Still, there are folks on Islesboro who do not believe that Mehta is really blind, because they remember seeing him ride a bicycle along the island’s crowned, narrow, shoulderless roads 20 years ago. The kitchen of Mehta’s summer home has a spectacular prospect of East Penobscot Bay and the litter of islands from Deer Isle to Isle au Haut, but Mehta can’t see the million-dollar view, because, as anyone who has ever read one of his books or his New Yorker pieces knows, Ved Mehta is blind – the result of contracting spinal meningitis as a boy of almost 4 in his native India. His hands tremble as he pours a fresh cup for himself and returns to the table. He walks slowly, cautiously from the kitchen table to the coffeepot, feeling his way.
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His only concessions to country life are removing his tie and replacing his black leather shoes with blue canvas ones. A consummate urbanite, he is dressed in light-blue blazer, gray slacks, and gray shirt. “I thought I should adapt to the world.”Īdept at discerning what he called sound-shadows - the subtle cues, borne by sound, heat and air currents, that can impart “facial vision” for surrounding objects - Ved climbed trees, bicycled and raced gamely over rooftops holding the strings of soaring kites.The distinguished author Ved Mehta, 69, looks uncomfortably out of place in his summer home on the Maine island of Islesboro. “Because I grew up with six sighted brothers and sisters, I never thought the world should adapt to me,” Mr. Returning home to Lahore at 8, Ved was determined to keep pace with his siblings. I always prayed to Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and he didn’t bother me.” “Whenever I went to the bathroom, I could hear the ghost shift his weight from foot to foot he made the whole bathroom wall shake. Ghosts slide away just at the mention of their names.’ “‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph live up in Heaven. “‘Who are they? What will they do to the ghost?’ ‘If he ever attacks you, just pray to Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’ ‘If anyone stays there too long, the bathroom ghost will pounce on him and bite off his nose,’ he had said. “Deoji” (an older student) “had told me about a bathroom ghost who lived inside the wall.
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Mehta would write about his time there in “Vedi” (1982), the third volume of Continents of Exile: He remained at the school for three years. There was rampant disease and little serious instruction, though Ved did learn to read English in Braille there was then no standard Braille alphabet for writing the many languages of India. Mehta had envisioned, proved to be more like an orphan asylum, populated mainly by blind street children. More Asylum Than Schoolīut the school, far from being the educational oasis Dr.
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“You are a man now,” his father told Ved as he placed him on the train, in the care of a cousin, for the long journey. When Ved was not quite 5, he was sent some 900 miles away to one of the country’s few institutions for blind children, the Dadar School for the Blind, an institution founded by Christian missionaries in what was then Bombay. Mehta became determined to have his son educated. In an era when many blind Indians wound up as beggars, Dr. Had he sought treatment immediately, he came to think, Ved’s sight might have been saved. Though he had correctly identified his son’s meningitis, he let himself be persuaded of an incorrect, far less urgent, diagnosis by a ranking medical official.Īs a result, he felt he could honor an engagement to play tennis that day with a visiting British dignitary rather than take his son to the hospital. Mehta held himself responsible for Ved’s blindness, which had arisen amid circumstances that encapsulated the class-consciousness and learned subservience that India’s colonial history entailed.