![]() Those early volumes won critical acclaim, and Mehta received a financial boost in 1982 by winning a $236,000 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius grant.” He drew further praise with books including “The Ledge Between the Streams” (1984), which examined his childhood as well as the violence of the 1947 partition, in which British India was divided into two independent states. “To this day I can’t hear the sound of a train without shedding tears in my head,” Mehta once said. Nearly half those works made up his autobiographical project, known as “Continents of Exile.” The series began with two biographies of his parents, “Daddyji” (1972) and “Mamaji” (1979), who put him on a train to Bombay when he was 5, sending him to a school for the blind more than 1,000 miles from home. He used a Braille typewriter early in his career but spent decades working with amanuenses, dictating to them pages that he wrote in his head and revised out loud – millions of words in all, spanning 27 books. Mehta placed himself in the lineage of blind writers such as Homer and Milton, though some critics accused him of playing tricks on readers by not disclosing his sightlessness. “If I’m in the Punjab in the spring and I smell mustard flowers, I know what color they are,” he said. Similarly, he explained that he was able to describe landscapes – including a field “with the yellow of mustard flowers outlined by the feathery green of sugarcane” – partly through smell. “People would think that was a visual description,” said Mehta, “but it was purely an auditory impression,” the result of a cigarette that made his subject talk like Humphrey Bogart. ![]() In his book “Fly and the Fly-Bottle” (1963), about British intellectuals, he described historian Herbert Butterfield as “puffing every so often at his Player’s, which had a permanent place on his lower lip.” Traveling without a guide dog or white cane, Mehta used what he called “facial vision,” learning to distinguish the roar of a Chevrolet from a Ford and to identify visitors by the sound of their footsteps. “He wanted to compete on equal terms,” his wife said in a phone interview, explaining that Mehta “wanted to be viewed as a writer,” not a “blind writer.” Mehta discussed his blindness in his first book, the autobiography “Face to Face” (1957), which he wrote in his early 20s partly as a romantic ploy, an unsuccessful attempt to woo a Pomona College classmate whom he hired to take dictation “eight hours a day, six days a week.” But for many years he avoided the subject, refusing to let publishers reference his blindness on dust jackets. ![]() “I am an amalgam of five cultures – Indian, British, American, blind and The New Yorker.” ![]() “I don’t belong to any single tradition,” he told The New York Times in 1984. But his chief subject was loss – including his sight, which disappeared after he was diagnosed with meningitis at age 3 the loss of his home in Lahore, which he and his family were forced to flee after the partition of India the loss of his language, Punjabi, which he traded for English and the loss of his country, which he left as a teenager to study in Arkansas, beginning a Western education that included stops at Oxford and Harvard universities. ![]()
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