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175 pages

English

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Blind since the age of four, Ved Mehta led a lonely and turbulent childhood in India until he was accepted to the Arkansas School for the Blind, to which he flew alone at fifteen. America and the school changed his life, leading to degrees at Oxford and Harvard Universities and a fruitful writing career. Face to Face (1957), Mehta s first book, is the author s autobiography touching upon childhood, blindness and remaking himself. It remains one of his most beloved works.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351185727
Langue	English

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VED MEHTA

Face to Face
Contents
Dedication
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Foreword
Part I: India and Home
1. Surmas and School
2. Reality and the Dream
3. Mehta Gullie
4. At the Foot of the Himalayas
5. The Juti
6. From Mela to the Murree Hills
7. The Dinner-Table School
8. Inside Our Own House
9. I Return to School
10. Marriage in the Making
Part II: Pakistan and Transition
11. Divide et . . .
12. Ideals and Irony
13. The Bugle Sounds
14. The Terror
15. Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan
16. Refugees
17. We All Agree . . .
18. Yes
Part III: America and Education
19. The Center of the Universe
20. My Second Home
21. A Donkey in a World of Horses
22. The Steampipes
23. Between the Lines
24. College at Last
25. In Search of Sight
26. K and Prometheus
27. Mary
Epilogue
Glossary
Footnotes
11. Divide et . . .
Follow Penguin
Copyright
For Mother and Father without whom not
This entire book was dictated to my two fellow students, JoAn Johnstone (Pomona 1956) and Grace Kestenman (Radcliffe 1957); my labor was made easier by JoAn s patience and understanding-not to mention her well-cooked lunches-and Grace s cheerful and alert personality. The devoted and unsparing work of Nancy Reynolds (Atlantic Monthly Press) was invaluable in preparing and brushing up the manuscript for publication. Another good friend to whom I am deeply indebted is my sponsor, for it was her timely and generous help that made it possible for me to write at all.
Balliol College Oxford 15 th October, 1956
Ved Mehta
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
I CORINTHIANS 13: 12
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Face to Face
VED MEHTA is the author of twenty-seven acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in 1934 in Lahore and educated largely in the USA. A staff writer on the New Yorker from 1960 to 1993, he has won many awards and is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and the Royal Society of Literature. Mehta lives in New York.
Praise for the Book
Brilliant as a ray of sunshine piercing darkness, the warmth and modesty, the humor and sensitivity of young Ved Mehta light his story all the way through - New York Times
An un-self-pitying, dry, acutely observant autobiography - Sunday Times (London)
[The book] testifies to astonishing bravery and tenacity - Guardian
There are no heroics, no underlying self-congratulation. Simplicity, freshness and objectivity are more than the style of the book. They are the roots from which this record of fortitude draws its power - Economist
It is more an intimate conversation than a formal literary effort-human, humorous and penetrating on a wide variety of subjects - Los Angeles Mirror
His book leaves you guessing, but its fine quality is that you are guessing with a high heart - New York Herald Tribune
A brave book. The blind author has extraordinarily vivid powers of description . . . He lights up for his readers the world he cannot see himself - Illustrated Weekly of India
This book is not simply an account of the personal experiences of one blind man. The Hindu family and the terrors of Partition, the volatile atmosphere of the Little Rock School, the pathetic story of a Japanese friend at College-his skill makes all this vivid, and he has sympathy to spare for the sufferings of all sorts of other people, including the Muslims who dispossessed his family - Balliol Annual Record
Foreword
About three Christmases ago, I was invited by a group of students to speak on India. We want, the invitation read, something with flesh and blood, something which is more than just a talk on day-to-day happenings in your country.
I rummaged through my file of previous talks, but none of them seemed to fill their order. The longer I sat by my Braille-writer, the harder it became to produce what was required. I was about to write and decline the invitation when one of my friends suggested that I use the form of a fairy story, but buttress it with real, live stuff. I returned to my Braille-writer, and beginning with the sentence, Once upon a time there was a salt march led by a frail little man, I constructed a success story of India s struggle for independence, complete with description, dialogue, action and pathos.
Full of trepidation I delivered my talk, but from the reaction it seemed that the teen-agers had not lost their appetites for fairy stories. At the close of the discussion period a young lady on my right asked, Have you ever written anything?
From the back of the room a boy piped up, It would be hard for him to write, an allusion probably to my blindness.
This challenge, along with that speech, was the germ of the present narrative. The real, live stuff. I knew best was my own experience, yet I realized even before I began to write (I was then twenty) that no one man s experiences or reflections were sufficient to justify or inspire a book. But India, where I had been born and brought up, was. In that land there were color, splendor and pageantry, juxtaposed with tragedy, division and change. I was all too conscious of my own limitations, but with the solace that everyone had to begin somewhere, I set that summer aside to write, for my own diversion.
I began by trying to re-create a house of India, with all its colorful awnings, and portraits of family members, servants and pandits , and even the Kiplinglike curios which decorated the mantelpiece. In a way it was easier to build this house because its original had been drowned in the fast current of contemporary history. It seemed natural, then, to go on to describe the whirlpool of events which had divided my country.
After the intensive writing of that summer, I went back to the routine of a student until two years later, when with the kind encouragement of Mr Edward Weeks, the project was resumed. But before the book would be complete I would have to write a section on the United States, where I had been living for seven years.
This I undertook with mixed emotions. It would not be hard to write about a country to which I owed so much-my education and the use of the very language which made this book possible. And yet so many people had written about America, and with a much more eloquent pen and perceptive eye than I could ever command, that I wondered if I had much to offer that was fresh and worth being on a reader s bill of fare. Although the first two parts had to reflect larger issues, I decided that this final section should be wholly personal in tone.
And so I wrote about the experiences of a boy totally blind, set loose alone in the vast and bustling United States at the age of fifteen. The third part, then, is the story of the reception, problems and growth of this blind boy until he reached manhood, and of the pleasures and warm friendships he experienced in the West. Actually, the narrative is a succession of images, images collected from old and new India-one eclipsed, one rising-and from America, as these images appeared to that boy in the time of his growth.

Part I

India and Home
1 Surmas and School
In India as elsewhere every girl or boy has fond and warm memories of his childhood, from the day he begins to talk to his mother and father in broken syllables. Invariably a child learns and recognizes the faces of his mother and father, of sisters and brothers who play with him constantly, or the servants who prepare his meals or watch him play in a nursery strewn with knickknacks and toys. He must also remember the rich colors of the butterflies and birds which children everywhere always love to watch with open eyes. I say must, because when I was three and a half, all these memories were expunged, and with the prolonged sickness (meningitis) I started living in a world of four senses-that is, a world in which colors and faces and light and darkness are unknown.
If my age and the length of the sickness deprived me of the treasured memories of sight, they also reduced things which are valued so much in the sighted world to nothing more than mere words, empty of meaning. I started living in a universe where it was not the flood of sunshine streaming through the nursery window or the colors of the rainbow, a sunset or a full moon that mattered, but the feel of the sun against the skin, the slow drizzling sound of the spattering rain, the feel of the air just before the coming of the quiet night, the smell of the stubble grass on a warm morning. It was a universe where at first-but only at first-I made my way fumbling and faltering.
It was good that I lost my sight when I did, because having no memories of seeing, there was nothing to look back to, nothing to miss. I went blind in November 1937. At that time we were living in Gujrat, in the province of Punjab in northern India. After my sickness we moved to Lahore, a few miles away, but the procession of relatives who came to sympathize made my father ask for another transfer, this time to Karnal, where we had neither friends nor relatives. There we got a cottage on the canal bank, built in very peaceful and quiet surroundings.
As might be expected, in the beginning it was tough for all of us-for my mother and my father, for my three sisters and my brother, and for me, too. The illness had left me weak. The servants shirked me as though I were an evil eye personified. My sisters treated me with care, as though I were a fragile doll, and my mother wept. My father, who was a doctor in the public health service, was grateful that my spine had been tapped in time, for a delay in the lumbar puncture would have affected my mind or endangered my life. But he, like the rest, despaired.
A state of complete inaction therefore followed my blindness. In part this was due to the immediate shock of the illness, but more important still, the impasse was caused by ignorance of the potentialities of a blind