12-volume memoir explored life in India
Ved Mehta, an author and journalist who wrote at length on Indian history and culture, notably in an epic 12- volume autobiography that melded the personal and political, died Jan. 9 at home in Manhattan of Parkinson's disease, at 86.
Mehta wrote for the New Yorker for three decades, on Oxford philosophers, Christian theologians, Noam Chomsky and Mahatma Gandhi.
But his chief subject was loss — including his sight, which disappeared due to meningitis at age three; of his home in Lahore, which he and his family had to flee after Partition; his language, Punjabi, which he traded for English; and his country, which he left as a teenager.
Mehta wrote his first book, Face to Face, in his early 20s partly as a romantic ploy, an unsuccessful attempt to woo a classmate he hired to take dictation “eight hours a day, six days a week.”
For many years he refused to let publishers reference his blindness on dust jackets.
“He wanted to compete on equal terms,” his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, said. He “wanted to be viewed as a writer,” not a “blind writer.”
Nearly half his 27 works made up his autobiographical project, known as Continents of Exile. The series began with biographies of his parents, Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979), who put him on a train when he was five, sending him to a school for the blind more than 1,600 km away. “To this day I can't hear the sound of a train without shedding tears in my head,” Mehta once said.
Those early volumes won critical acclaim. He drew further praise with books including The Ledge Between the Streams (1984), which examined his childhood as well as the violence of the 1947 partition.
Ved Parkash Mehta was born in Lahore on March 21, 1934.
After studying in Bombay, he learned Braille, bicycling, roller skating, horseback riding and rudimentary English. He won a scholarship to Oxford after attending the Arkansas School for the Blind. Mehta received a second bachelor's degree in 1959, and a master's from Harvard in 1961.
Survivors include his wife, two daughters, two sisters and two granddaughters.
Mehta renounced his Indian citizenship over Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's autocratic rule. He completed his autobiographical odyssey with The Red Letters (2004).