The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period (Continents of Exile Series)

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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 ...

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More About This Book

Overview

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.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Imagine: you're a middle-aged adult and your elderly parent offers you a packet of love letters ("red letters") from an adulterous relationship that took place just before you were born. After you recover from the shock-you never imagined your parents being sexual, much less anything but faithful-you must decide whether you really want to know what's in the letters. If you're longtime New Yorker writer Mehta, and you've already published biographical volumes on each of your parents (Daddyji; Mamaji) without this information, the offer's both troublesome and irresistible. It began when Mehta's father asked him to collaborate on a novel about two lovers. As his father "slipped from conditional into indicative mood," Mehta realized he was actually hearing the truth about his parents. That Mehta senior would unburden himself to his biographer son is almost a foregone conclusion. What's unclear, though, is the effect this knowledge will have on their relationship. Son must accept a new version of his father. No longer an even-tempered, optimistic gentleman, he's become a passionate, moody romantic. Mehta's notions of his mother also need revising. It's a "belated growing up," yes, but also a fitting conclusion to his Continents of Exile series. Mehta fans will find this 11th and closing volume enticing, and newcomers may be inspired to restart with volume one. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
In the 11th and final installment of Mehta's "Continents of Exile" series, he explores his father's brief and memorable love affair with a family friend. The Indian-born author had written biographies of his parents (Daddyji and Mamaji) without knowledge of this illicit episode. In his father's later years after the author had established himself as a respected novelist and contributing writer at The New Yorker the story came out piecemeal. At first, Daddyji wanted to cloak his story as fiction, but he ultimately revealed the titular "red letters" the correspondence between him and his lover. While he loves and admires both of his parents, Mehta was fascinated to learn more about this forbidden relationship, and he struggled with this knowledge of his father's past. Here he is especially descriptive when recounting his father's medical and administrative career under the British colonial system. Mehta's unique outlook as a native-born Indian educated and living in the West since 1949 gives readers a comfortable entr e to a world that he knows but no longer inhabits. Recommended for all collections, especially those with other books in the series. Jan Brue Enright, Augustana Coll. Lib., Sioux Falls, SD Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Finding universals in the particulars of a father's short dalliance with a married woman, framed within the context of late-colonial India. At the beginning of this 11th and concluding volume in his Continents of Exile series (All for Love, 2001, etc.), the India-born, blind author Mehta recounts an incident that occurred when he was a young man living in New York. The neighborhood cobbler addresses him as "Mr. Mehta" and tells him how much he liked his recent book. Mehta's appalled reaction ("How dare he be so familiar with me?") suggests the burden laid on him by his sense of propriety. And propriety will be sorely tested when his father suggests that Mehta help him with a novel he's writing, the story of an idealistic young doctor working in the hill country who falls in love with a shepherd girl and rails against the abuse she suffers at the hands of the local Nawat: The tale's verisimilitude ignites in Mehta a suspicion that this may be creative nonfiction, but he can only approach the subject gingerly: "In the balance were my lifelong glowing notions of his rectitude and the purity and stability of his forty-nine-year-long marriage to my mother." Mehta cultivates the ground of his father's affair with great sensitivity, painting the peerless backdrop of the Simla hill station and explaining the norms at play. ("Nothing was more important than to keep the reputation of the family pure and unbesmirched.") His mother handled the situation "with good humor and good cheer," observing of the lover, who was also her close friend: "She came like a butterfly and went away like a butterfly." At the heart of the story are the pair's love letters, each of which Mehta displays to best advantagein all their fragility, expressing wonder at their survival in a world of rapid transformation. A story of enough provocative, sensual grace to have fueled Scheherazade for a 1,002nd night.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781560256281
  • Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 10/10/2004
  • Series: Nation Books
  • Pages: 190
  • Product dimensions: 6.14 (w) x 8.84 (h) x 1.20 (d)

Table of Contents

Photographs x
Prologue: The Long Shadow on the Party 1
I Hill Girls and Princelings 11
II Woven Into the Region 32
III The Simla Stage is Chaste 67
IV The Attache Case 94
V Psalms of Praises of Your Feet 112
VI Vacated House 142
VII The Long-Lived One 162
Epilogue: Terminable and Interminable 176
Afterword 187
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