Vedi

“Namaste.” Vedi’s father bade him the Hindu farewell. “You are a man now.” It was the first step in Ved Mehta’s long journey toward independence. He was a month shy of five years old, and he was to spend much of the next four years thirteen hundred miles away from home and family, at Dadar School for the Blind—really a mission orphanage, in a sooty section of Bombay, that had only the barest facilities but was run by an American-trained Indian Christian principal with Western ideas about education. Before Vedi was four, he had been left blind by meningitis. His father, a well-to-do, England-trained Hindu doctor, was determined that his son not experience the usual lot of the blind in India—begging alms or caning chairs—but receive the best education that India could offer a blind child.

At the school, Vedi at first felt isolated. There was the obstacle of language: he spoke only Punjabi, the other children spoke only Marathi, and the principal was determined to teach him English. There were the differences of class and age: Vedi was from “a cultured home,” and therefore wore shoes and proper clothes, took his meals with the principal’s family, and had a special soft bed in the boys’ dormitory; many of the other children were waifs from the streets, and most of them were much older. As a consequence of what may strike some as an incomprehensible act—a father sending a child to a kind of foster home—Vedi learned to get along without his parents, without his sisters and his brother, without familiar sounds and scents and tastes, long before any ordinary child learns self-reliance. He also learned to read and write English Braille, to add and subtract, to play the games that all boys play—sometimes adapted by the principal for his pupils—and to get along with his school-mates. Not all his experiences were happy, of course. He had many illnesses; like any child, he got into “boy-mischief” and was subject to the discipline of the principal’s ruler and to the harsher punishments of the Sighted Master, who lived in the boys’ dormitory. When it looked as if the Second World War were coming to India, Vedi left Dadar School and returned home—as much a victim of events in his departure as he had been in his arrival. Yet, as his father knew, and as he himself came to know, the education he received at the school afforded him a chance for a meaningful life. He grasped it eagerly.

Vedi is Ved Mehta’s memory of ordinary childhood experiences—of trying to find out, of struggling to fit in, of wanting to be loved, of playing, of dreaming—during the years that ordinarily make up childhood. But Vedi, in a sense, ceased to be a child before he was five. In the school, he learned what it was to feel apart from his peers even when he was among them; at home, on holidays, he learned what it was to feel apart from his family members even when he was among them. In the narrative, two voices alternate: the voice of a child and the voice of an adult. When the child speaks, even grim events seem innocent and funny; and when the adult speaks, even ordinary moments seem sad, reflected in a memory that brings together past and present and conveys them with eloquence in this extraordinary work.