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Journalism of Courage
AMBIGUITY becomes an autobiography, for the reader as much as the writer. Is reading it a search for vicarious thrills, an act of legitimate voyeurism? Is writing it anything more than a giant exercise of the ego? When is an autobiography the story of one’s own life — and when does it become the biography of near ones? Is it at all possible to draw those lines — and, in that case, is the true autobiography an achievable reality at all?
It’s impossible not to encounter these questions again and again while going through The Red Letters. Far from the simple tale of the poor little blind boy of Vedi or Mamaji — two earlier chapters of Ved Mehta’s 11-part autobiography — the concluding episodes move into the emotional minefield laid out by the discovery of his father’s extra-marital affair.
The story, as it unfolds, has two protagonists: Mehta and his father Daddyji (also the subject of an earlier eponymous book). As is the wont of all family stories, this one, too, unfolds in dribs and drabs, zigzagging across time and space, demanding a rejig of held notions and putting events and ideas into new perspectives. The one given in this scenario of flux is the deep yet dynamic bond between father and son.
And as in all relations, there is a dark side to this too: In the opening chapter — a party Mehta hosts in his New York apartment to introduce his parents to his mentor at The New Yorker — his father unwittingly reveals his guilt at his perceived role in his son’s visual impairment. Mehta, on his part, can never be grateful enough for his father’s belief in him, and his unstinting support for everything he did.
Advancing age and, presumably, his son’s success as a writer, trigger the first breach in Daddyji’s locked-up memories. An attempt at fiction is laid aside, and the son is told of his father’s “enchanted period”, a two-year affair with his mother’s best friend, which ended just before Mehta’s birth.
How does any son react to such a revelation? With disbelief, horror, shock, shame? With relief, that the life-long model of rectitude and conscientious living is actually a fallible mortal? Or with a graded mixture of many emotions? None of the above, actually, if you’re Ved Mehta. His first thought is for his book Daddyji, and how this bit of information escaped him while researching his father’s life.
The tussle between the son and the writer is the dominant characteristic of the book. At some points, one gets the feeling that the writer would give anything to be free of the son tag, so that he could examine this fresh grist to the mill unencumbered. It is not, perhaps, an unnatural conflict but, as the writer wins every time, the resulting effect is that of a post-mortem: a detached dissection of a defenceless soul.
Perhaps the most liberated — and liberating — part of the book is the couple of pages in which Mehta’s mother has her say about her husband’s infidelity. Her retrospective reading of the situation, spiked with fatalism and humour, transcends much of the unreserved glorification on the part of the father, and the uneasy intellectualisation on the part of the son.
That said, The Red Letters — the title refers to the billet-doux the lovers exchanged, reprinted in every embarrassing shade of purple — is a remarkable foray into disturbing territory. One can only wonder how much the impact would have multiplied had it been the son doing the telling.
