The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period

by Ved Mehta

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, India

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 2004

About the author

Indian-American journalist Ved Parkash Mehta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ved_Mehta

Reviews

[Kathleen Hagen]

The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period, by Ved Mehta. A.
I read this book in braille, borrowed from the Library for the Blind
This book is the last in the autobiographical series of Ved Mehta and his family. Ved Mehta was blind practically from birth and was born in India. These books, of which there are twelve, give us an understanding of India at the end of the Raj period and what came next. Also, these books take us through the life of Ved Mehta, born blind, surviving in India prior to being accepted at a school for the blind in the U.S., and his life in the U.S. after he got here. This last book is about his discovery that for two years his father had an affair with another woman, the best friend of his wife. Mehta explores the effects and consequences of this affair on his father, on the other woman, on his mother, and on himself once he found out. He did not write this book until his parents and the other woman were dead.

[Frank · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reminds me a bit of Carlos Castenada's attempt to revive a brand after having killed off his protagonist. Unlike the early books of the series, we can't celebrate the author's overcoming of his physical limitations. Instead, VM gives a tedious recounting of his father's desultory affair.

[Beth Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Red Letters" enveloped me, bestowing an "enchanted period" of my own. Mehta's stated philosophy–that the universal is most evident in the minutely specific–is herein fully achieved. The book's deceptively simple architecture buttresses the complexity of the psycho-emotional development of the author/narrator. Mehta's world, though seemingly exotic at a westerner's first glance, is entirely accessible, due to Mehta's deceptively simple treatment of mundane realities. My only complaint is that "The Red Letters" impels me to read the rest of the 12-volume series.* I look forward to re-entering the enchantment.

*Mehta describes the series as being comprised of individual books that can be read and comprehended entirely independent of the others.

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

A memoir( the last of The Continent's of Exiles series)written by Ved Mehta who is blind and wrote for the New Yorker for many years.-- It is set partly in India, partly in America . The description of life at Shima during the Raj is very interesting. The father,mother,mistress story is somewhat intriguing. The writer trying to figure himself out and to understand his relationship with his father and his mother is a little tedious. Perhaps I should go back to the first in the series and start there.

[Bhavna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The revelation has left me speechless. I have to reread all the previous series in the new light!

[Sarad Pradhan]

Ved explores his early days in this book. It is based on the letters that his fathers sent to him about his liaison with other women. Written beautifully.