The hanging bit I picked up from the way he spoke.”Īs Mr. Mehta wrote in 2001: “‘A Player’s cigarette hung from his lower lip and threatened to fall off at any moment.’ I knew the brand of his cigarette from his chance remark. His hearing was so acute, for instance, that he was said to be able to tell the make of a car by the song of its motor. Mehta said, beyond minute reporting, plumbing the inner depths of memory and the adroit use of the four senses at his disposal. Mailer died in 2007 without having made good on that vow.īut there was no trick to the keen visuality of his writing, Mr. Mehta was not completely blind, threatening to punch him in the face. Norman Mailer was reported to have charged that Mr. To some critics, the pinpoint acuity of these descriptions seemed too good to be true. “The fields become bright, first with the yellow of mustard flowers outlined by the feathery green of sugarcane, and later with maturing stands of wheat, barley and tobacco.” “At the close of winter, Basant-Panchami - a festival honoring the god of work - arrives, and everyone celebrates it by wearing yellow clothes, flying yellow kites and eating yellow sweetmeats,” he wrote in “Daddyji” (1972), the first volume of his memoir. (In the line of duty, he traversed India, Britain and the United States, including the teeming streets of New York, nearly always alone, with neither dog nor cane.) Mehta’s prose was its profusion of visual description: of the rich and varied landscapes he encountered, of the people he interviewed, of the cities he visited. One of the most striking hallmarks of Mr.
He could rework a single article more than a hundred times, he often said. Mehta composed all of his work orally, dictating long swaths to an assistant, who read them back again and again for him to polish until the work shone like a mirror. His literary style derived partly from his singular way of working: Blind from the age of 3, Mr. Mehta was long praised by critics for his forthright, luminous prose - with its “informal elegance, diamond clarity and hypnotic power,” as The Sunday Herald of Glasgow put it in a 2005 profile.
Historian Manan Ahmed also took to Twitter to share his emotions. Journalist Salil Tripathi mentioned how an ‘era has ended’.
An unusual man, an elegant perceptive writer and what an original career forged out of so much hardship. Woke up to hear Ved mehta has died – I worked with him at the end of his life, relaunching some of his books, and had the pleasure of reading a lot of his work.
Publisher Chiki Sarkar also shared a memory of her working with him. Time Shelter, a story of a magical clinic for Alzheimer’s patients, wins.
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