The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period (Nation Books) [Hardcover]

Ved Mehta (Author)

Book Description

Series: Nation Books | Publication Date: September 13, 2004

The story has its origins in the sixties, when Mehta by chance finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother’s shoulder during a New York dinner party. As a result, the son begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father’s British past in Simla, the magical hill station. Step-by-step, he is forced to confront his father’s passionate clandestine affair with Rasil, an exquisite beauty who in her teens was abducted from her poor family and raped. She was subsequently rescued by a Hindu philanthropist, only to end up trapped in an abusive marriage to a rich businessman. Mehta’s exploration of his father’s love affair proves painful, as the son realizes that the entanglement, a passing episode in sixty-one years of a loving marriage, had shattering psychological side effects on his mother—a close friend of Rasil’s—and also on his own life. The Red Letters is Mehta’s masterpiece, a work of extraordinary intensity that perfectly re-creates the exotic, closed world of British India.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Imagine: you're a middle-aged adult and your elderly parent offers you a packet of love letters ("red letters") from an adulterous relationship that took place just before you were born. After you recover from the shock—you never imagined your parents being sexual, much less anything but faithful—you must decide whether you really want to know what's in the letters. If you're longtime New Yorker writer Mehta, and you've already published biographical volumes on each of your parents (Daddyji; Mamaji) without this information, the offer's both troublesome and irresistible. It began when Mehta's father asked him to collaborate on a novel about two lovers. As his father "slipped from conditional into indicative mood," Mehta realized he was actually hearing the truth about his parents. That Mehta senior would unburden himself to his biographer son is almost a foregone conclusion. What's unclear, though, is the effect this knowledge will have on their relationship. Son must accept a new version of his father. No longer an even-tempered, optimistic gentleman, he's become a passionate, moody romantic. Mehta's notions of his mother also need revising. It's a "belated growing up," yes, but also a fitting conclusion to his Continents of Exile series. Mehta fans will find this 11th and closing volume enticing, and newcomers may be inspired to restart with volume one.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Mehta concludes his unique and indelible 11-volume series, Continents of Exile, by filling in a crucial, long-concealed chapter in his father's life. After moving his wife and children to Simla, the gorgeous Punjab hill station the British claimed for their summer capital, Mehta's father had an affair with a woman he had first met when she was an abused "hill girl" and he was a medical student. Eventually he entrusted their love letters to his son, and Mehta--who was born in India in 1934, lost his sight as a child, and wrote for the New Yorker for decades--now judiciously adds this riveting story to his lavish family history and cross-cultural saga. Over the years, Mehta has illuminated life during the British Raj (his father was a public health official), the trauma of the Partition (his family lost everything), his own amazing sojourns in England and America, and, most unforgettably, the world of blindness. Written with a historian's perspective, keen psychological insights, and extraordinary candor and lucidity, Mehta's Continents of Exile--a monumental meditation on humankind's determination not merely to survive but to live meaningfully--will stand as a pillar of world literature. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (September 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560256281
• ISBN-13: 978-1560256281
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,243,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Father, A Son, And Mother Memory, October 22, 2005

By 

Ashok Banker "www.ashokbanker.com" (Mumbai, India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period (Nation Books) (Hardcover)

About a fourth of the way into this graceful memoir, and just before he starts to unfold the tale-within-a-tale concerning the eponymous 'red letters', author-narrator Ved Mehta admits to a moment of agonizing self-doubt:

"In writing a series of books about myself and my family, among other things, with the title Continents of Exile, I have often been torn between loyalty to my family and loyalty to my craft, to which any kind of censorship is anathema. My father, who served as a source for some of the material, knew all too well how such conflicts tormented me."

Mehta is especially troubled by the material at hand in the current book. While all the eleven volumes of his long autobiographical series have been immensely revealing about his family and himself, the revelations in question have been more of an intellectual and cultural nature, concerning themselves more with the impact of a lifetime spent abroad (in exile, as he calls it) upon a writer's mind and relationships.

The series to date, as anyone who has been following it even occasionally since the first volumes, Daddyji and Mummyji, were published decades ago, are gentle, self-probing intellectual studies that are as much observational records of their place and time as literary autobiography.

But in The Red Letters, he is about to introduce an unxpected 'twist' in the tale. Mehta's father, a genial public health official with unfulfilled literary ambitions ("I may still surprise you, son, by writing a bestseller one of these days"), comes to New York with his wife for their daughter's confinement, and behaves peculiarly at a party hosted by the author.

After his return to India, the father makes good his literary threat, and begins to send Mehta chapters of a "novel" he claims to be writing. He later reveals that the "novel" is nothing more than a thinly-disguised memoir of a certain period in his life, dating back forty years.

As Mehta reads on, and then agrees to collaborate with his father in this joint act of turning remembered history into literary fiction, he learns with growing unease that his father is really confessing to a secret extramarital love affair from that period. To make matters worse, rather than wallowing in guilt or self-remose, his father seems quite unabashed about revealing the more intimate details of the matter. "Sex, as you would call it today."

In the end, Mehta agrees to proceed with the work because as he puts it in one of the quietly eloquent passages which mark his work, "he, like me, sensed, even as he was confiding in me, that the story had a larger significance, something neither of us could yet verbalize, but which we imagine would far transcend his life--and maybe mine too."

What follows is a fascinating narrative, like one of the Russian dolls-within-dolls-within-dolls that so fascinated Mehta during his childhood. Unpeeling the onion of the past in carefully revealing layers, he proceeds to give us his father's transparently autobiographical 'novel' fragments, alternating with the real events described in those fragments, then his own reactions to these revelations.

This being Ved Mehta, the gentle "uncleji" of contemporary Indian novelists, there is nothing sordid or truly shocking about the revelations. With painful grace and elegance, he winds his way through past and present, mind and body, real and perceived, to weave an enticing tale. In the end, the real relationship being explored and studied is not really that of his father and the 'other woman'; it is Ved and his father themselves. Completing--and often revising--the first novel of the Continents of Exile series, Daddyji, Mehta produces a deceptively simple, impressively artful book, one that manages to fulfil its aspiration to transcend mere autobiography and achieve the status of literature.

Interestingly, the red letters of the title don't exist. They are a fictional device suggested by his father to Ved as a means of conveying the details and passion of his remembered liaision. After all, as Daddyji points out, Mehta has frequently altered important details such as names, places, and some events, to make the material of life more suitable for purposes of literary recreation.

And in any case, this particular story, by Mehta's choice, will only be published after all parties concerned have passed away and are far removed from any potential hurt which such revelations or alterations may cause. It's a significant reminder to all vicarious readers and over-zealous critics that the final work exists as a literary entity unto itself, not merely as a bare documentary record of real people and events. The best autobiography, as this book is, transcends itself to become a tale of the human condition.

Mehta may not have achieved the heights of his self-declared literary aspirations, Proust and Joyce, but he has produced a valuable insight into the Indian diaspora that deserves a place on our shelves, alongside the best work of Naipaul and Rushdie. In a chapter at the end of The Red Letters, Mehta provides a brief synopsis of the themes covered by the previous ten volumes, and readers who may have missed entries in this long roman fleuve, running into some two thousand pages, flowing through the disparate lands of India, England and America, covering events from the late 19th century to the early 21st (though not in strictly chronological order), would do well to start at the beginning and work their way through to this very satisfying and illuminatory work.

Rarely does an author get to write 'The End' not only to a long series of novels but in effect, to his own life story. With The Red Letters, Mehta performs that miraculous literary act.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yet another wonderful book by Ved Mehta, October 29, 2005

By 

Sharon Fratepietro "sharoninsc" (Charleston, SC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period (Nation Books) (Hardcover)

Warning: If The Red Letters is your first Ved Mehta book, it is only the beginning. Reading a book by Mehta is like trying to eat just one bite of Swiss chocolate. It's not enough. You'll have to read another, and then another, till they're all read. And by the way, don't be surprised if you find yourself booking a trip to India before you're finished, for your curiosity about that intriguing country will be severely provoked.

Don't worry if you read the other books in Mehta's autobiographical series in mixed order. Many characters appear and reappear like old friends woven into the simple and complex stories of Mehta's life. It is a life both ordinary and extraordinary, described with uncommon vulnerability, and I can't think of a writer who uses language better, with a simple style and great narrative skill.

Ved Mehta claims that The Red Letters is the last of the eleven autobiographical books in his Continent of Exile series. I hope not. Changing one's mind is perfectly acceptable.