![]() ![]() He could recognise people by their footsteps, cars by the whir of their engines, and relate it all with an immaculate choice of words. Ved Mehta was able to describe this with precision, using his keen auditory impressions. He had a peculiar way of smoking, with his cigarette dangling from the right curve of his lower lip rather than the centre. The New Yorker a man who smoked endlessly and spoke almost as an afterthought. Ved Mehta had the rare gift of painting the person in front of him with words. Even as the man resorted to gimmickry with Naipaul, Ved Mehta had been in another part of the hall with his own captive audience, probably painting a picture of his listeners in his mind. He was soon dispossessed of this notion as he was informed that the unflappable writer had in fact been V.S. The man retreated from the scene, confident that Ved Mehta was indeed blind. The writer continued to address his listener, unfazed. ![]() The man moved a step back, stood behind one of the listeners and made faces at the writer. The latter continued his discussion with his attentive audience, completely oblivious. Seeing a writer of Indian origin holding court, he went up to him and snapped his fingers at him. In a widely reported anecdote, a veteran New York journalist decided to verify this fact at an informal hangout with writers. Having lost his vision at the age of three to a bout of meningitis, his writing had the kind of detailing that made many wonder if he was actually visually challenged. Not blessed with sight, he was gifted instead with the power of visual poetry and rare perspicacity. He could visualise the dark nooks and crevices of society that were in danger of coming unhinged. Born in Lahore in undivided Punjab in 1934, he moved to the United States at a time when it was fashionable for writers to talk of alienation in a normless world. We also meet some of the most prominent Indians of the 1970s and the 1980s - Jayaprakash Narayan, Satyajit Ray, Begum Akhtar and so on.Ved Mehta was a man well ahead of his times. In these books we meet ordinary citizens from all walks of life: a police officer in Ludhiana, a tribal chieftain in Nagaland, a loquacious Darjeeling bureaucrat with strong views on India’s China policy. Portrait of India was followed up by Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles (1976), New India (1978) and A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers (1982). Throughout his career, Mehta kept writing about India and Indians. Was this a bit of a Eureka moment for Mehta, who would soon begin a massively ambitious autobiographical project? Difficult to say, but surely it’s not implausible that the storyteller in Mehta sensed the tour guide’s point that the stories we tell have a funny way of circling back to ourselves. Call it foreshadowing if you will, but Portrait of India begins with a jovial Sikh gentleman conducting a guided tour of New Delhi - the man announces that he will begin with “a tour of myself” and proceeds to rattle off his family history. This was still a few years away from the beginning of Continents in Exile, the 12-volume memoir that has made him almost synonymous with the form among Anglophone Indian writers. During the late 1960s, The New Yorker staff writer Ved Mehta (who died earlier this week at 86) began writing what would become the essay collection Portrait of India (1970). ![]()
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