When loss isn’t less

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: Writer of 23 books. Part of the New Yorker for over three decades. A double BA and MA from Harvard. India born Ved Mehta, who lost his vision at just age four, has nevertheless lived a life so rich—and described the world of the sighted so well—that many contemporaries refused to believe he was totally blind. Norman Mailer even challenged him to a boxing match to prove that!

For decades, well before India’s graph began looking upwards, his books have often introduced India to Americans. The maker of the recent Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson is on record saying that Mehta’s Delinquent Chacha, his first and only novel, got him interested in India. But for all his acclaim in the West, his writings have only been selectively available in India. Rajkamal Prakashan translated some early books, and later OUP brought out a few. Now Roli Books has decided to publish his best known series, Continents of Exile, a nine-part volume written over three decades, which began and ended with a book on his father.

Mehta, who was in India recently with his wife, says it all began almost as a matter of chance. His first book, a memoir was Face to Face. The first of the Continents of Exile was Daddyji, published in 1972. Mamaji, on his mother, followed in 1979. “I had never dreamt of writing about my father. I thought family writing was not worth it.” While reactions have largely been positive, there were also unexpected ones. “A New York Times reviewer, after reading Daddyji, pulled up my father for wasting his life playing poker in print. My father was in New York at the time, and buttonholed anyone he met indignantly complain about the review,” Mehta remembers with a chuckle. Mamaji is a considerably longer book, and it “took him two years to write.” He really had to draw out his mother to talk, as she would not profer anything readily, and not at all when his father was in the same room. “I had to get her away to England so that she could open up.”

A New Yorker born