October 30, 2015.

A dip in the morning air. Rama switched off the fan. A Mumbaikar may hope for a few less hot months. Hes and shes may not wipe their wet brows. There may not be a cloudburst of smiles. Living could be about fractions of pleasure. Pens off Ved Mehta in Daddyji: 'In winter, the sky is blue and hospitable, the nights are frosty and starlit, the fields are left furrowed by the plow, and the air is filled with the call of partridges, the honking of wild geese overhead, and the languid creaking of Persian wheels as the bullocks turn them round and round to draw water from the wells...' Mumbaikar has no such luck; from me window watches parakeets, fresh as ATM currency notes, screaming their joys, landing on any perch...  before a bye till tomorrow. Ved Mehta is blind; became so when 'not quite five'; was put in a train at Lahore station for a blind school in Dadar, Mumbai, says the last page of the narrative, picked up a month ago at Strand Book Stall; a relative went along; the last words Daddyji said to Ved (and the first words I remember hearing) were:'You're a man now.' Became a man to write Daddyji, of times when the family started in a Punjab before 1947. Daddyji is about Amolak Ram Mehta written by the second son and fifth child of Daddyji and Mamaji --- Ved Mehta. Politics, partition, patriotism are mostly, perhaps, entirely excised; no blood, no Gandhi. At Port of Aden, Daddyji opens a letter from father Lalaji, which he destroyed in 1938; why, the reader is not told. Lalaji began by 'remarking that his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had lived and died in the same village of Nawankote. His great-grandfather had gone on foot as far as the next important village, and that was all. His grandfather had been on a pilgrimage to Hardwar by bullock cart, and that has taken several months. His father had been a passenger on the first train between Lahore and Sahranpur, and that journey had taken only a couple of days. And he, Lalaji, had ridden in a motorcar, and his sons had crossed the ocean in steamships - something his own father could not have dreamed of.... But, as we say in our beloved Punjab,'Even the meeting of rivulets is a matter of kismet.' Me morning turns a bit warm. For a few minutes tried to act blind; fright, opened me eyes. Ved Mehta goes to be on the staff of New Yorker in USA and write.