Synopsis
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.
From 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.
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