INDIAN-AMERICAN novelist Ved Mehta, who shone a bright literary light of evocativeness and imagery overcoming his blindness, has died here at the age of 86. The New Yorker magazine, where he had been a staff writer for 33 years, reported that he had died on Saturday. Mehta provided the first introduction to India for many contemporary Americans through his popular books and articles that ranged from the autobiographical to the political and historic.

 

The prolific writer of 24 books and hundreds of articles lost his eyesight because of meningitis at the age of three but that was never a handicap as he navigated the world uncannily with his remaining four senses and did not use even a cane or seek assistance from anyone.

 

Mehta was born in 1934 in pre-partition Lahore and educated in India, the UK and the US, which he made his home and became an American citizen. His first book, “Face to Face”, a recounting of his early life that was published in 1957 and caught the eye of literary figures, launching his career as a writer and turning him away from a career of scholarship that he had initially set on.