Word: mehtas
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...Despite the recent swarm of pretenders, however, the heavyweight champion of memoir writing is still Indian-born Ved Mehta. Back in 1972, long before memoirs became hip, the 38-year-old Mehta, who had already authored an autobiography in his 20s, got down to composing his memoirs in earnest. Thirty-two years and 11 books later, he has just ended his tale...
...Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period, the last book in Mehta's memoir cycle?collectively called Continents of Exile?concludes the most comprehensive autobiography of the past quarter-century. His topics range from going blind at the age of four to his childhood in Lahore, an education at Oxford, working for the New Yorker, love affairs in India and America, and the trials of house building in Maine. The unifying theme is loss, and the recovery, in unexpected places, of part of what has been lost. Going from his blindness, Mehta adds other privations, such as his bad luck with...
...Mehta's life certainly has the raw material for a great novel: a stark mix of cruelty and grace and the sharp demarcation of light and darkness common to fairy tales. As a boy he is struck blind by meningitis; when he is 13, his country is divided and his family, finding itself in Pakistan, is forced to leave Lahore for India and to start over again. A special program for blind children sends him to America; there, a wealthy woman becomes his patron and sponsors his studies. Mehta's calm, unhurried prose captures the fable-like events...
...Letters, the fairy tale takes a turn into darkness. The principal character of this last book is not Mehta himself but his father?fittingly, since the memoir cycle began with Daddyji, a portrait of the elder Mehta. The Red Letters gets going when father and son write a story together. To Mehta's surprise, it becomes one of extramarital infidelity. Eventually it is revealed that the story is an account of an affair that his father had, years ago. He learns of the letters that his father exchanged with his lover. He understands what his father's affair...
...wanted to find out how...FOP started, how traditions like warm and fuzzy cheesecake began.” Mehta said. “We wanted to see how it became a 25-year, intergenerational community. A lot of it is about building for the future...