#Ved mehta new yorker how to#

And now Mehta has died after his struggle with Parkinson’s disease. More than three decades have passed since then. This was a fate that I wished for myself, and I remember that my desire had an edge of desperation to it. Perhaps I was also attracted to him because he was living in New York and writing about India.

#Ved mehta new yorker how to#

Narayan, Mehta’s gift to Indian writers was to offer a lesson about how to write about our own streets and our own relatives. Along with his friend and contemporaries like Dom Moraes, with whom he traveled in India, or others like Khushwant Singh and R.K. When I was reading Mehta at that time, especially all his memoirs about his family members in Lahore or Amritsar, he was giving me a language to describe life around me. In the space of a few paragraphs, a seamless transition from one kind of absurdity to another, more horrifying, kind of meaninglessness.Īlso read: Kapila Vatsyayan: The Visionary Who Defined Indian Aesthetic Theory The radio exploded in his hands and killed him and his family. A boy had found a transistor radio in the street and taken it home. The newspaper headlines were about bomb blasts in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

The next morning, Mehta had awoken to a more real piece of news. The report’s beginning was there to point out the absurdity, perhaps even comedy, which Mehta encountered in India. “Is it of polyester? If so, ask her to immediately change into a cotton nightie.”Ī little later, Mehta learned that it had been a prank call. “Is your wife wearing a nightie?” the caller wanted to know. He wanted to know how many people were in the room with Mehta. The caller said that there was a fire in the hotel’s basement. In September 1985, the year before I left India, Mehta began a piece with a report about being awakened by a phone call in his room at a five-star hotel in Delhi. He was living in New York but often wrote about India. I was in college in Delhi when I discovered Mehta’s writings. Mehta had come to the US in 1949, a 15-year-old student at the Arkansas School for the Blind. As the little girl went around in a circle, Mehta turned in her direction, alert to any cry. There was Mehta, a blind man, anxious that his daughter not fall and hurt herself, and he instructed her to keep ringing the bell on her bicycle. What interested me in my colleague’s account was his description of Mehta trying to teach his daughter to ride a bicycle. This was after he lost the job at The New Yorker. I hadn’t been aware that Mehta had taught at Vassar in the mid-1990s.

My home is in the middle of a row of dull, surprisingly ugly, apartment buildings across from campus the fact that Mehta had lived in one of these grey or brown units immediately redeemed them in my eyes. When I arrived at Vassar College about 15 years ago, a senior colleague told me that the Mehta used to live in the same faculty housing where I had just moved in. After a distinguished scholarly career that took him from Pomona College in California to Oxford University and then to Harvard, he joined The New Yorker where he worked as a staff writer for 30 years. He was admitted by his affluent doctor father at the Dadar School for the Blind. He will be remembered in India for his moving account of his childhood – at the age of three, he became blind after suffering from an attack of meningitis.