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BOOKS
The Ecstasy of Seeing
Ved Mehta's love stories are a travelogue of the
human heart with some dull detours
By Nilanjana S. Roy
Two months short
of his fourth birthday, Ved Mehta became blind from cerebrospinal meningitis.
His response set the pattern for the rest of his life. He speculates that
had he been older, the loss of sight might have been far more traumatic:
"As it was, I laughed and played, jumped around, ran about, hopped
and skipped, climbed up and fell down-much as I had done when I could
see."
He listened to people's descriptions and developed
what he called his "facial vision" to the point where casual
acquaintances often didn't suspect that he was blind. He would even briefly
drive a car with the windows down to enable him to use his facial vision
to sense approaching obstacles. His writing denied his disability: he
wrote as the sighted do, of colours, interiors, how the late R.K. Narayan's
little finger shot out as he grasped a coffee cup. In the prologue to
All For Love: A Personal History of Desire and Disappointment, the ninth
and perhaps the most intimate book in his Continents of Exile series,
he admits, "I now understand ... I was in the grip of the fantasy
that I could see."
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ALL FOR LOVE
By Ved Mehta
Granta
Price: £9.99
Pages: 341
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The admission
forms the opening section to an extraordinary love letter, addressed to
four women whom Mehta loved, and lost, in his youth. "As I sit down
to write this letter, I scarcely know how to address you," he begins.
"'Love' or 'darling' or 'sweetheart' belongs to the distant past.
Yet each of you live in my memory the way you were and the way I knew
you in the sixties." Here he embarks on a journey where readers are
drafted into the narrative as privileged eavesdroppers, witnesses to the
unbaring of a man's soul.
The four women in question-Gigi, Vanessa, Lola
and Kilty-are slowly excavated from the depths of Mehta's memory to emerge
intact, just the way he knew them. He writes with rue and irony, but never
with bile, as they flicker enchantingly before him only to disappear,
usually into the arms of another man. He writes armed with the belated
wisdom of maturity and the insights of psychoanalysis-the 20th century
version of the confessional. And he writes with searing honesty, displaying
a rare courage as he discusses his struggles with impotence, lays bare
the writhings of the dumped, wonders how far his denial of the blindness
crippled his relationships. At times this honesty is deadly, as is the
case with Kilty with the "little girl's voice", who calls herself
Kiltykins and signs her letters with childish rows of XXXs. Here too there
is balance: Mehta includes the letters written by his lost loves, as if
to allow the reader to hear their voices too, not just his descriptions.
Not every reader is going to want to journey
with Mehta; the downside of the honesty and agglomeration of detail is
that the reading can be tedious. This is especially true for the last
section which deals with Mehta's sessions with his psychiatrist-we are
too much in the eavesdropper's position, forced to overhear the mundane
along with the insightful. But All For Love is ultimately a travelogue
of the human heart, and you shouldn't grudge a few dull detours on the
way to Mehta's ultimate destination.
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 The
Regiment
By Ekalavyan
(Reliance, Rs 195)
A war novel set in 1961 and 1965.
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 End
of the Line
By Neelesh Misra
(Penguin, Rs 200)
The story of the killing of the royals in Nepal.
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 The
Heritage Buildings of Bombay
By Rajan Narayan and Sunil Vaidyanathan
(English Edition)
A discovery through pictures of Mumbai's rich architectural past.
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 People
of India: Tamil Nadu
Ed by K.S. Singh
(East-West Press)
An anthropological profile in three volumes.
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 An
Odyssey in Tibet
By Tarun Vijay
(Ritwik, Rs 800)
A travel to Kailas Mansarovar with an eye on Tibet.
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