The Ledge Between the Streams (Picador Books) - Softcover

Mehta, Ved

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330289772 ISBN 13: 9780330289771

Publisher: Picador, 1986

Synopsis

The author describes his adolescence in India during the forties and tells how he adjusted to his blindness and learned Braille, English, bicycling, typing, roller skating, and horseback riding

About this title

Review:

Steadily, quietly, Mehta keeps adding to his unique family/personal history - which began in earnest with parental studies (Daddyji, Mamaji) and turned to Mehta himself in Vedi (1982): the chronicle of his five years in a special school after being blinded by meningitis at age four. Now, removed from the school because of health problems, little Vedi must go without an education - living at home with his loving, cultured, oddly neglectful family. (No one read to him.) But "home" keeps shifting, as public-health official Daddyji is moved from Lahore to Rawalpindi to a hill-station, then back to Lahore. Vedi is fearful yet reckless, determined to ride a bicycle: "Mamah felt that my blindness was a curse on her for something she had done in a previous incarnation. . . I felt that blindness was a terrible impediment, and that if only I exerted myself, and did everything my big sisters and big brother did, I could somehow become exactly like them." He develops his sound/feel "vision," yearns for education, settles for visits from a seedy Indian-music master: Daddyji suggests music as "solace," a singing career as the only viable one for a blind man. Then, at last, Vedi argues his way into a makeshift little Lahore school for blind children - with a Muslim teacher who tells lurid stories about houris and venereal disease, a principal who insists on Vedi's nonstop knitting. In the late 1940s, however, even Vedi's attention shifts to the escalating Muslim/Hindu tensions in Lahore: distant sounds of riots, fires; imminent fear of mob attack; sleeping with a knife under his pillow; flight, after the Partition violence erupts, to Bombay, where the children seek out trouble. ("In Lahore we had got so used to living, with a sense of danger that in Bombay we couldn't hear to live without it.") There, again, the question arises: what to do with Vedi, who still hasn't even learned Braille? And the strange answer is St. Dunstan's in Dehra Dun - a top training center for blinded soldiers, where the "little civilian fellow" finally gets his basic reading/writing skills, his first English. . . and then goes on, after heart-catching setbacks, to gain admission to an Arkansas school, "the first Indian blind boy ever to go to America for education." With rich backgrounds of nation and family: the most personally compelling of the Mehta memoirs - fired by the hunger for learning. (Kirkus Reviews)

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0330289772
• ISBN 13: 9780330289771
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 350