Growing Up with the Writer Ved Mehta

My parents' apartment had never looked better than on the day it was photographed to sell. As I walked through the rooms, the only thing that seemed out of place was the Statesman, which was the name of the wooden cube that my mother had selected from a catalogue to hold my father's ashes. (He had been a writer, not a statesman, but somehow the name had stuck.) It wasn't just that the Statesman looked incongruously modern amid the English antiques and Persian carpets; it was the four plastic bags of gray dust inside. Even though I knew they were proof that my father was gone, I couldn't shake the feeling that if I just quickened my step I would find him in the next room.

Growing up, I'd always known where in the apartment he would be. The path my father traced through the rooms was highly consistent. He sat on the right side of the sofa, not the left; on the near chair, not the far. He could often be found in the grand canopy bed that he and my mother shared, lying down with the phone, a landline, at his ear. He had memorized hundreds of numbers, and when he left a voice mail he dictated it with warmth and also a certain formality. I can still hear his voice on the machine: "Sage, it's your father here."

He was often on the phone with one of the auction houses. He liked to find out what was coming up for sale, hunting for the items that would make each room complete. When a carpet arrived, it would be attached to the parquet floor with hidden Velcro strips at the corners so that they wouldn't lift up and trip anyone. Certain walls had mirrors, others had paintings. Everything in the apartment had its place, except for a pair of George III "floating chairs," upholstered in pale-pink silk, which usually flanked the French doors in the dining room but got pulled out for big parties.

"Fuck," I would hear my father curse when he bumped into something—maybe one of those pink chairs, marooned in the middle of the living room after the guests had left. There was a particular insult to hitting something at home; it was the place where, surrounded by objects and furniture he had chosen, he was supposed to be safe. My father was blind, but we didn't use that word. If we had to, we said, "He lost his sight." Mostly we avoided the topic entirely. And, as if to test the boundaries of our credulity, he liked to say in conversation, "I see."

My father, who was born in Lahore in 1934, could see for the first few years of his life. But just shy of his fourth birthday he contracted cerebrospinal meningitis, which permanently damaged his optic nerves. Throughout my life, he was at work on an all-encompassing autobiographical project, "Continents of Exile," much of which was serialized in this magazine and subsequently published in twelve books. If blindness was the first exile, Partition was the second. In 1947, his family, along with millions of other Hindu refugees, was forced by sectarian violence to leave Lahore when the city became part of Pakistan, and resettle in a new India. Only one object from 11 Temple Road, their house in Lahore, made it to our apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street: a carved mahogany lamp that never moved from its place next to the piano.

As a child, I had no doubt about my father's ability to navigate his surroundings. I took for granted that he could walk into a room and know where everything was. He relied on a prodigious memory and something he called "sound-shadows," a type of echolocation based on the way that sound waves change with the shape and distance of objects.

There was a circle of people who marvelled at his ability, and an inner circle who knew not to comment. And then there were those who disapproved of the way he passed as sighted. They wanted to know why, as he moved around New York City on his own, he didn't use a white cane or a Seeing Eye dog. The most skeptical of these acquaintances didn't believe that he was blind, and I was often asked, "He can see, just a little bit, right?" I would answer quickly, "No, not at all," unconsciously mimicking his own mixture of defensiveness and pride. I was baffled when I came across pity, usually expressed by women who liked to say, "I'm sorry your father can't see you." I wasn't sorry.

And yet, even at home, the stakes were high. No drawer was supposed to be left open, no door ajar. Once, I found him sitting at the dining-room table, stonily quiet after he had run into a closet door, using one of his white handkerchiefs to dab at a small vertical cut on his forehead. His silence communicated anger more effectively than words. Finally, he said coolly, "Your mother is trying to kill me." He usually ascribed fault to someone, and even though it wasn't me that time, I felt a pang of guilt.

When I was a baby, I am told by my mother, my father would ferry me from my crib to their bed at night, saving her the trouble of getting up to nurse. As I grew older, I would instinctively move close to him when I sat down on the sofa, or take his hand when we were outside. His fingers would sometimes reach out, flutteringly, to touch my face.

His careful movements were at odds with the way my younger sister, Natasha, and I were allowed to race around. We would tear from room to room in a loop that took us from one end of the apartment to the other. Our father would sometimes plant himself in the middle of the track to play a game we called Daddy Monster, in which we would try to dart past him. I would shriek with delight when he invariably caught me, both surprised and comforted not to be able to sneak by. I wonder now if he used the game to train himself to know where our small, fast-moving bodies were. He was forever gathering information, clues to help him piece together what he called the "sighted world."

By the time I was eight, I was tall enough for my father to put his hand on my shoulder with an even pressure when we went out. This was not a game, or a casually affectionate touch. It was a physical manifestation of trust and a sign that I had to start paying attention. He hated to be overdirected; all I had to do to signal a crooked step or a crack in the sidewalk was to pause briefly and exaggerate my step.

For a long time, my father had an office on West Forty-third Street, at The New Yorker, where, under the editorship of William Shawn, he was a staff writer. One rainy day when he came home later than usual, I remember my mother running to the door and passionately kissing him, as people did in the movies. He still had his wet raincoat on. Was she relieved that he had made it home safely? We never spoke about the dangers of his solo commute up Madison Avenue on the bus from Forty-third Street to Seventy-ninth, his walk two avenues east. Just as blindness was never mentioned, neither was bravery.

In 1994, a couple of years after Tina Brown took over as editor, my father's contract as a staff writer was terminated, though, under what he acknowledged was "a long-standing agreement," he was allowed to keep his office. The scope of the magazine had changed; it had become more current and was making room for newer voices. He was a staff writer for thirty-three years, a period he covered in "Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker." (Growing up, I didn't know Mr. Shawn's first name. I only knew that it was thanks to Mr. Shawn that my father was able to work as a writer, publishing personal histories and stories that later became the material for his books.) But when the magazine moved to a new location, in Times Square, in 1999, he was told that there would not be room for him, and so his writing life moved home.

"Linn!" my father would often call out in the apartment. If my mother didn't respond right away, he would pick up line one and dial line two until she answered his call from a few rooms away. When I went to the grocery store with her, sometimes the loudspeaker would boom, "Mrs. Mehta, your husband is on the phone." It was only while running around the reservoir in Central Park or walking home from Columbia University—where she was first a Ph.D. student in comparative literature and later an adjunct lecturer—that my mother was truly unreachable. She preferred to go about the city in her jogging clothes, carrying a backpack instead of a handbag as other mothers did. She needed her hands, to help us and to help him. "Your mother is a ragamuffin," my father would say. And then every January: "My New Year's resolution is not to criticize your mother."

Twenty-one years his junior, she met my father at a party when she was eleven. By the time I was eleven, I blushed at this anecdote, but my parents didn't seem shy about it. My father liked to shock, and he didn't mind waiting a beat before assuring anyone who was listening that they had only become romantically involved sixteen years later. In the intervening time, he had been in the background, a guest brought to parties by my mother's uncle, Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., a friend and colleague of his. My father was an eccentric whom my mother's grandparents were happy to entertain at their Park Avenue apartment, an interesting extra man for dinner. Muriel Spark had inscribed her book "The Bachelors" to him: "For Ved, my favorite bachelor." But he was not the type meant to marry into my mother's Wasp family. That he did says less about his perseverance than about her free spirit.

She accepted my father's proposal while sitting at a desk in a hotel room in Bombay, looking out the window past the Colaba reef to the Arabian Sea. She was learning Sanskrit, and had eagerly connected with his family, who had been based in New Delhi since Partition. But there was no question of where they would live. "I can never live in India," my father used to say, even though writing about the country was at the center of his life's work. He had left in 1949, when he was fifteen, arriving in New York City after a forty-seven-hour trip from New Delhi and then making his way on to the Arkansas School for the Blind, which would prepare him for college. I remember walking down the street with him in New Delhi while children my age, begging, swarmed around him. As he handed out rupees, more children came forward until we were surrounded. "But for the grace of God, there go I," he said, when we made it back to the quiet of the hotel.

Although he treated my mother as an intellectual equal and a trusted first reader, it was clear what he wanted her priorities to be. He was forty-nine when they married, and ready to settle down and start a family. I was born within a year, and my sister followed two and a half years later. My mother was not a housewife, and yet, almost every morning, she walked down the long hallway to the kitchen to make him bed tea, a remnant of the British Raj, which often seemed to be alive and well in our apartment.

"Belts and suspenders" was a phrase my father liked to use, though he wouldn't have worn both at the same time. Belts were for casual corduroys, suspenders for the high-cut trousers of his Savile Row suits. My father dressed like an English gentleman. "It was Edwardian," Kennedy Fraser, a colleague of his who wrote about fashion, told me recently. My grandfather, whom my father called Daddyji, had been born in a village in Punjab around 1895, when Queen Victoria was Empress of India. In all the formal pictures of the Mehta family, the men wear suits, the women saris.

My father had the right accoutrements for every occasion. In winter, he would sit on the ledge facing the elevator, swinging his feet boyishly, until one of us bent down to stretch his rubber overshoes across his leather lace-ups. When he was ready, we were all supposed to be ready. But sometimes one of us would be missing. "Where is your mother?" he would often ask.

Every weekday, my mother was out of the kitchen by 9 A.M., and it became Maria's domain. To call Maria our housekeeper does not begin to capture her role in our family, or her devotion to "Mr. Mehta," as she called my father. She was cook, butler, laundress, maid, and something more. Caregiver is probably the right word, but he would have hated it, dismissing the idea that he needed caring for.

Maria was born near Rio and found her way to New York through a job at the Brazilian consulate. She did not know how old she was, because her birth had not been recorded, but she and my father were about the same age. The musical cadence of her Portuguese was a constant murmur in the background, while the equally foreign sound of his Punjabi could be heard only on the mornings when he called his sisters in India.

"Maria is a saint," my father would say, and no one ever disagreed. She understood something about his need for order. One day—I must have been in my late teens by then—he announced, "I need an epergne!" When, soon afterward, a tiered silver centerpiece arrived for the dining-room table, Maria, without a word, took on the job of polishing it. My father ate at fixed times, with a sense of ceremony that the rest of us didn't share. For breakfast, Maria served him freshly squeezed orange juice, a hard-boiled egg on dry toast, and fruit. They were such complete allies on the domestic front that for a short period I became convinced that they would get married. The reality was more complicated: together, she and my mother seemed to fulfill the role of an imaginary, all-doing wife.

My father was happiest when he was surrounded by women. Although he liked to talk about his mythical bachelorhood, the days when he took notes on a Braille typewriter and made his own cheese toast, by the time I came around he had decided it was far more efficient to delegate. Aside from our family and Maria, he had an assistant to open his mail, and another who came in to file medical claims; a reader who went through newspapers, opera libretti, and other material for him on evenings and weekends; and, separate from all the others, an amanuensis.

"Aman-you-en-sis"—the word was as familiar to me as "Wednesday." From a young age, I was aware that Milton, Johnson, and Churchill had amanuenses, people to whom they dictated their work. Milton had three daughters who lived to adulthood, the youngest of whom, Deborah, was a sometime amanuensis for "Paradise Lost." There is an 1877 oil painting by Mihály Munkácsy, at the New York Public Library, of the poet and his daughters around a table. "Why can't you be like Milton's daughters?" my father asked me on numerous occasions. Although he really meant like Deborah, who, I assumed, was the girl in the painting leaning forward, her quill poised over an open book. He wanted my complete and adoring attention. But he didn't draft me into service, nor did I volunteer.

My father dictated every word he ever published, and he thanks thirty-seven amanuenses by name in the various acknowledgments of the twenty-seven books he wrote. "There is hardly a sentence in the text which did not benefit from her untiring scrutiny and alert, intuitive intelligence," one reads; "in addition to helping me much as Milton's daughters helped him, [they] provided inestimable editorial suggestions," he writes in another.

Amanuenses came and went. The tenure was usually short—one to two years right out of college. I always felt that there was an aura of specialness around these women who called my father by his first name, Ved, like my mother did. At The New Yorker, they were sometimes referred to as "Vedettes," a word that means "star" in French but which in the magazine's precincts carried an element of scorn. They weren't referred to by this sobriquet in our family.

Mr. Shawn had the magazine pay for his amanuenses, an expense that my father could not have afforded in the early years. Some of his colleagues thought the concession to my father's handicap was unfair, but this kind of help, unlike a dog or a cane, was something he could not do without. I asked the writer Jamaica Kincaid, who knew my father at that time: "The whole atmosphere was very special—the atmosphere Shawn created for him, his charm created for him—almost hothouse."

In 1989, soon after Mr. Shawn left, Spy magazine published an cataloguing the insults and complications of the job of being one of Ved Mehta's amanuenses. I didn't read the when it was published—I was four years old at the time—but at some point in my teens I became aware of it. I knew that a copy of the issue was kept in a low cabinet under the TV, its negativity at odds with the silly colorful cover of Jay Leno feeding sushi to a goat.

During the summers, our family decamped from the apartment in New York to a house that my parents had built on an island in Maine, which my father had first visited as a bachelor. He could not have picked a social circle less interested in him than the denizens of Dark Harbor, a tightly knit, intergenerational community of families, whose island lives revolved around tennis, golf, and sailing. Our family managed socially thanks to my mother's gentle diplomacy, and to one man, a gregarious stockbroker and philanthropist, who offered my father his friendship. "Veggie," he would call him, an irreverent Americanization of the respectful Hindi designation Ved-ji. My father was delighted by the affectionate teasing, and the acceptance it signalled.

Each July, we would head to the island, an awkward caravan made up of the four of us, Maria, a mother's helper, and an amanuensis. Although we often ate together, everyone was on different schedules during the day, and it wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I got to know one of my father's amanuenses, a young woman named Alex, with any degree of intimacy.

That summer, I felt caged in. I was in college and wanted to be in New York, where my friends were all working. But my father had insisted that I come to Maine. "I've just put a new roof on the house," he said. Though he didn't say so, he had also stopped walking up and down the central island road alone on his evening constitutional, and he wanted company. I noticed that now he no longer walked upright behind me but leaned forward and put more of his weight on my shoulder. I remember one evening we were just approaching the house when he asked me what I wanted to do with my life. "I want to write," I ventured.

"What do you have to write about?" he replied. It was hard to tell if he was being cutting or genuinely curious.

There were times when I could laugh off a casual pronouncement like that, and then there were times when I would be overcome by a helpless rage. I'd have a sudden urge to leave, to get far enough away from him that his voice could not call me back to answer some small, irrelevant question. In Maine, this often meant walking down to the beach, to sit on the stairs looking east over Penobscot Bay.

One evening, I went down to those stairs and found Alex already there. I don't recall the details of our conversation, but I remember that I was angry at my father and that she was sympathetic—she knew what I was running away from. It was a tone that was familiar to everyone who knew my father. A manner of speaking that put you in your place—one far beneath him.

It was, I think now, related to a tone inherent to the Raj—the British ruled the subcontinent not only by strength but through an attitude of unassailable superiority. It might even have been the tone of the superior who dissuaded my father's father, Dr. Amolak Ram Mehta, a district health officer in the civil service, from testing his son for meningitis with a lumbar puncture when he fell sick at age three: "When have you heard of a meningitis patient sitting up and drinking milk? By this point he would be in a feverish coma. He couldn't possibly have meningitis."

My father wrote in detail about the events that led to his blindness in his biography of his father, "Daddyji," which came out in 1972. After the abandoned lumbar puncture, there was another delay because of the imminent arrival of a Mr. Cuthbert King, with whom Daddyji had arranged a tennis match. My grandfather, "whose promotion to an assistant directorship was still pending," my father notes, put off the trip to the hospital until the next morning. "He was furious with himself," my father wrote. "Yet had he ever had a choice in any of it? There were the children to raise and educate, and one's superiors were everything."

Recently, I contacted Alex through a mutual friend, asking if she would be willing to talk, and she replied immediately with an exclamation mark and a glasses emoji. I remembered that she had worn black glasses that sat on her small ski-jump nose, the sort of nose I had desperately wanted as a teen.

When we spoke on the phone, I asked right away, "Do you remember meeting down on the steps to the beach?" She was now living in South Africa. "Yes," she said. Her voice sounded exactly the same. I told her that I was writing about my father, and "not just the good parts." I had finally read the piece in Spy. The journalist's tone was snarky, but there were some direct quotes from my father's amanuenses. The women's experiences were recognizable to me, from my father's impatience ("Faster! Faster! Why are you so slow?") to his inappropriateness: "Did you bathe?" he asked one; "Did you make love today?" he asked another.

I was reminded of the magician-like way my father could wield his heightened senses. He might compliment a woman on her earrings at a cocktail party, having heard them dangling. Sometimes he was playful, but more often there was another dynamic: he wanted to give an impression of omniscience, and the power it implied. Though I would never have called my father a "sexist, oppressive, manipulative son of a bitch," as one amanuensis described him in the Spy piece, I did recognize what another said: "The guy could really get to you . . . he was like a human tuning fork."

I asked Alex if she had ever read the story. "Well, O.K., I can tell you about that stuff," she said. She hadn't known that my father was blind when she interviewed for the job (he hadn't mentioned it in the listing), nor had she known the term "amanuensis," although she figured both out during their conversation. By the time she was hired, he was writing less, and the job required a slew of errands and administrative tasks. On her first day, she and my father were standing in line at the post office, she said, and "there was a moment when I felt his hand kind of on my back, up and down, and I remember feeling, like, weird."

When Alex shifted her stance from his unwelcome hand, she remembered that my father had said, "Why are you gyrating away from me?" I flinched at the sexual innuendo. Then he asked her, "Why is touch more invasive than sight?"

It shouldn't have been a question: touch is more invasive than sight. "It was uncomfortable," Alex told me. How could my father have missed it, this fundamental tenet of the sighted world. He was obsessed with the way things looked. "You are my eyes," he used to say to me as a child. I automatically learned to provide the specificity that he craved, but the details were largely superficial. I might have described a woman wearing "tomato-red lipstick"; I would not have said, "She looks hurt."

Hearing about my father from the women who'd worked for him was like watching him hit his head against door after door after door, but now he was the one causing, not feeling, the pain.

I reached out to Madhur Jaffrey, the actress, writer, and cook, whom my father considered one of his closest friends, to ask her about him. Whenever he called her, he would say her initial, "Em," with a special affection, but they also fought. "We were never more than friends, sometimes much less," she wrote me in an e-mail. "My relationship with Ved was contradictory. He was funny, clever, bright, annoying, rude and ugly male all at the same time."

"Don't read me," my father would say to me. "Read the greats." He meant the great European novelists: Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Eliot. He said he couldn't afford to write fiction. He was a working writer, prolific in part because his words had always paid his bills, bills that added up as his taste became more bourgeois.

"Good girl" was often my father's highest praise, and I was good. I didn't read him until I was a young adult. When I did, I recognized the voice—his spoken and written voices were so close. And I also recognized the bedtime stories he used to tell us from his childhood in Punjab, the "jungly boy" stories of his high jinks jumping across the roofs of Lahore to chase kites, or secretly following his sisters to school on a bicycle he had fixed up.

Still, the man on the page was harder to map onto my father. His accounts of adult life do not shy away from humiliation and defeat. The final book of his autobiographical series reveals his father's love affair in the midst of married life; earlier, there is my father's crushing disappointment at not getting a first at Oxford, and, in "All for Love," published in 2001, an unsparing account of his failed relationships with women prior to marrying my mother.

A consummate stylist, my father usually put a simple dedication at the front of each book—just "To" and then the names. But "All for Love" starts with a paragraph, an expression of his love for my mother that includes the line "I trust [the book] will never give you one anxious moment, since, after all, its culmination was discovering you," and a dedication to me and my sister, acknowledging that if we read the book it might be hard "to imagine your father . . . as an ordinary human being, like yourselves."

The summer before I began seventh grade, we travelled to Greece on holiday. We were on a pier by the sea when my father stepped backward and fell, breaking his arm. The broken humerus didn't heal well; he began to lose proprioception—the ability to feel a body part in space—of the entire arm, from his shoulder to his hand. His arm, from his point of view, was vanishing. If you can't see a part of yourself, and can't feel it, how do you know it exists?

He was operated on and regained the use—and the feeling—of his arm, but I thought back to that summer when, some twenty years later, he became bedridden with Parkinson's. It was hard to grasp how the disease's constellation of physical and neurological symptoms fit together. More than anything, it felt like he was going blind.

The first time a hospice nurse came to see my father, he was propped up for bed tea, and I was keeping him company. " 'Masterpiece Theatre,' " the nurse said, glancing at the ornate canopy bed, the layers of rich blue drapery bordered in a golden brocade. She might have loved "Masterpiece Theatre," but I bristled at the reference. She wasn't playing along.

Over the next three years, my father went in and out of hospice. ("Failed," the nurses said. "Graduated," my mother replied.) We turned to my sister, a newly trained doctor, to try to understand what was happening, but there was no good medical diagnosis for his fitful decline. Perhaps he said it best, in a voice mail that my sister saved: "Oh, Natasha, it's your distraught father . . . I-I seem to have got some kind of permanent chill in my soul—or in my body—I don't know where it is, and it's so cold."

When it became too difficult for him to sit up, he was moved from the canopy bed to a hospital bed set up by the window. My mother and the nurses started using two lightweight, washable fleece blankets, free gifts that had arrived one day from the National Wildlife Federation. One had a bright-blue background with penguins on it, and the other featured polar bears on a black background. I knew that he would have hated the patterns, but I did not object. What was important was that the blankets were easy to wash, and to take on and off as needed.

When I visited, I noticed his hands on the colorful blankets. Hands that had never fidgeted were suddenly restless, moving back and forth. They looked so youthful, almond brown with large veins, unlined and unmarked, the strong nails he had always carefully cut now trimmed by a nurse. He had so often taken the measure of things with his hands. "Let me see your haircut," he would say, and reach up to feel how much space there was above my shoulders. My sister, as a doctor, also has this ability, her hands touching and palpitating, gathering essential information.

Sometimes my father didn't remember where he was, and when he spoke he was in London, Delhi, Lahore—rarely in the present, rarely even occupying the period during which my life had overlapped with his. It was as if his mind were rewinding. Natasha hypothesized that, if he could see, his brain would have been getting visual stimulation that might have slowed his decline. And I wondered, If he could see, would he have known that he was in his apartment in New York? Would he have known who I was?

By that point, he was sleeping in the soft black cotton sports shirts he used to wear on weekends, and nothing else—the paper-thin skin of his lower body was prone to bedsores. He winced with pain sometimes when he was touched, but he didn't complain. He was patient, as his body under the thin blankets kept shrinking. His voice had become small, whispery, and the last time I visited him it wasn't there at all.

"I want to sell the bed," my mother said, a few months after my father died, before adding, "I want to sell the apartment." I was surprised. I remembered when I had described the new fabric for the living-room curtains to my father. He had replaced them just as he was beginning to get sick. "Your mother will never do it," he had said. He spoke as if the living room, and the curtains, would always be there.

In the end, I sold their marital bed. A friend who saw the listing photos of the apartment asked if she could buy it. ("Were you conceived there?" her husband wondered; I didn't want to know.) So I unmade it, finding layers of dust in the folds of the drapes. The movers unscrewed the bolts and separated the posts and frame and headboard. Once in the truck, one of the carved posts split in two. When I told my mother, she said that one of the posts had broken years earlier, but the hairline crack had been carefully repaired and was very hard to see. I had missed it. What else had I not seen?

I kept a stack of my father's handkerchiefs. He used to blot his eyes with them; one in particular would get watery. When I was a teen-ager and started wearing sunglasses, he asked if he should get a pair to hide his eyes. "Don't they look ugly?" he had asked. At the time, I didn't realize the question was a chink in his armor.

"No," I replied. His eyes were different, but they were not ugly to me. One was an opaque blue-gray with a lid that opened halfway; the other, whose lid rarely opened, was sunken—this was the one that watered. Besides, sunglasses would hide his face. Emotion moved across it like weather: laughter, delight, and, sometimes, suffering. He didn't make artificial expressions; he couldn't mirror the people he was talking to. But he also couldn't see their reactions, waiting instead on their words.

The Statesman now sits in my mother's new apartment, on a shelf facing her bed. We have cast the ashes, in a reverse of his life's trajectory, out onto the waters of Maine, Oxford, and India. But a quarter of them still reside in the Statesman. My mother sometimes talks about where those remaining ashes might go, but I'm not sure if the Statesman will ever be empty.

She is not the only one holding on. "Come home," my father used to say to me, whether I was blocks or continents away. I think of the apartment. The rooms and objects have solidified into something like a memory palace, and I wonder if this is not how they had always existed in his mind.