Making Sense of Then Now

A personal history of desire and disappointment—that’s what the author callsthis book, or what is really a book-sized letter. The kind of subject that has somethingfor all of us, something even from all of us. But it wouldn’t have worked if we wereonly listening in to a confessional about the four women he loved and lost. Or because theextraordinarily obvious twist at the end would stop us comparing echoes, most of usanyway. It wrenches you out of any expectations of diary-reading with its play of past andpresent. That maybe living through an experience is only a part of living; what the minddoes with it later is another story. The relationships that were and then weren’thappened in the mid-’60s. The writing came 35 years later. It’s a story of then,of making sense of it then, and of making sense of it now as it never did then.

All For Love is the latest in the autobiographical series Mehta calls Continentsof Exile. None of the nine is as painful as this letter. It’s addressed to thewomen. “I was prompted to write this book about each of you individually, and aboutthe four of you together, because of a long and profound inward journey that I started in1970 and that has altered my life.... I am taking the strangers who will read it into myconfidence; they will sit in judgement on us—on what was done, what was said and whatwas not said.” One impulse for “laying myself bare in this uncharacteristic wayis the wish to get at the truth of exactly what happened”. Another, he says, is“to understand the effect of love on one’s sense of self”.

Ved Mehta was in his early 30s in the mid-’60s, and had found fairly early successliving in New York as a writer for The New Yorker. Blind from age four, he wentto school and college in England and America where “girls were prepared to be friendswith me but generally spurned any romantic overtures...it was only after I started writingand publishing that any ‘nice’ girl seemed to take a romantic interest in me, asif my writing made me less alien—more real and comprehensible.” His position aswriter opened doors to parties, and to women. And to women in a pattern that they did notknow, and at the time he did not. But one woman repeated the other in a way that made itpossible for him now to write to “all of you”.

Through those chapters you live the trauma of those relationships with him. Judith thedancer and then the Englishwoman Vanessa in New York (after those childhood wishes that“a memsahib would take me in her arms and whisper sweet English endearments tome”), above all, Lola Khanna from Delhi and fourth but not least Kilty back in NewYork. It’s quite a book for letters, and that exchange of letters with Lola Khannaover years of his life, and three chapters in his book, are a life lived and ended withletters that the writer found difficult to write. “Since I wrote for a living,writing letters always seemed to me a little like a busman’s holiday. Also, I hadlong become accustomed to dictating everything, but dictating love letters to anamanuensis, however sympathetic, was like undressing myself at the office. And whenever Isat down to type a letter to Lola, my laboured efforts seemed no match for herspontaneity.”

You almost don’t notice that it’s the author’s style that has taken youthrough that pain and made you live it before you knew it. This is not an author who makesan exhibition of his sentences. The words speak, and you don’t notice the brickworkalong the way. It takes you to people in life in a way never possible through the cleverwordplay of the likes of Rushdie and Roy. You don’t look at his sentences, you lookthrough them into an experience, unmindful of the language that took you into it.Mehta’s style stands out for what it is not: so transparent you almost don’t seeprint on paper.

It’s the language of remorseless honesty at the end of one relationship afteranother. The had-I-this and had-I-that, the unacknowledged sense of how dreadfully wrongthings are just when they seem perfectly right, all that telephoning after all thosedecisions not to, the secrets, the lies, the rubbishing, the manipulation, the other. Andyet the book goes into relationship after relationship with feelings of warmth and respectfor a woman who wanted to leave him to sleep with another man because she wanted to getover him, of a woman who set up the wedding with him and a date with another. And hewrites of her with warmth and respect beyond the usual writer’s empathy. It took ashrink to call her a bitch.

There are moments through witnessing these relationships when the repetition ofpatterns among the women gets mildly wearying to read, as it was more than mildly wearyingto live through. But the stories come with his innocence then, 35 years ago, call by call,letter by letter, illusion by illusion. The last 70 pages of sessions with a New Yorkshrink can at times be heavy going. But it is this last chapter that untwists the story,the one that brings insight. It was there all the time. How did we not see it?