The Red Letters

(Penguin Petit)

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Ved Mehta’s acclaimed Continents of Exile series ends where it began—with a portrait of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta. But this, the final instalment of the eleven-book series, which has been appearing over the last thirty-two years, is its emotional crescendo, the story of the author’s discovery of his father’s affair with a married woman in the British India of the 1930s.
The story has its origins in the 1960s, 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 and summer capital of the Raj. 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.
Years earlier, when the Daddyji of the story was working in the Punjab Himalayas as a medical student, he had met a young shepherdess on his rounds, and been intoxicated by her greenish-blue eyes, fair skin, golden hair, and the Nepalese lilt of her voice. At one moment, he caught sight of her concealed tattoo of the consort of Lord Krishna. She said that she, too, intended to marry the voluptuary deity.
Some fifteen years later in Lahore, Dr. Mehta encounters a socialite whom he recognizes as the hill girl of his youth by her tattoo. They re-establish contact and in time become lovers. Their affair is kept alive by the exchange of love letters, or Red Letters—sublime if eccentric works in themselves—that Mehta’s father treasures for the remainder of his life as a memento of his enchanted time.
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.
The appearance of this book is a major literary event, signalling the conclusion of Continents of Exile, one of the most remarkable literary achievements of the twentieth century.