break in the journey, their blind nine-year-old son, Ved—the author of this exquisitely composed memoir—heard two streams flowing and asked about them. He was told that one looked clear, the other muddy. He said he wanted to see the streams for himself, and the family climbed down into a gorge where a narrow ledge separated the icy torrents of the Jhelum, a powerful river fed by the snows of the Himalayas, from a tepid, sluggish local stream. Ved squatted down on the narrow ledge and put a hand in each stream. A sudden cloudburst then caused the Jhelum River to rise, and the Mehtas barely scrambled out of the gorge with their lives. The echoes of the author’s experience forty years ago in that gorge—one small incident in this book—haunt the story much as the mysterious Malabar Caves haunt E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and, like Forster, Mr. Mehta presents us with a highly original, intimate, and revealing portrait of modern India.

Mr. Mehta writes about the decade 1940–1949, a crucial time in his life and the life of his native country. He recounts the day-to-day joys and sorrows of a large, affectionate well-to-do Hindu family in the Punjab, setting them against the distant thunder of the Second World War and the waning light of the British raj. He describes the growing strife between Hindus and Muslims, and the wave of violence that engulfed India during Partition, which in the Punjab alone left more than ten million homeless and a million dead. He tells how he came to terms with his adolescence; how he learned English, Braille, horseback riding, bicycling, touch typing, roller skating; how he coped with blindness and came to live a normal life. He shows how he became increasingly aware of the disparate currents flowing through his life, much like the two streams: a young man without sight determined to enjoy the advantages of the sighted; a dutiful son daily confronted by the contrasting personalities of his father, trained in Western medicine, and his mother, bound by Hindu tradition; an intelligent boy, his hopes for schooling in his own country thwarted by his blindness, undertaking the adventure of leaving his home and family and coming to the West. At the end of this work, he is on his way to the Arkansas School for the Blind (the only school in the West that will have him), convinced that there the course of the currents will somehow be made plain to him.

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 by himself, 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 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.

This is the true and intimate story of one man and his love of four women, each of them very different, but each in her turn the object of his hopes and desires.
What does Ved Mehta want of these women? To be loved by them, to marry them, to have children with them. He has been blind since childhood. Love, marriage, children—all these, he imagines, would make him whole.
And the women, Gigi, Vanessa, Lola and Kilty? What do they want? It seems for a time that they too want to love him, marry him, have his children. But desire is a dangerous emotion and the state of being in love both illusory and mysterious.
In spare and elegant prose, Ved Mehta transforms that most subjective of all human acts, falling in love, into an objective account. Without justification and without excuses, he documents the twists and turns of an extraordinary personal history that soars and dips with expectation and anguish, until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way to a new insight about women he has loved and about himself.
Few other writers are such compelling and vivid witnesses to their private lives; few other men have been so honest about their misunderstandings and failures in the business of love.

“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 was 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.

To be at Oxford: the university had occupied Ved Mehta’s imagination ever since he was a small, blind Hindu boy, during the British Raj. His quest for learning had taken him from India, where education for the blind consisted of little more than confinement in an orphanage, to America, where he attended high school in Arkansas and college in California. Now, in this volume, he journeys to England, to earn what he saw as the highest mark of intellectual attainment—an Oxford honors degree from Balliol College.
Few foreign undergraduates can have entered the stream of English life with more verve and gusto than Ved. While he is not surprised at being intellectually challenged at Oxford by the erudition of his tutors, he is floored by the achievements of his contemporaries. Believing his own sketchy educational background to be an all but insurmountable handicap, he struggles mightily to keep up with them. Still, neither his friends nor his pursuits are just scholarly. He is elected to a debating society that mirrors the House of Commons and develops verbal dexterity. He becomes part of a literary circle centered on a mercurial and captivating young poet. He is seized by a strong desire to be accepted into upper-class society, and in his speech he cultivates the vocabulary and the cadence of an English gentleman. As time goes on, he is charmed by numerous young women with upper-crust accents, and is befriended by a lord, whose ancestral castle he visits for a shooting party during a Christmas vacation. All the same, in the land of those who once ruled India he manages to come to terms with his own ethnic heritage.
In Up at Oxford Ved Mehta recalls the nuances of his conversations and his meditations, the range of his youthful emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of undergraduate life, and along the way he draws memorable portraits of, among others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers. He catches people in their youth who later make significant contributions to politics and letters, and also some whose youthful promise turns to failure and tragedy. And he introduces us to various brilliant figures who made Oxford the pinnacle of intellectual life in the fifties.
Up at Oxford is unlike any other account of university life. Told with wit and candor, Ved Mehta’s journey to his degree—from the awkward moments at his freshman dinner to the anxious days and nights of his final examinations—captures a time and a place worth discovering and remembering.