Ved Mehta's ways of seeing

THE ESSENTIAL VED MEHTA
Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin Books)
390 pages; Rs 599

It is not easy to identify the precise reason that Ved Mehta is such a delightful read. His prose is simple. His skills as a raconteur are impeccable. He is autobiographical in many of his stories, but rarely lets the first-person account bias the reader's perspective either way. In his narratives, therefore, he achieves a rare amalgam of passionate objectivity.

These are all qualities that should distinguish any author from the ordinary and place him on a high pedestal among Indo-American writers in English. Yet there is something more that makes his writings endearing and easy to read. The volume under review provides an answer to the question of what actually makes Ved Mehta still sought after and captivating several decades after he penned many of those memoirs of his life in India, his family and his interactions with well-known personalities.

It is his empathy with the characters he presents in his writings and the candour with which he captures their follies and foibles that imbue his narratives with an R K Narayan-like ambience where the people and the episodes look more than real and convincing. At some point in the story, the writer is able to bring the reader round to empathise with the characters and see their perspectives as well. Such rare coalescence of perspectives of the characters, the author and, indeed, the reader is a quality Ved Mehta shares in abundance with R K Narayan. And that is also what makes Ved Mehta a rarity among today's generation of writers.

Consider the way he writes about his father, whose characterisation has none of the flaws most autobiographical accounts suffer when it comes to portraying one's father. Mr Mehta explains that his father bothered to send him to a school in Bombay and indeed took extra care of him because he suffered from guilt pangs for having delayed taking his young son to the doctor - negligence that impaired the young boy's vision at an early age.

Later in the anthology, which contains selections of some of his best writings over the years, Mr Mehta brings out his doctor-father's delicate relationship with the young attractive wife of Fatumal, whose raw money power was as uncouth as his physical appearance. The author expresses doubts about his father's reluctance to share details of his personal life - a chance encounter with Fatumal's wife who happened to be the same woman a proposal for marriage with whom he had earlier spurned. Was there something more between his father and Fatumal's wife that the old man did not want to share with his son? And was the doctor honest in explaining that he did not allow his relationship with Fatumal's wife to grow any further because of his deep love for his own wife? Even as you begin wondering about such possibilities, you realise that not only has Mr Mehta narrated a fascinating story concerning his father's private life, but he has also skillfully explored the complex and highly nuanced relationship every adult son has with his father.

It would appear that Mr Mehta revels in exploring the interplay of sex, adultery and conjugal love from a fairly neutral platform, possible largely because of his upbringing in the United States. His uncle dotes on his wife, but the wife has no qualms about giving shelter to a more handsome Sikh farmer in her house, without worrying about what damage this might cause to her marriage. In the end, the marriage remains intact and the uncle comes to terms with living in the same house along with the wife's Sikh paramour. What also stands out is Mr Mehta's ability to observe and then capture in his writings interesting facets of human behaviour and mannerism. In this area, he excels even R K Narayan. There is a long chapter in this anthology that presents the two writers face to face, engaged in a long conversation spread over many days in New York. It was an encounter between two writers who belonged to different traditions and ways of life - one was a typical south Indian in his manner of speaking and behaviour and the other a westernised man from north India. There is empathy between them, but Mr Mehta loses no opportunity to poke fun at Narayan's spoken English with a heavy south Indian accent or his vegetarianism. You will marvel at Mr Mehta's journalistic acumen in drawing a fellow writer out and revealing in a short time what inspired R K Narayan to write and why he chose to have only a few non-Indian characters in his fiction.

The same skills are evident in his essay on Satyajit Ray, the film-maker. There is no trace of hero worship in his profile of Ray. As objective as anybody can be, Mr Mehta presents Ray as a man who struggled hard to hold his own against a system that was difficult and unwelcoming of any new film-maker. Little-known facts, such as the moral support he got from the wife of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, the author of Pather Panchali, based on which Ray made his first film, have embellished the Ray portrait. In comparison, the much-talked about portrait of Gandhi is detailed and candid. But it is naturally constrained by the limitations of the account given by Gandhi's associates as the profile was written long after Gandhi was dead. No such constraints limited Mr Mehta's portraits of Narayan and Ray, which were based on his individual meetings with the two personalities. The difference shows and even Ved Mehta fails to make those differences go away.