Lucknow Boy: A Memoir By Vinod Mehta, Viking, Rs 499

After reading Lucknow Boy, I regretted accepting the Aspen Institute’s invitation to chair a talk by Robert Blackwill, the former American ambassador to India. Vinod Mehta makes him out to be a bully and a boor who browbeats his guests over elaborate six-course meals, not letting even a veteran like Naresh Chandra, sometime India’s ambassador to Washington, get a word in edgeways. I needn’t have worried. Blackwill turned out to be easy and charming, as deferential to the chair as he was solicitous of the unending stream of questioners. Perhaps he had mellowed with retirement. Perhaps Mehta was touchy. There’s a chapter in the book called “Bombay Masala”. The wicked description of the famous “round table” in Blackwill’s house (even if his boast “that the India-Pakistan dispute would be resolved around it” wasn’t borne out, Indo-American relations improved as never before during his embassy) may have been spiced with “Delhi masala”.

Perhaps that isn’t a serious crime in a journalist who must liven up his tale. “Like most sinful and salacious human beings, I enjoy gossip,” Mehta confesses, “particularly, gossip about people I know, and gossip about the media.” But the consequences can be dangerous if a reader of greater consequence than this reviewer is taken in by the hyperbole and acts on it. That danger is aggravated because the book isn’t only memoirs. The story of Mehta’s life makes the most interesting reading but laced into personal memories are running commentaries on current affairs, guidelines for other journalists (“Sweeper’s Wisdom”) and pen sketches of important people (V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and others) whose paths have crossed his. The most important of these is Editor, the pup he picked up in a park and who lives up to his name by being “disobedient, stubborn, wilful and thinks he knows everything”.

Mehta admits this is a dig at his peers. Perhaps he means the columnist who calls engaging fiction newspaper history or the editor who boasts of his linguistic skills but confuses “whet” and “vet” (Punjabi pronunciation?) and translates “Votre Altesse” (Your Highness) as “Your Majesty”! Sadly, the jungle Mehta stalked as editor of Debonair, The Sunday Observer, The Independent, the Indian Post and The Pioneer and which he still commands by virtue of Outlook teems with jackals pretending to be lions. Mehta himself must be excluded from the pack because of the self-deprecation that marks his reminiscences. It’s a rare quality in an Indian, especially one whose name is a household word, thanks to TV. He must also be commended for an embarrassingly candid account of an affaire that resulted in an illegitimate daughter. Hearing I was reviewing Lucknow Boy, a common friend wrote to say that “a man who disowns his own child and suppresses that fact for 40 years can’t be expected to tell the truth about anything or anybody” and went on to list conflicting versions of various appointments, sackings, encounters and episodes Mehta describes. Be that as it may, something of the pain of a confessional seeps through on Page 67, where he acknowledges that while two marriages produced no children, his only child is a stranger in a faraway land. This ability to confess, to regret, to see oneself from outside — despite some egotistical lapses like “people still had high regard for me” — makes the personal passages the book’s most poignant.

Others may find the Page Three stuff absorbing. And there’s plenty of it with a cast of preening prima donnas. There are the author’s bitchy references to Dileep Padgaonkar, his spat with Shobhaa Dé from which her publisher, Ashok Chopra, emerges as the real craven though Mehta chooses to blame Dé for not publishing the foreword she had requested, “an absorbing writers’ quarrel” between Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple, and George Verghese’s spirited riposte to Arundhati Roy. Mehta is a raconteur. He is also a better editor/entrepreneur than a writer. His nose for the sensational, superb networking and ability to rope in those who make news ensure that any publication under his stewardship is the talk of the town. Curiously, and given his role in publicizing the Radia tapes, he is surprisingly reticent about Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt.

It’s a pity he doesn’t regale readers with more details of his personal experiences in Britain (why did he get a British passport, for instance, and how? Is he still a subject of the Queen’s?) where he spent eight years. Instead, he culls a great deal of news and gossip from Britain’s media to pack 40 pages with what was already in the public domain. The hazard of trying to describe Britain without the background (which an immigrant ghetto doesn’t provide) becomes evident when he turns Lady Dorothy Macmillan, daughter of the ninth Duke of Devonshire, into an American! And while Malcolm Muggeridge did indeed work in Calcutta, he didn’t restrict the honour (or disgrace) of being “the last Englishman” to a denizen of the city. What Muggeridge actually said was “the last Englishman left will be an Indian”. There are many competing candidates in Bombay and Delhi. Perhaps even in Madras. Even Mehta might qualify, despite the passport of convenience he may or may not still have.