The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period

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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Mehta concludes his unique and indelible 11-volume series, Continents of Exile, by filling in a crucial, long-concealed chapter in his father's life. After moving his wife and children to Simla, the gorgeous Punjab hill station the British claimed for their summer capital, Mehta's father had an affair with a woman he had first met when she was an abused "hill girl" and he was a medical student. Eventually he entrusted their love letters to his son, and Mehta--who was born in India in 1934, lost his sight as a child, and wrote for the New Yorker for decades--now judiciously adds this riveting story to his lavish family history and cross-cultural saga. Over the years, Mehta has illuminated life during the British Raj (his father was a public health official), the trauma of the Partition (his family lost everything), his own amazing sojourns in England and America, and, most unforgettably, the world of blindness. Written with a historian's perspective, keen psychological insights, and extraordinary candor and lucidity, Mehta's Continents of Exile--a monumental meditation on humankind's determination not merely to survive but to live meaningfully--will stand as a pillar of world literature. Donna Seaman
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