Growing Up with the Writer Ved Mehta

My parents’ apartment had never looked better than on the day it was photographed to sell. As I walked through the rooms, the only thing that seemed out of place was the Statesman, which was the name of the wooden cube that my mother had selected from a catalogue to hold my father’s ashes. (He had been a writer, not a statesman, but somehow the name had stuck.) It wasn’t just that the Statesman looked incongruously modern amid the English antiques and Persian carpets; it was the four plastic bags of gray dust inside. Even though I knew they were proof that my father was gone, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I just quickened my step I would find him in the next room.

Growing up, I’d always known where in the apartment he would be. The path my father traced through the rooms was highly consistent. He sat on the right side of the sofa, not the left; on the near chair, not the far. He could often be found in the grand canopy bed that he and my mother shared, lying down with the phone, a landline, at his ear. He had memorized hundreds of numbers, and when he left a voice mail he dictated it with warmth and also a certain formality. I can still hear his voice on the machine: “Sage, it’s your father here.”

He was often on the phone with one of the auction houses. He liked to find out what was coming up for sale, hunting for the items that would make each room complete. When a carpet arrived, it would be attached to the parquet floor with hidden Velcro strips at the corners so that they wouldn’t lift up and trip anyone. Certain walls had mirrors, others had paintings. Everything in the apartment had its place, except for a pair of George III “floating chairs,” upholstered in pale-pink silk, which usually flanked the French doors in the dining room but got pulled out for big parties.

“Fuck,” I would hear my father curse when he bumped into something—maybe one of those pink chairs, marooned in the middle of the living room after the guests had left. There was a particular insult to hitting something at home; it was the place where, surrounded by objects and furniture he had chosen, he was supposed to be safe. My father was blind, but we didn’t use that word. If we had to, we said, “He lost his sight.” Mostly we avoided the topic entirely. And, as if to test the boundaries of our credulity, he liked to say in conversation, “I see.”

My father, who was born in Lahore in 1934, could see for the first few years of his life. But just shy of his fourth birthday he contracted cerebrospinal meningitis, which permanently damaged his optic nerves. Throughout my life, he was at work on an all-encompassing autobiographical project, “Continents of Exile,” much of which was serialized in this magazine and subsequently published in twelve books. If blindness was the first exile, Partition was the second. In 1947, his family, along with millions of other Hindu refugees, was forced by sectarian violence to leave Lahore when the city became part of Pakistan, and resettle in a new India. Only one object from 11 Temple Road, their house in Lahore, made it to our apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street: a carved mahogany lamp that never moved from its place next to the piano.

As a child, I had no doubt about my father’s ability to navigate his surroundings. I took for granted that he could walk into a room and know where everything was. He relied on a prodigious memory and something he called “sound-shadows,” a type of echolocation based on the way that sound waves change with the shape and distance of objects.

There was a circle of people who marvelled at his ability, and an inner circle who knew not to comment. And then there were those who disapproved of the way he passed as sighted. They wanted to know why, as he moved around New York City on his own, he didn’t use a white cane or a Seeing Eye dog. The most skeptical of these acquaintances didn’t believe that he was blind, and I was often asked, “He can see, just a little bit, right?” I would answer quickly, “No, not at all,” unconsciously mimicking his own mixture of defensiveness and pride. I was baffled when I came across pity, usually expressed by women who liked to say, “I’m sorry your father can’t see you.” I wasn’t sorry.

And yet, even at home, the stakes were high. No drawer was supposed to be left open, no door ajar. Once, I found him sitting at the dining-room table, stonily quiet after he had run into a closet door, using one of his white handkerchiefs to dab at a small vertical cut on his forehead. His silence communicated anger more effectively than words. Finally, he said coolly, “Your mother is trying to kill me.” He usually ascribed fault to someone, and even though it wasn’t me that time, I felt a pang of guilt.

When I was a baby, I am told by my mother, my father would ferry me from my crib to their bed at night, saving her the trouble of getting up to nurse. As I grew older, I would instinctively move close to him when I sat down on the sofa, or take his hand when we were outside. His fingers would sometimes reach out, flutteringly, to touch my face.

His careful movements were at odds with the way my younger sister, Natasha, and I were allowed to race around. We would tear from room to room in a loop that took us from one end of the apartment to the other. Our father would sometimes plant himself in the middle of the track to play a game we called Daddy Monster, in which we would try to dart past him. I would shriek with delight when he invariably caught me, both surprised and comforted not to be able to sneak by. I wonder now if he used the game to train himself to know where our small, fast-moving bodies were. He was forever gathering information, clues to help him piece together what he called the “sighted world.”

By the time I was eight, I was tall enough for my father to put his hand on my shoulder with an even pressure when we went out. This was not a game, or a casually affectionate touch. It was a physical manifestation of trust and a sign that I had to start paying attention. He hated to be overdirected; all I had to do to signal a crooked step or a crack in the sidewalk was to pause briefly and exaggerate my step.

For a long time, my father had an office on West Forty-third Street, at The New Yorker, where, under the editorship of William Shawn, he was a staff writer. One rainy day when he came home later than usual, I remember my mother running to the door and passionately kissing him, as people did in the movies. He still had his wet raincoat on. Was she relieved that he had made it home safely? We never spoke about the dangers of his solo commute up Madison Avenue on the bus from Forty-third Street to Seventy-ninth, his walk two avenues east. Just as blindness was never mentioned, neither was bravery.

In 1994, a couple of years after Tina Brown took over as editor, my father’s contract as a staff writer was terminated, though, under what he acknowledged was “a long-standing agreement,” he was allowed to keep his office. The scope of the magazine had changed; it had become more current and was making room for newer voices. He was a staff writer for thirty-three years, a period he covered in “Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker.” (Growing up, I didn’t know Mr. Shawn’s first name. I only knew that it was thanks to Mr. Shawn that my father was able to work as a writer, publishing personal histories and stories that later became the material for his books.) But when the magazine moved to a new location, in Times Square, in 1999, he was told that there would not be room for him, and so his writing life moved home.

“Linn!” my father would often call out in the apartment. If my mother didn’t respond right away, he would pick up line one and dial line two until she answered his call from a few rooms away. When I went to the grocery store with her, sometimes the loudspeaker would boom, “Mrs. Mehta, your husband is on the phone.” It was only while running around the reservoir in Central Park or walking home from Columbia University—where she was first a Ph.D. student in comparative literature and later an adjunct lecturer—that my mother was truly unreachable. She preferred to go about the city in her jogging clothes, carrying a backpack instead of a handbag as other mothers did. She needed her hands, to help us and to help him. “Your mother is a ragamuffin,” my father would say. And then every January: “My New Year’s resolution is not to criticize your mother.”

Twenty-one years his junior, she met my father at a party when she was eleven. By the time I was eleven, I blushed at this anecdote, but my parents didn’t seem shy about it. My father liked to shock, and he didn’t mind waiting a beat before assuring anyone who was listening that they had only become romantically involved sixteen years later. In the intervening time, he had been in the background, a guest brought to parties by my mother’s uncle, Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., a friend and colleague of his. My father was an eccentric whom my mother’s grandparents were happy to entertain at their Park Avenue apartment, an interesting extra man for dinner. Muriel Spark had inscribed her book “The Bachelors” to him: “For Ved, my favorite bachelor.” But he was not the type meant to marry into my mother’s Wasp family. That he did says less about his perseverance than about her free spirit.

She accepted my father’s proposal while sitting at a desk in a hotel room in Bombay, looking out the window past the Colaba reef to the Arabian Sea. She was learning Sanskrit, and had eagerly connected with his family, who had been based in New Delhi since Partition. But there was no question of where they would live. “I can never live in India,” my father used to say, even though writing about the country was at the center of his life’s work. He had left in 1949, when he was fifteen, arriving in New York City after a forty-seven-hour trip from New Delhi and then making his way on to the Arkansas School for the Blind, which would prepare him for college. I remember walking down the street with him in New Delhi while children my age, begging, swarmed around him. As he handed out rupees, more children came forward until we were surrounded. “But for the grace of God, there go I,” he said, when we made it back to the quiet of the hotel.

Cartoon by Emily Bernstein

Although he treated my mother as an intellectual equal and a trusted first reader, it was clear what he wanted her priorities to be. He was forty-nine when they married, and ready to settle down and start a family. I was born within a year, and my sister followed two and a half years later. My mother was not a housewife, and yet, almost every morning, she walked down the long hallway to the kitchen to make him bed tea, a remnant of the British Raj, which often seemed to be alive and well in our apartment.