Red Letters , livre ebook

Ved Mehta

THE RED LETTERS
Continents of Exile My Father s Enchanted Period
Contents
By the Same Author
Dedication
Photographs
PROLOGUE: THE LONG SHADOW ON THE PARTY
I. HILL GIRLS AND PRINCELINGS
II. WOVEN INTO THE REGION
III. THE SIMLA STAGE IS CHASTE
IV. THE ATTACH CASE
V. PSALMS OF PRAISES OF YOUR FEET
VI. VACATED HOUSE
VII. THE LONG-LIVED ONE
EPILOGUE: TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE
AFTERWORD
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
B Y V ED M EHTA
Face to Face
Walking the Indian Streets
Fly and the Fly-Bottle
The New Theologian
Delinquent Chacha
Portrait of India
John Is Easy to Please
Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
The New India
The Photographs of Chachaji
A Family Affair
Three Stories of the Raj
Rajiv Gandhi and Rama s Kingdom
A Ved Mehta Reader
C ONTINENTS OF E XILE
Daddyji
Mamaji
Vedi
The Ledge Between the Streams
Sound-Shadows of the New World
The Stolen Light
Up at Oxford
Remembering Mr. Shawn s New Yorker
All for Love
Dark Harbor
In Memory of William Cary and to Katherine Cary
Photographs
Mamaji and Daddyji. Simla. 1934.
Jakko Road. Ca. 1865.
A view. Simla. Ca. 1865.
Mamaji and Daddyji. Simla. 1934.
Prologue
The Long Shadow On the Party
IN 1967, MY YOUNGER SISTER, USHA, WAS EXPECTING her first child in Charleston, South Carolina, where her American husband, a lieutenant in the Navy, was temporarily stationed. My mother was determined to be with Usha for her confinement, as she had been with my three older sisters for their confinements in India. The fact that Usha was living in Charleston, thousands of miles away from New Delhi, where my parents lived, seemed to be an obstacle for my mother only in terms of money, something she d always understood and managed well. Indeed, it was a matter of pride with her that, in spite of my father s meagre government salary as an Indian public-health official and his openhanded ways, she had been able to keep all seven of us children in respectable clothes and respectable shoes as we were growing up. Fortunately, near the time of Usha s confinement, my father, who was now in his early seventies and had long since retired from government service, got a medical assignment in New York City with a wealthy, eccentric, elderly American patient of his, Mrs. Ethel Clyde, whom he had attended off and on for many years. She generally compensated him in an unconventional way-by buying his round-trip air ticket from New Delhi, taking care of his expenses while he was in America, and giving him a small stipend. The arrangement suited him; he was able to see me in New York, where I was living, and the stipend, nothing much in American terms, went some ways toward defraying his expenses in India. Assuming that the cost of my mother s lodging in America would be minimal, since most of the time she would be staying with Usha, he decided to splurge the stipend on another air ticket, for my mother, and bring her out with him.
My mother stopped briefly in New York on her way to Charleston, and eager to introduce my parents to some of the people who were closest to me in New York, I arranged a dinner party for them in my apartment. I invited William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker , who edited my writing; his wife, Cecille, and their two grown sons, Wallace and Allen; and my friend and amanuensis, Gwyneth Cravens. Despite tremendous good will all around, I expected the evening to be difficult. I was bringing together the two men who had had the greatest influence on me-my father and Mr. Shawn. After I had gone blind, two months short of my fourth birthday, everyone at home thought that my father should plan for a modest life for me, like that of a small-time shopkeeper, but my father never faltered in his ambition that I should aspire to the highest intellectual attainments. Later, in my middle twenties, when I was completing my nine years of college and university and was thrashing about for a means of earning my living, Mr. Shawn had opened up the vocational path of a writer to me. Indeed, since I had come to New York he had served in loco parentis, and I had developed an enormous amount of affection and regard for him. I wanted the two men to admire each other as I admired each of them. Yet I was all too aware of how vast the gulf that divided them was. My father was worldly; Mr. Shawn was otherworldly. My father thrived on the social stage, a sine qua non of his medical profession; Mr. Shawn mostly worked from behind the scenes, invisibly improving and perfecting other people s writing and art work, and usually avoided all social engagements not directly connected with his work. I thought it was a great mark of his affection for me that he had agreed to come to the party.
My anxiety was compounded by the fact that my mother spoke broken English, and Mrs. Shawn, except for a jaunt in Europe, had scarcely stirred out of Chicago and New York; the two of them would be forced to communicate mostly through nonverbal expressions of warmth. No doubt Wallace would help interpret; he had stayed with my parents in New Delhi a couple of years earlier, when he had been in India as a Fulbright scholar, but since leaving India he had fallen out of touch with them. Allen and Gwyn had had no direct contact with my parents or with India.
I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, and there was hardly any space to move around. My living room was crammed with a sofa, easy chairs, and a long dining table and dining chairs-furniture I had bought for a much larger apartment when I was in my twenties, in my more expansionist days. The party would be cozy and intimate, but the obverse side of that was that there would be no buffer of other people-no place to hide in case of social awkwardness. The evening had the potential to collapse like a souffl .
To my relief, the party got off to a good start. My parents cut graceful, impressive figures, with my mother in a beautiful silk sari and my father in an elegant tweed jacket. He was chatty, while she used smiles, gestures, and hugs to good effect. The Shawns, as always, were warm and outgoing, and Gwyn was a wonderful moral support.
Then, just when I thought everything was going fine, my father said, as if in a desperate conversational gambit to Mr. Shawn, You have wonderful jokes in your magazine.
I squirmed. I had become so hypersensitive to language under Mr. Shawn s editing that my father s slight linguistic misfire-saying jokes when he meant cartoons -embarrassed me.
But Mr. Shawn seemed instinctively to understand that my father was anxious. He laughed graciously and asked, Do those jokes really make sense all the way over in India?
Yes, sir, my father said. We Punjabis especially like a good joke-we like to laugh a lot.
That s fascinating, Mr. Shawn said. I wonder why that is.
To my horror, my father launched into a lecture about the Punjabis-their character, their habits, their language-leaving Mr. Shawn s simple question far behind. I was mortified. I wished I could tell my father that there was no need for him to try to impress Mr. Shawn with his store of knowledge about Punjabis. Ordinarily, he was able to manage a conversation with almost anyone, but because he knew how I revered Mr. Shawn he was going all out to dazzle him. But then I reminded myself that many of us writers were also anxious to have Mr. Shawn s good opinion-indeed, involuntarily behaved around him like schoolboys in front of their esteemed headmaster.
Mr. Shawn listened with unwavering attention. That was his way-always trying to connect with what someone was feeling or thinking or interested in, putting aside his own views and preconceptions.
As the evening went on, my father, if anything, became more voluble. I attributed that in part to his having had a couple of glasses of wine. He had been a teetotaller for most of his life and hadn t touched alcohol until he was in his late fifties, and then took only a few sips of whiskey or brandy medicinally, because of a heart attack he had had a year earlier.
At one point, when I was offering around ginger ale and wine, I overheard my father say to Gwyn, in a surprisingly choked and maudlin voice, As a medical man, I can tell you that eighty-five per cent of information is taken in through the eyes. Ved somehow manages to take all of that information in through his ears. Isn t that remarkable?
He s not behaving like his usual, circumspect self, I thought. He may be hoping to elicit Gwyn s admiration for me, but without knowing it he is inviting her to pity me. That goes against everything that I stand for. It s not like him to be so insensitive. But then there was no way I could control him and, anyway, if he sounded simultaneously proud and sad that was to be expected. After all, the only blind people he ever came across in India were destitute beggars stumbling around with sticks and begging bowls.
As I was pouring some ginger ale for the Shawns (they were all teetotallers), my father called me over and asked for some brandy.
I didn t want to get into an argument with him, especially with the Shawns present, so I got a snifter and poured him some brandy. Perhaps my hand shook. In any case, I poured more of it than I meant to.
Are you feeling all right? I asked my father in Punjabi, handing him the snifter.
Never better, he said, emphasizing never, as if he sensed that I didn t like his talking so much and were trying to cover up his own embarrassment. Since my childhood, we had been so close that he was quick to pick up on every slight change in my feelings-even experiencing them as his own.
Soon I was busy checking on dinner, which was being prepared by a hired cook, and getting hors d oeuvres and ice. In any event, I made a point of not being within earshot of my father, thinking that, that way, he would feel less anxious and act more like himself.
As the guests rose to serve themselves dinner, my father first got