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Journalist. Ved Mehta told the story of his own life for most of his career. This story included the cultures in which he had lived. Mehta was born into a well-educated Hindu family in Lahore in 1934. At the age of four, he lost his eyesight as a result of meningitis. Mehta’s education took him away from his close-knit family and sent him to places that must have seemed like different worlds—Arkansas in the era of segregation, a college campus in suburban Southern California, and Oxford University. As a staff writer for the New Yorker and in his many books, Mehta made those different worlds, including the world of blindness, come alive to the reader.

In Continents of Exile, Ved Mehta has set himself the task of remembering and interpreting his life. In the seven volumes published before 1994, he examined his own development up to his graduation from the University of Oxford. Mehta’s quest for self-understanding is also an introduction to the several different cultures through which Mehta has passed. From childhood Mehta has been an outsider seeking to understand worlds of which he is not fully a part. The loss of his eyesight at age three made him an exile in the world of the sighted, and his almost heroic struggle to secure an education sent him into exile—to Bombay from his native Punjab, to the United States, and to England. In describing his experiences, Mehta also gives the reader the flavor of different worlds, including India before and after its partition into India and Pakistan in 1947, Arkansas during segregation, suburban California in the tranquil 1950’s, Oxford before the upheavals of the 1960’s, and the world of blindness.