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FACE TO FACE

In the light of words

Photo: Suresh Menon

A wide range of concerns: Ved Mehta at home.

Ved Mehta has more to say. The Red Letters, the 11th volume of his autobiographical series Continents of Exile, is not the end. He has just finished the 12th; it will appear in the summer and fall issues of the Raritan (Rutgers, New Jersey). It recalls his days at Harvard, and “chronologically would be the eighth volume, between Up at Oxford and Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker,” he exp lains.

We are sitting in his apartment on Lexington Avenue, high above the traffic noises of New York City. It is a cosy study, twelve paces from the study where we had met a few minutes earlier and where he had been working with his amanuensis. In his brilliant white shirt and dark trousers, he brings to mind Maureen Dowd’s description in the New York Times: “He bears a strong resemblance to his prose — elegant, lean and immaculate.”

There is a happy informality about the household. During our conversation, Natasha, the younger daughter pops in to check something with her father; later, wife Linn welcomes me warmly and apologises for not having returned earlier. In the kitchen the Brazilian housekeeper is excited that someone has come from India.

The greatest memoirist of our time is finishing a novel. To be called Widow’s Son — unless the objections of his daughters cause him to change the title — it is only his second in a career that has touched many ge nres, and bent some of them.

“Tell me,” he asks gently, “what is the Hindi word for ‘widow’?” The question throws me, and I promise to give him the answer as soon as the word returns into my active vocabulary from the passive section where it has temporarily gone into hiding. Later, I realise the question is a way of putting me at ease. As he has said often, he lives in a world of four senses but “uses those senses better”.

His analyst has told him that he both undervalues and overvalues sight. He undervalues it because he keeps thinking that its absence can be ignored, that he “can do everything that anyone else can do”. He overvalues it because he thinks he is an outcast without it, “like a beggar asking for the hand of a princess”.

It is possible, as Mehta writes in Daddyji, the first book of the series, that an incorrect diagnosis might have led to a delay in treatment when he had an attack of meningitis at the age of three. The illness made him blind. An ob scure doctor in Punjab may thus be responsible for creating one of the finest prose stylists in the English language.

Mehta is both a creative story-teller and a roving reporter, recording impressions with a precision and feel for the language that is unforced, almost casual, but is in fact the result of many rewrites and rigorous self-editing. He is known to re-do a piece 150 times, till he gets it right.

With lots to say, Mehta quite early hit upon the form in which to say it — using the autobiography like other writers use the sonnet or the iambic pentameter. The architecture of the series is fascinating. Each book is complete in itself, as well as part of a bigger whole. Sometimes within books there is a main theme and a subtler motif just below the surface. The Ledge Between the Streams, for example, is the story of Partition told by the boy Ved Mehta from the perspective of the man. This gives the book a unique voice as events are both described and interpreted. It is equally the story of apparently dissimilar parents who are in reality more alike than the boy thinks. But that insight is the later Mehta’s. Thus, Continents of Exile, the story of one man, becomes the history of a people and of a period.

Long before Indian writers began getting their due in the West, Ved Mehta was already a fixture on New York’s literary scene; his Portrait of India, was, according to Salman Rushdie, “important just as I was starting to think of Midnight’s Children”. Mehta is the link between the R.K. Narayan-Mulk Raj Anand generation and the Rushdie-Vikram Seth one.

He has written a wider range of English essays than any Indian, bringing to each one a rare sensitivity and humour. He showed too a healthy eagerness to jump into a good fight, as in his “encounters with English intellectuals” in Fly and the Fly Bottle. For this book he interviewed Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Iris Murdoch, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J.P. Taylor, catching many of them in indiscretions and contradictions that kept the community in ferment for a long time. He did the same with theologians for another book. “Then I stopped,” he says. “Some people wanted me to continue with economists, scientists and so on. But I hate repeating myself.”

He introduced India in the pages of the The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1994. “Ved Mehta has educated Americans about India,” wrote William Shawn, the legendary editor of the magazine, and a father-figure in Mehta’s life, “Illuminating that country with an insider’s sensibility and an outsider’s objectivity.”

Indian readers, unused to such objectivity, took offence at Mehta’s interviews with the women in Gandhi’s life in his biography of the Mahatma. The uproar pushed up sales and established Mehta’s reputation as an uncompromising teller of his truth, a reputation he strengthened in his other India books. Mehta’s area of darkness is both symbolic and literal.

Amartya Sen, friend and one-time rival in love, has called Mehta “a very systematic contemporary historian”. The more particular a story, the more universal it is, says Mehta, whose personal history is one of the most remarkable literary enterprises ever. “Personal history” is the rubric The New Yorker created for his autobiographical writings; many of his books were first published there. That rubric was his exclusive domain for years, till John Updike̵ 7;s memoirs also appeared under it.

Ved Mehta has not been given credit as one of the pioneers of “New Journalism”. The techniques borrowed from fiction — scene-by-scene construction, use of dialogue, attention to details, use of the flashback — were second nature to him. He knew no other. He had to rely on intensive questioning, impressions and greater alertness to “get inside his subject’s head” and tell us his thoughts and motivations. He had to work at getting right the colours, expressions, gestures, and all those visual clues that other writers take for granted.

In the 1960s, as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Mailer, George Plimpton, Truman Capote extended the meaning and range of the New Journalism, Ved Mehta was polishing his style at The New Yorker, ensuring that the essence of all journalism, old and new — the sacredness of facts, the integrity of ideas — remained unchanged. By the end of the decade, when he set out on his “Proustian” voyage, it was all in place — the technique, the integrity, the choice of the telling detail.

This last involved a mastery over the unsaid, and interestingly for a man who has written so much about himself, an elusiveness that is at the heart of the best poetry.

In Sound-Shadows of the New World, the story of Mehta’s stint at the Arkansas School for the Blind, he tells us how he developed his hearing and memory and formed mental images. Later, he imposed colours on his childhood and growing years, writing with confidence of “the yellow of mustard flowers outlined by the feathery green of sugarcane,” for example.

So well did Mehta succeed in his aim — to write as if he could see — that he was sometimes accused of faking his blindness. Norman Mailer once challenged him to a boxing match to settle the issue.

How much could he know about colour? I ask. “Actually, quite a lot,” he says. “During therapy in later years, I was able to remember colours and much more.” And then he adds, a little mischievously, “Of course, my yellow may not be the same as your yellow.”

With today’s knowledge and yesterday’s energy, would he have written anything differently?

“No. I wouldn’t change a word,” he says, adding that everything is as it ought to be. “In retrospect everything looks inevitable.”

In the foreword to his first collection of essays in 1971, Mehta wrote, “My whole life is an unprecedented — and so, for the time being, incomprehensible — experiment, conducted by me in the guise of a mad scientist.”

At 73, the mad scientist, crazy student (known for speeding on bicycles and even driving a car in the U.S.), path-breaking writer, family man, inspiration to generations may be forgiven if he thinks he has no more worlds to conquer. He continues to write, however, “because that is what I do”.

As I bid goodbye, he sees me to the door, calls up the lift, and shakes hands warmly. The combination of confidence and vulnerability is captivating. I recall a line from Borges about God, who, “with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.”

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