Yet his writing contains delightfully detailed description. Mehta was left blind around the age of 4 by an attack of meningitis. But well, that can’t be helped I suppose,” he says. I wish I could see my sentences taking shape. But the fact that he can’t see his errors, that he can misspell ‘taxi’ as ‘taxy’ and not know it, bothers him. Mehta has always dictated his writing, though he does know how to type, and types for his personal work often. Perhaps this is thanks to all those years in the hallowed, error-proofed offices of The New Yorker, or perhaps the result of long years of dictation beginning with the amanuensis he wanted to impress that summer. Mehta’s speech takes the elegant, fully-formed shape of the polished, copy-edited sentence. Later, I discover that he has used the word in the prologue to the first piece in The Essential Ved Mehta, the smart, stylish new anthology of his work that has just been published by Penguin. It is a word that comes up more than once in the conversation he is clearly taken with it. He explains that it means an assistant who is more than a scribe. “Do you know the word ‘amanuensis’?” he asks. No one encouraged him to write, but she did. He had been told his English was ‘shaky’. She agreed, and by the end of the summer, he had 200 pages of what was to become his first book, Face to Face. He asked her if she would take dictation for a fee. He was 20, and had decided to embark on writing his autobiography that summer. We start our conversation with the time he began to write, and he speaks of a girl in his college-Pomona College, California-he was in love with. ‘Well-chosen details represent more than themselves… The trick is to choose the details, which Mehta does with consummate, sly skill.’ ‘Mehta’s writing… often reaches large questions through small local instances,’ observes critic Michael Wood in the London Review of Books. ‘ was so adept at using small stories to cast light on a big picture,’ writes critic Jai Arjun Singh on his blog, ‘that his mentor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, developed a new rubric-“Personal History”-especially for his profiles.’ In a 2009 article for Business Standard, writer and critic Nilanjana S Roy notes that ‘Nothing is exempt from Mehta’s need to set it all down, not the years of apprenticeship with Mr Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor, not his blindness, not his sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch.’ This is borne out in his ‘million-word plus’ 11-volume autobiography Continents of Exile-comprising well-known accounts of his father, Daddyji, his mother, Mummyji, and his uncle, Mamaji, and ending with Red Letters-which he began in 1972 and completed in 2003. This offers testimony to the considerable regard Mehta holds for episodes of his personal life, and indeed what a careful chronicler he is of the everyday, of what is often dismissed as the commonplace. The reader came away convinced of ‘Mehta’s’ blindness. There are also some marvellous, fantastical anecdotes that make an appearance in various interviews, such as that splendid one about a reader not believing Mehta was blind because of his famously detailed descriptions, and making faces before an impassive VS Naipaul, whom he mistook for Mehta. Or observations he has made in other interviews, which can be found handily collated on his website. The stories writer Ved Mehta-polite even when he edits your English, soft-spoken, precise in speech-tells you in person are very often anecdotes you would find recounted in his enviably large body of work.
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