from Harvard University in 1961. He has lived in
the United States since 1959 and is a naturalized
American citizen.
Best known for his essays and autobiographical
writings, Mehta is a prolific writer and has written
extensively about India and the United States. He
has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine
since 1961 and has written more than 20 books.
In Face to Face (1957), Mehta illustrates his child-
hood and the challenges he faced due to blindness.
He also details at length his years in Arkansas State
School for the Blind. After the triumph of Face to
Face, he published a novel and many works of non-
fiction including Daddyji (1972), Mamaji (1979),
Ve di (1982), The Ledge between the Streams (1984),
and Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986). Most
of these works are autobiographical in nature and
are collectively titled “Continents of Exile.” In
Daddyji and Mamaji, Mehta for the most part por-
trays his parents’ lives and the childhood that he
spent with them. In The Ledge between the Streams,
Mehta writes about his youth during the 1940s. He
describes at length the day-to-day pains and perils,
the growing rift between the Hindus and Muslims,
and the violence that overtook India during parti-
tion. Although he writes about his adolescence and
his coming to terms with blindness, Mehta beau-
tifully weaves the political struggles of his native
country in the book. His latest book, The Red Let-
ter (2004), which is also the 11th and concluding
volume in his “Continents of Exile” series, is about
his father’s affair with a Nepalese young woman.
Mehta has written a satirical novel, Delinquent
Chacha (1967), but he is best known for his ob-
servations on Indian society and for his auto-
biographical works that result from his early life
in India and later annual trips to India. Walking
the Indian Streets (1963), Portrait of India (1970),
Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom (1994), and
Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles (1977) are
among his books that deal with his observations
on Indian life and some of the well-known Indian
figures such as Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and
Mahatma Gandhi.
Mehta is also an outstanding essayist. His Fly
and the Fly-Bottle (1962), The New Theologians
(1965 collection of essays on European Christian
thinkers), and The Ved Mehta Reader (1998 series
of essays on subjects as varied as the art of essay
writing, and religion, politics, and education) are
evidence of his masterly style. All in all, Mehta is
an exceptional memoirist, a well-known journal-
ist, an accomplished essayist and writer.
Asma SayedMiddleman and Other Stories, The
Bharati Mukherjee (1988)
In this collection of stories, BHARATI MUKHERJEE—
a Calcutta-born immigrant to the United States—
explores the harsh, violent, tragic, and oftentimes
redemptive aspects of the immigrant experience in
the later decades of the 20th century. Published to
critical acclaim in 1988, The Middleman and Other
Stories received the National Book Critics Award
for Fiction, making Mukherjee the first natural-
ized U.S. citizen to receive the award and establish-
ing her as a prominent writer and cartographer of
an increasingly hybridized and internationalized
America. Spanning several continents, shifting
between male and female narrators and navigat-
ing among numerous cultures, Mukherjee’s col-
lection speaks to an increasingly cosmopolitan
world, one poised to spring into full-scale global-
ization after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, with
all of its attendant problems, contradictions, and
possibilities.
The 11 stories constituting the collection have
their individually distinctive voices and tones, yet
underlying their largely dissimilar narrators, plots,
and characters remains a pervasive sympathy for
the position of the outsider, the transient, the exile,
and, more often than not, the immigrant forced
to mitigate the demands of largely divergent cul-
tures. In the collection’s title story, “The Middle-
man,” the narrator, an Iraqi Jew and naturalized
American citizen in exile, serves as an unwitting
accomplice and gunrunner for revolutionaries in
South America, charting not only the excesses and
abuses of the revolutionaries but likewise the cor-
ruption of American foreign policy in Central and
South America during the 1970s and 1980s. In “A
Wife’s Story,” Panna Bhatt narrates her tightrope19 0 Middleman and Other Stories, The