London Telegraph Magazine
August 11, 2001
Seeing Without Sight
There are two marble statues in the hallway of Ved Mehta’s New York apartment, both beautiful in their very different ways. Once is a reclining, strangely androgynous Buddha with a Mona Lisa smile, and the other is a deliciously chubby classical cherub with tiny wings sprouting from its cool white back. Mehta smiled as he showed me into the drawing-room.” ‘They are lovely, aren’t they? East and West. Not unlike me.” Dressed in an elegant grey checked suit and a silver and pink heavy silk tie, he then disappeared into the pantry, returned a moment later with a bottle of chilled Meursault and a couple of glasses , and said very politely, pulling out a chair for me, “Do sit down, please.” The room is furnished with floor-to-ceiling books, stunning oriental carpets and antique furniture and an eclectic collection of modern art. “Ah yes”, he said, as I complimented him on the decor, “I picked out all the carpets and furniture myself.” I realised I was with somebody who cared deeply about how things look. People as well as objects.
Witness the only photograph in his new book, All for Love: A personal History of Desire and Disappointment, published by Granta this month. On the very last page, there she is, wild flowers entwined in the her waist-length hair, a generous mouth, enormous eyes: irresistable. She’s a ballet dancer named Gigi, who is one of the four past lovers Mehta has chosen as the subjects for this fascinating and revealing memoir.
We chatted away about life, love, men and women – and just as my glass was almost empty, he said, “Please allow me to give you some more wine,” and went off to get another bottle from the fridge. Now, none of this would be the least bit remarkable, or worth describing, were it not for the fact that Ved Mehta has been totally blind since the age of three.
He was born in Lahore in 1934. Just before his fourth birthday, he became blind after contracting cerebrospinal meningitis. His father, a doctor, was Westernised in his education and outlook on life, while his mother was a devout Hindu with very little schooling, which explains their different attitutes towards their son’s blindness. His mother was convinced that his affliction was a passing curse brought on by the evil eye, and dragged him around to healers and astrologers, refusing to believe that the condition was permanent. But his father knew that his optic nerves had been destroyed , and instead of his wife’s denial and magic, he looked to Milton for inspriration and encouraged his son to feel that he could do absolutely anything he wanted if he worked at it.
But work meant education, and at the time there were no serious schools for the blind in India. So, as a child, Mehta was kept at home with the women, where he began to teach himself how to piece together his own vision of the world using his other senses. He could tell by touch the shape of someone’s face, or the texture of a plant or fabric, and learned over the years how much of a person’s character -even their weight, and most certainly their mood and temperment – is revealed in their voice. He also became adept at filing away all kinds of information about people that picked up from listening to the grown-ups chattering away. These random fragments were then fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle inhis head until he was able to describe somebody in amazing detail: “Aunt Kimmi has fat cheets, a narrow forehead, a tight little mouth, a big nose and when she walks her chest almost seems to go ahead of her.” He made sounds visible. In his book he writes about his need to live as though he could see, and speaking to one of his lovers he says, “As you know, within hours of meeting you, I was able to surmise what you looked like—even the shade of your lipstick. But what you were not to know was that I had reached this level of mastery only after years upon years of using alchemy to transform my ears into my eyes—of developing, in Keats’s words ‘blindness keen.'”
Mehta and his father spent many years applying, without success, to schools in England and America and finally, when he was 15, he was admited to the School for the Blind in Little Rock, Arkansas, and set off alone, with a one-way ticket. It must have been terrifying, yet he knew he had to escape from India where his disability was seen as a permanent barrier to education and to living any kind of normal life.
“In India,” he said, “I was told from the day I lost my sight that I would never get married and have children.” At the school in Arkansas he was forced to compress 12 years of missed schooling intro three, graduated at 18 and went off to college in California. From there he went to Oxford and then Harvard. But while his intellectual life was zooming ahead, his emotional life was paralysed. Not only did he have to deal with his blindness, but there was also the question of exile, being a stranger in a foreign land. As he writes, “There was hardly a day I did not feel defeated, condescended to and humiliated.”
Paradoxically, his skill at getting around by himself (he has always refused to use a white stick) only complicated his feeling towards others. “I had to prove every day, to everyone I encountered, that I was able to do things they thought I could not do. Whenever people tried to help or protect me, they jarred my self-confidence and dulled my senses.” A former colleague at The New Yorker magazine, who was never a close friend, believes “Ved made a conscious decision that it was more important to be taken as sighted than be liked.”
In 1957, while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, he published his first book, and then, a couple of years later, he was put in touch with William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker. Mehta told me quite simply , “Shawn was a genius and a saint.” A genius who fulfilled the role of mentor, father and protector.” I had never met such acceptance from anyone before,” he said. He went on to become a staff writer at the magazine, and to publish lengthy articles on subjects ranging from Oxford philosophers to theology, Mahatma Gandhi and what some critics have described as “interminable” essays on his family in India. Mehta is a self confessed addict and fanatic when it comes to his work (“my mistress,” as he described it to me, laughing) and rarely takes any time off. He works seven days a week, and intends to go on doing so until he is summoned by “the big editor-in-chief” to his corner office in the sky.
Shawn had admitted Mehta into the sunlit uplands of The New Yorker, but he still longed for love. Which is where the four women he writes about in All for Love come into the picture. The first was Gigi, the beautiful ballet dancer. He met her at a party and their relationship started almost immediately, but ended when she abruptly announced that she intended to marry someone else. About six months later he ran into Vanessa, an elegant English girl he had known at Oxford, on a snowy New York street one December evening. After dinner that night, they ended up in bed together, and Mehta touchingly decribes the effect her English accent and the word ‘darling’ had upon him: “When I was a child I used to wish that a memsahib would take me in her arms and whisper sweet English endearments to me.” But the dream was short-lived. Soon after the love affair started, Mehta went off to England to work on a series of articles about theology, and when he returned, there was Vanessa at the airport to meet him—with a man called Robert in tow.
His next romance started in India where he went at the end of 1965 to write another series of articles for The New Yorker. Lola was his secretary, and when she arrived at his parents’ house his mother exclaimed, “Your new secretary is so beautiful that I’m sure she turns heads wherever she goes.” Lola was also bright, highly efficient, attentive and sympathetic. And, like Mehta, a mixture of East and West. They traveled around India for five weeks, became lovers, and after Mehta returned to New York, it was agreed that she would join him there. After endless delays and visa problems, she finally arrived, but during their separation, had met Gus. Eventually she abandoned Mehta and he was once again alone. The last lady in the quartet was Kilty, a highly neurotic model/graduate student at Yale, who arrived in his office one day with a bundle of her poems which she asked him to read.
Although there are moments of great happiness and fulfillment with each of these women, there is also a great deal of sadness in this moving and extremely courageous memoir. The subtitle of the book, is after all, “A Personal History of Desire and Disappointment.” There has been an unspoken understanding with each of his lovers; they had to go along with the fantasy that he could see; his blindness must never be alluded to. And so each relationship was built upon an insurmountable and monumental lie. “In order to live in the world,” said Mehta, “I had to live as if I could see, and yet that way of living was a hurdle to acceptance by others, especially by a woman I loved, for as long as I continued to hide from myself, how could I expect her to truly know and love me?”
After his particularly traumatic split with Kilty, who ended up having an abortion and going into psychotherapy, he decided that he might benefit from psychiatric help himself. Enter Dr. Bak. All Mehta’s independence of spirit and intellect rebelled against the idea: “I thought the people who went to psychoanalysts were either pathetic lunatics or rich wastrels.” Neither one nor the other, Mehta embarked on a disturbing, weird and magical mystery tour of his subconscious. It would be far too simplistic to say that analysis transformed his life, and yet he told me, “The truth is that I can’t imagine what my life might have been like without it. And yet, nor can I be sure precisely what gains and losses, if any came from it.”
It was only after many years of disappointing love affairs, and being on his own, that he married Linn, the daughter of old family friends, in 1983, when he was almost 50. Their first daughter, Sage, was born a year after their marriage, followed by Natasha a few years later.
As we sat chatting in his apartment high above Lexington Avenue, surrounded by books (including the 23 he has written himself), I realized what an extraordinary journey his life has been—”a triumph of the will,” as his friend, Kennedy Fraser, put it. But why, I wondered, had he written this book, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of stripping yourself naked in full view of the world? “I needed to write about the woman I have loved for self-understanding, to sort out, all these years later, a complicated welter of emotions.” And what did his former lovers think of the project? They all give it their blessing and, with permission, he has quoted from their letters, although names have been changed to protect their privacy, with the exception of Gigi who, as a published author herself, said she could handle the exposure.
As I was leaving, Mehta walked me to the front door and we both stroked the two statues, East and West, and I asked him what he was doing for the summer. He said he was going to Maine for a month, with his wife and daughters, to their house by the sea-accompanied by his new “mistress,” the book he has just started writing about his father, set in the Thirties. Idylic. And, just as important, triumphant.
All for Love: A Personal History of Desire and Disappointment, by Ved Mehta (Granta, £14.99), is available for £12.99 Call 0870-155-7222 or write to Telegraph Books Direct, 32-34 Park Royal Rd. London NW10 7LN.
An extract from All for Love starts overleaf:
It was November 1968, one and a half years after Lola had left me. As if to soften the edge of a miserable wintry day, a shy, exquisitely beautiful young woman whom I had encountered at parties around town walked into my office. Her name was Kilty. “I see you’re busy,” she said, backing out of my office and starting quickly down the hall. I dashed after her and caught up with her just as she reached the elevator. “Don’t go away, Kilty.” “I don’t want to disturb you,” she said. “You are not disturbing me-you’re brightening my day”. I was surprised at my words, by her shyness encouraged me. Kilty laughed in a girlish, high-pitched way and her laughter ripped along the quiet, narrow halls. We walked back to my office. The following month, she asked me what I was doing for Christmas, saying, “I think you should have a Christmas tree”. “But I don’t have any ornaments”. “I know, I’m going to make you some.” “Oh, Kilty, It all seems such a fuss, Why? It makes your apartment feel very homely. Perhaps I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but the tree adds a kind of feminine touch that’s woefully missing around here”. The evening after we installed the tree she arrived with a sewing basket full of pipe cleaners and colorful scraps of fabric and pieces of felt. While we sat and talked. She stitched together some birds. Her sitting on the silk sofa, bent over the sewing in her lap as my mother, my sister and my aunts had done, knitting, stitching and embroidering at home-gave the room a family feel. Her presence awakened in me certain emotions that had lain dormant since Lola left me. When she had an assemblage of bright birds, she showed me how to bend their pipe-cleaner legs around the branches; we worked rapidly until the tree was alive with the small, auspicious things. In attaching the last bird to the tree, I noticed how warm it felt. You lucky thing. I thought. You’ve been nestling in her hands. Now and again, by design as much as by accident, I touched Kilty’s hand: it was long, shapely, and competent. Kilty finished up by hanging candy canes, an angel, and a Santa Claus that materialized from her sewing basket. And last we put on a string of lights that I had bought at her request. With the table lamps on, the room seemed to her to be too bright. I turned the lamps off. Then it seemed too dark to her. I brought out some candles, which we lit. The scent of the tree had probably been there all along, but suddenly I noticed that the whole room was filled with its fragrance.
Walking home after Christmas dinner, I put my arm around her cautiously, fully expecting her to disengage herself gently. Instead, she turned her face toward me and rested her head on my shoulder. I found myself kissing her. We circled the block, kissed again, crossed over to the park side of Fifth Avenue, kissed again and yet again. The morning after the first kiss, just as I walked into my office and was wondering about the appropriate time to call Kilty, the telephone rang. “It’s me,” Kilty said. Perhaps because of her little girl’s voice the greeting sounded very intimate. “Beware,” I told myself. “Go slow. It takes you for ever to recover from a love affair.” Last night was wonderful, I said, not quite certain whether I was saying the right thing. You have such a pure, sweet smile. I was just going to say something like that about you, I said stupidly. Copycat, she said teasingly, and added. I miss you. What are you doing tonight? That’s a question that I should have asked, I though. I’m taking you out to dinner, I said quickly; I seemed to veer from caution to boldness, from one extreme to the other. The same German restaurant? She asked. I thought you might like a change. This little mouse is a house body. She likes the same nibbles again and again. I found the way she talked about nibbles both exciting and threatening. I was reminded of my mother, who had a girlish side, and who, like a child, was by turn sweet and arbitrary. What a pleasure to talk to a woman with a light touch, I thought. What could be more appropriate for me? Yet, even as I thought this, I wondered about my sanity. I had imagined the Gigi was appropriate, yet she was a ballet dancer, and I had no interest in or knowledge of dancing, I’d thought Vanessa was appropriate, too, yet she ended up becoming a follower of a self-styled holy man, And, of course, I’d thought Lola was appropriate-indeed, that no other woman could ever be right for me-and yet here I was having exactly the same feelings about Kilty. I wondered how much of what she was and how much by my imagination.
I could only conclude that each woman had appealed to a different identity of mine. Gigi to my ericanself, Vanessa to my English self, and Lola to my Zindian self. Could it be that because of my confided identity, my instincts were so skewed that I don’t know what I really want, so I left it up to a woman to decide whether she wanted me? Or was there something in me that was drawn to women who were destined to leave me? You seem to be in deep thought. Kilty said. What are you thinking about? I was just wondering if you minded that I wasn’t an American. You are such a wondrous bird. Don’t you know that we Americans are all originally immigrants? So you don’t mind? I find you very exotic like baklava. Ordinarily, I was superstitious person, but as I paid the bill for our dinner, I thought it was promising that Kilty and I, though born poles apart, had had identical dinners-chicken liver pate. Wiener schnitzel, fruit salad and coffee. Instead of the insistent tume of Chhuthe asha kai tare nah hon, the song Lola used to sing in India. I heard in my head the soft, gentle melody of Vivaldi’sSpring, with its slumbering shepherd and sheepdog, and its murmuring brook, the strains passing over le like a benediction. It’d been a long winter, but now I’m strolling into the spring. On the street corner, I hesitated between turning south and taking her to her parents apartment and turning north and inviting her to my apartment. Kilty instinctively turned north, and I fell in step.
Where shall I put the question? I asked myself. The apartment? There’s no romance in that. In a restaurant? That’s a public place. On the Top of the Sixes, with a stunning view of the city I love. That’s touristy. On a boat the Circle Line? That’s certainly romantic, but also public and a bit tacky. Take her away to an inn somewhere in the Catskills? That’s sort of middle-aged-OK for divorces and widowers but not right for young love. Walking along the Brooklyn Bridge? That’s right for spring, but not for the winter. Still I don’t want to let another day go by. We’d been together now for only and irrevocable love. Trying to learn from what I thought of as my past mistakes, I was determined not to be tardy and casual-as I’d been with Lola in India. I felt that I had to take control and act quickly. Perhaps Gigi, Vanessa and Lola had all been wrong choices, but now I wanted to lay claim to Lilty with a love as lasting as that of my parents, who by then had been married for nearly 45 years. When I was in high school, I had fallen under the spell of JD Salinger and his toy epic, The Catcher in the Rye, and had been mesmerized by Holden Caulfield ingenuou question to a New York taxi driver: “You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?” In my adolescence, I had identified with those migrating ducks. I decided that as soon as Kilty and I got together that evening, I would coax her to take a walk with me in Central park and steer her to the duck pond. I picked Kilty up from the lobby of her parents’ building and took her for lunch at a little Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue, and afterwards we walked, through cold, sunless afternoon, to the pond. It was windswept and bleak, and there was not a single duck or child in sight. “Well?” she prompted. I was flustered. “Will you marry me?” My words came out in a single breath. I wondered whether I had surrendered to her what should have been entirely my initiative. In books, men kneel on one knee, I knelt down, and she seemed happy. “But I’m waiting for your answer,” I said. “You know so little about me. I gave you my answer when I slept with you”. I was hoping for a definitive response, sweet”. She flung her arms around me and kissed me powerfully, murmuring, “Yes-yes-yes-yes.” As Kilty and I were walking back to my apartment, after the formalities at the duck pond, I said to her giddily, “The moment we get home, I’m going to telephone my parents in New Delhi, and Jasper and Miriam, my friends in Oxford” Her hand went rigid in mine. “Are you all right?” “Yes,” she said, in a distant voice. Then she said, “You are not to breathe a word about marriage to a soul”. “I won’t if you don’t want me to-but why not?” “Don’t ask me any questions unless you want me to flip”. “I won’t,” I said accommodatingly. Her spell-or whatever it was-passed, but the rest of the way home I stepped along hesitantly, my balance had been shaken. Finally, in the evening, when she was her relaxed, flirtatious self again, I asked her the reason for the secrecy. I must speak to Pappy and Mother before anyone else hears about our marriage. You can’t have any idea how much persuading it will take to get them to agree. I’ll have to find just the right moment, or everything may go kaput. A few evenings later, after dinner at my apartment I poured a little brandy into a couple of crystal snifters and we settled down together on the sofa. Coby called today, and I’m going to Philadelphia to see him tomorrow, she said without any preliminaries. I broke up with him last October, just before I went to Paris with Michael. I was stunned. You’ve never mentioned Coby before, I said. You’ve never mentioned any of your ex-girlfriends to me, either. Her tone was defiant. But there hasn’t been a woman in my life for a long time, I protested. I know, she said, putting her head on my shoulder. Don’t be alarmed. I said in my most encouraging voice (the one I used for interviewing reluctant subjects). Tell me more about Coby. He sounds fascinating. You know the way people refer to Frank Sinatra as Old Blue Eyes? Well, everyone at college used to refer to Coby as Bedroom Eyes. I flinched. Then I said, “What does ‘Bedroom Eyes’ mean?” It tells me nothing about his eyes. Are they restless, or deep or penetrating, or seductive? Is his gaze so intense that you feel you are in his power? Are you, unclothe you? Don’t overdo it, she said. I know how you feel. I’d really like to know who my competition is I said. He’s not your competition. Besides, you must control your jealous impulses. Is Coby very handsome? When I first saw him, I ran in the other directions, because he looks like a movie star, she said. But, don’t torture yourself. I’ve broken up with him, and that’s the end of it. But it’s not the end of it if you want to go and see him. I want to go and be with him, not for my sake but for his. He can be really violent, and I want to make sure he doesn’t harm himself.
Summer came and went. Every two or three weeks Kilty would go to Philadelphia or Coby would turn up in New York. She arranged matters so I was never able to meet Coby and judge for myself how much of a threat he was. One Saturday evening, as I was kissing her goodbye outside her building, she said, “I’ll be leaving for New Haven tomorrow. I have been accepted at Yale to work toward a PhD in English literature.” I berated her for not telling me her plans. I applied as a lark. I was sure I wouldn’t get in. The next day, I took Kilty to Grand Central Station, and hauled her case full of clothes and books from the taxi to the platform. It won’t be too bad for you, sweet, will it? She asked. I felt like yelling. What do you think? Why are you doing this to us? But instead I said, No, it won’t be too bad. I’ll try to come up on weekends. And so life went on, until she finally agreed to come back to New York for the wedding. Kilty had vacillated so much about marriage that I didn’t allow myself to take her coming for granted until she actually arrived on November 28. This was such a heady period that for years I remembered each date as if I were making off days on an Advent calendar. As luck would have it, I had won a free trip to New Delhi in an airline raffle the Friday that Kilty was to the city to set our marriage plans in motion. I had a good reason to go to India-my father was not keeping well-but when I mentioned the free trip to Kilty I immediately regretted it, because after that, she would not hear of my passing it up. As Kilty is tackling her parents I will be giving the good tidings to my family, I though. For many years, my relatives near and far, had been waiting for news of my marriage. I was 35 and, in their eyes, long past the Hindu stage of a householder-of becoming a family man in my own right. The Hindu life cycle calls for a man to devote his first 25 years to learning, his second to raising a family, his third to doing community service, and his fourth to preparing to take leave of worldly cares. Separation from Lola and Vanessa had had such disastrous consequences, however, that the idea of putting thousands o miles between Kilty and myself, even for only a week, filled me with foreboding, and that was deepened by the fact that every time I turned on the radio to catch the weather report or the news headlines I would hear the song Leavin on a Jet Plane. In the song’s plaintive refrain I heard echoes of my own predicament. I would then scold myself for not being much better than the soothsayers who try to divine the future from tealeaves or the entrails of a bird, and above all, for not trusting in Kilty. I was flying out December 4, and as I was saying goodbye to Kilty I made her promise three things: she would talk to her parents promptly; regardless of what they said, she would telephone the guests and invite them; and she would keep me informed by cable. As I was leaving New Delhi, I picked up a blue silk suit that I had ordered on the day I’d landed to be made up for her as one of my wedding gifts; it matched her eyes. I now intended to give it to her and pretend that I had casually picked it up as a travel present=glossing over the fact that, until so very recently, it had signified my hops in New York, I reached her on the phone at her parents’ apartment. Usually, when we hadn’t spoken to each other for a day or two she sounded giddy and excited, but this time she sounded far away. Kilty entered the apartment with a heavy step and returned my embraced a bit self-consciously. How did you get on in my absence? I asked, after a while. Vedkins, Kiltykins was hoping you’d tell her all about India. If you really want to know what went wrong, you should have known that without your being near me I could do nothing. But you insisted that I go, I didn’t want to, I now realize that without your presence I was paralyzed.
