Continents of exile Series

When Ved Mehta was invited to Islesboro, a thirteen-mile-long island off the coast of Maine, he could not have imagined the far-reaching consequences of his visit. Seduced by the dream of setting roots in the New World, Mehta finds himself buying a fifteen-acre parcel of land in the rugged terrain of Dark Harbor. To build his house, he hires the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, famous for designing, among other things, the IBM Building in New York. With echoes of Ibsen's Master-builder, Mehta details the folly of a blind man constructing a house on an island far removed from that other island, Manhattan, where he lives. Underlying this narrative is a richly allegorical tale about Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man. In the middle of it all, he falls in love with a much younger woman, whom he ultimately marries.

Haunted by Harvard

by Ved Mehta

Published 3 December 2020

Book 8 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.

Veritas continues Mehta's journey through education: this time as a Ph.D. student and Residential Fellow at Harvard. His experience illustrates the dramatic changes in institutional habits and behaviour that were to take places in the late 1960s, as well as how dramatically out-of-touch many senior lecturers were to the societal mood around them.