Over the years, Ved and I exchanged our most recent publications. Our friendship cascaded into the next generation when his daughter Sage came to stay with us in Lahore, and into yet another when she and her husband Michael became parents of twin daughters whom we have watched grow. This the house.’ He described the layout of the interior and showed us the place where, without guidance, he had re-assembled a broken bicycle so that he could ride it on his own, unaided.Īfter 1979, our subsequent meetings with Ved and his wife Linn Cary (they married in 1983) took place in their commodious and welcoming apartment in Manhattan’s prestigious 79 th Street.

Ved alighted, stepped on the gravel and said: ‘This is it. That palatial mansion we knew had become the Presidency.Īfter a number of false turns along Sarwar Road, we drove into a gate that led past a new house that had been built quite obviously in someone’s front garden. Ved had an unclear idea of the house his family had lived in, other than it was behind the large house owned by Sardar Bahadur Mohan Singh. Part of that childhood had been spent in Rawalpindi, where Ved ‘s father Dr Amolak Ram Mehta had been posted by his parent organisation, the Indian Health Department. As Ved revisited each area – the front drawing room, what had once been his parents’ room, the bedroom he shared with his brother Om, the kitchen, the rooftop where he flew kites – it became clear that Ved had come to reclaim not property but his childhood. They suspected he had come to reclaim the property. It took some coaxing to get them to agree to Ved’s visit. Shahnaz and I took him to his father’s former house 11 Temple Road, allotted to two sisters of Dr Mubashir Hasan. He grasped Shahnaz’s arm and steered her through the furniture to the main door. Just when it was time to leave, the lights failed yet again. India was experiencing power outages in those days and so all too frequently we would be plunged into humid darkness. Ravi organised a dinner at his Sujan Singh Park flat. We asked our common publisher Ravi Dayal (then MD of Oxford University Press, India) if he could arrange a meeting.

An inexhaustible source remained the wellspring of his own past, from which he drew material for his familial books such as Delinquent Chacha, Daddyji and Mamaji.īy the time my wife Shahnaz and I first met Ved in the summer of 1978 in New Delhi, we had read almost every book he had written until then – his haunting memoir Face to Face (1957), Walking the Indian Streets (1959) – his version of a trip to India with the poet Dom Moraes, his masterly canvas Portrait of India (1970), and his subtle expose of Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1977). There, for the next thirty years or so, under the mentorship of its editor William Shawn, Ved contributed carefully crafted pieces on diverse subjects such as politics, philosophy, theology, and biography. In 1960, at the age of twenty-six, he joined The New Yorker magazine. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and then at Harvard.

He mastered the skill of walking without a cane, relying on the air pressure on the follicles on his cheeks to detect changes in his surroundings. Ved refused to accept disability as unconquerable.

Ved mehta new yorker