Sound-Shadows of the New World
Mehta, Ved
SOUND-SHADOWS OF THE NEW WORLD Ved Mehta/W. W. Norton/$17.95 Jacob Weisberg Ved Mehta thinks he has led a pretty interesting life. So fascinating has it been, in fact, that Mehta, who is now 52,...
...In this latest work, Mehta tells of his arrival in the United States and the three years he spent as a student at the Arkansas School for the Blind, a state institution which was the only American academy that would admit him...
...Stop this autobiography, I want to get off...
...I have the imagination and possess the talent to write, I think...
...As a matter of fact, he writes about his ambitions in pretty much the same way he writes about the weather: For the last couple of weeks it has been awfully springlike...
...He says that the Educational Testing Service ruined his chances by supplying a culturally biased test that wasn't in braille despite the service's promise to provide one...
...The subtitle of Sound-Shadows of the New World ought to be "Blind Ambition...
...Hungary...
...They had poor housing in San Francisco, too...
...It's great that Ved was such an impressionable young man...
...In-stead of depicting a clash between Eastern and Western values, Mehta writes about putting his antiquated beliefs aside...
...I have been as much time as I possibly can outside, admiring and enjoying the flowers...
...Sound-Shadows of the New World, which was previously published in the New Yorker, is his sixth volume of autobiography to date, but it only manages to bring us up to Mehta's somewhat tardy puberty at age 18...
...But is it a measure of their progress that the blind now have equal opportunity to write for the New Yorker and bore innocent people to death...
...Mehta, however, seems to think that his handicap excuses his writing an entire book about selfabsorption...
...I don't mind being damned," Mehta barks back (partly in the hope of being excused from church services...
...Because the Red Army is in places where it isn't wanted...
...Although the American custom is foreign to him, he doesn't question its obvious superiority...
...They've already started blossoming...
...All of these factors have made America prosperous and a model for other countries...
...I think I could succeed in this profession, in spite of the great competition...
...El...
...They seemed to displease Olga 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986...
...I cannot imagine what our modern democracy would be like without our newspapers...
...When he finally reaches Little Rock, he has to ask the rubes what words like "divorce" mean...
...America's] mineral wealth, its forest wealth, its invigorating climate are unprecedented...
...The odds against young Ved in this strange new land are overwhelming: he arrives in New York so green that he doesn't know how to eat with a fork, and is shocked by the notion of couples kissing in public...
...Lady, they strip-searched you for bringing in a computer...
...A high wall and a Red Star, a river embankment and here was our hotel, the Rossiya, only two or three hundred yards from St...
...One young woman sat next to Beichman...
...But the point Mehta makes isn't about cultural bias, or even discrimination against the handicapped...
...Listen to him as he parrots the answers to an American History exam in a braille correspondence course he took one summer to graduate early: "Democracy is a marvelous thing...
...conformity and instantaneous assimilation...
...That was desperately unfair...
...He trumpets his own achievements and then steps back, as if waiting for our applause...
...The Kremlin...
...I love to read and write...
...Doesn't that tell you something...
...So fascinating has it been, in fact, that Mehta, who is now 52, has dedicated the years remaining him to exhuming his past and describing it in excruciating, microscopic detail...
...Why can't we live in peace...
...Buses packed with strap-hanging proles made their way out to communal apartments...
...But we can probably look forward to at least a few books from Ved about his years writing about himself...
...He stalls by telling her that although he's not a practicing Hindu, he can't accept the idea that the rest of his family is destined for hell because they don't worship Jesus...
...Much of it seems to be nothing more than a belated response to teachers who gave him B's and C's...
...Here, as in all of the arguments in the book, Ved has the last word...
...But because he is so diligent and so eager to become an American, patochial Arkansas rewards Ved with its attention and esteem...
...At this rate of reminiscence, there isn't much danger that art will overtake life...
...Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...But Mehta hardly seems to have considered it...
...He denies that Jesus was the son of God...
...Then go and burn in Hell," Miss Holt hollers...
...It was smaller than I had imagined, just as the Kremlin itself was somehow more impressive...
...That'll put an end to the flowers...
...We drove through muddy miles of socialist realism—dreary blocks of flats, Lenin in repose, Lenin making a point to the masses, Lenin in profile, Lenin Triumphant...
...Mehta remembers that some of his blind classmates were bigots and even thought that he was black, despite the fact that the school was segregated and didn't admit Negroes...
...I would also like my views to be known widely—all over the world...
...His writing is so humorless and superficial that he manages to transform the topic of ambition into something more tedious than hideous: Then there writing...
...Mehta's attitude in retrospect seems to be that the people who readily accepted him couldn't have been all that bad...
...But he quickly remembers the when-in-Rome adage, and digs in...
...One can only hope someone will knock some sense into him and persuade him to abandon what is surely one of the most overblown literary endeavors of all time...
...Old ladies with black shawls and shopping bags plodded along minding their own business...
...What he offers instead is a story of Jacob Weisberg a reporter/researcher at the New Republic doesn't read braille but he speaks it...
...At supper live music was provided by a hefty, pink-gowned quartet—the Kremlinettes, as I thought of them—playing Moscow rock-cum-pasodoble...
...Is a society of blind people less prone to bigotry because of the way it has been stigmatized and patronized by the rest of the world...
...Mehta's self-righteousness reaches its height as graduation approaches, when both Harvard and Columbia reject him because of his low SAT scores...
...Presented with a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs upon arrival in New York, he shudders briefly at violating the Hindu taboo against eating beef...
...Mehta objects that God isn't a student at the Arkansas School for the Blind...
...But he doesn't presume to pass judgment on the racism of his teachers and classmates...
...I love to criticize books...
...Its people have descended from the most energetic European stock...
...Only at the attempt by his piano teacher, Miss Holt, to save his soul does Ved draw the line...
...But if he has since developed any insights into this proclivity for patriotic platitude, Mehta doesn't share them with us...
...She might quite reasonably have assumed that we were one more peace group...
...BETHELL (continued from page 13) housing...
...Basil's Cathedral...
...Early in his book Mehta bemoans the fact that, until quite recently, the only careers for blind people in Arkansas were piano tuning and broom making...
...But Arkansas has really startling reverses in weather, and everyone is predicting a bitter cold wave...
...Every-thing was dirty, dun-colored, unpainted, grimy, poor, crumbling, trod-den down...
...The mere thought of it was revolting," he writes...
...He said she was "the victim of a self-induced blindness...
...Mehta's next volume is expected to treat his years at Pomona College, in Pomona, California, where the weather is also supposed to be lovely...
...Normans Mailer and Podhoretz have written directly about the topic, but because of their respective humor and honesty their descriptions of lusting after success were excusable...
...she pertly asked him...
...No doubt he did get a raw deal from ETS...
...Like where...
...Not a leaf in sight...
...I don't think we have it in India," he says...
...Driving away from the Moscow Air-port, our Intourist guide Olga (who was with us for the entire trip) allowed two more guides onto the bus for the ride into Moscow...
...It's a fascinating question...
...It looked, as Christopher Booker has written, "like nothing so much as a cluster of tethered Montgolfier hot-air balloons...
...And with that," Larry recalled, "we reached a stony impasse...
...I love good literature...
...It's that he succeeded despite the obstacles placed in his way, and despite the enormous odds against him...
...Quite abruptly we were in the center, with silvery church domes and freshly gilded onions glinting through bare birch branches...
...Mehta quotes endless passages from the mundane diary he kept at the time, telling of similar qualms about casual dating, which the Arkansas school encouraged to help its blind students prepare for finding sighted spouses...
...Miss Holt tells her students that only God deserves thegrade of A...
...If he were, I suppose, His name would be Ved...
...He was "brainwashed by anti-Soviet propaganda," she said...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
