Hunting for a good read in the college library, I studiously avoided the row of volumes written by a Mehta, a fellow Punjabi, which invariably had Indian familial sobriquets for titles. There was no chance a person from my own community could a) conjure the steaming sex we all looked for in weekend reading to ward off the ennui inflicted by prescribed classics, or b) open doors to a new world, or even to one beyond Punjabi sub-cultural confines. Further, learning that the writer was blind only strengthened my resolve. My cultivated distaste for such crude corruptions of language (both Punjabi and English) as 'daddyji' meant the books of Ved Mehta were not half about to find their way to my bedside table.
Having since read a handful of Mehta's books I found how wrong I was on the second count and how spot-on on the first. Now, after reading his recently published autobiography, All for Love: A Personal History of Desire and Disappointment (Granta, 2001), I have been proven somewhat wrong even on the first: still no steaming sex but sexual relationships do make a belated appearance, their delay in coming speaking simultaneously of authorial discretion and social conservatism.
All for Love is that rare account of the love life of a Punjabi male. In India, where the phenomenon of a 40- year-old virgin is not the stuff of bawdy humour but a lesson in a morality lecture that common Western view would find moribund, this would be taken as an ironic comment. Sex before marriage, especially between consenting adults is considered egregious and dirty. Virginity is a prize, a virtue; its loss, ignominy. 'Relationships' for the most part still require the social sanction of marriage in a society where matrimony is less a union of two individuals, more a 'memorandum of understanding' between two families, with the boy and girl being only part of the traded consignment.
Ved Mehta, a peerless chronicler of the life and times of middle class Punjabis who migrated to India around partition, is particularly adept with records of the Mehta community. This society that cannot convey its sorrows and joys without saccharine sentimentalism has found in the New York-based Ved an objective and eloquent historian. Far from highlighting its parochial tendencies, his narratives are infused with such universality and humanity that the Mehtas in fact assume a new dignity. Long after my college days were over, I realised after reading Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979) – stylish, unsentimental diptych-accounts of the life of Mehta's parents in a turn of the century death- and disease-ridden Punjab – how far I had underrated my own world and how pathetic my disavowal of my Punjabi roots had been. In Delhi, where I grew up, we children were taught Hindi and English to protect us from the cruder inflections of Punjabi culture. By not masking it in the rarefied circles of New York's literati, Mehta made being rooted a desirable, even essential, thing for Indians writing in a second language, and Punjabiyat (-ness) and regional identities respectable, even hip.