Ved Parkash Mehta (21 March 19349 January 2021) was an Indian-born writer who lived and worked mainly in the United States. Blind from an early age, Mehta is best known for an autobiography published in instalments from 1972 to 2004. He wrote for The New Yorker for many years. Early life and education Mehta was born on 21 March 1934 in Lahore, British India (now in Pakistan) to a Punjabi Hindu family. His parents were Shanti (Mehra) Mehta and Amolak Ram Mehta (1894–1986), a senior public health official in the government of India. Ved lost his sight at the age of three due to cerebrospinal meningitis. Due to the limited prospects for blind people at that time, his parents sent him over away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay (present-day Mumbai). Beginning around 1949, he attended the Arkansas School for the Blind. Mehta received a BA from Pomona College in 1956; a BA from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1959, where he read modern history; and an MA from Harvard University in 1961. While at Pomona, as very few books were available in Braille, Mehta used student readers, one of whom was Eugene Rose, who went on to become the Russian Orthodox hieromonk Seraphim Rose. Mehta referred to him in two books, one of which was Stolen Light, his second book of memoirs: "I felt very lucky to have found Gene as a reader. ... He read with such clarity that I almost had the illusion that he was explaining things." Literary career His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics, history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957; its narrative ends around the time Mehta enrolled at Pomona. Mehta published his first novel, Delinquent Chacha, in 1966. It was serialized in The New Yorker. He subsequently wrote more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994. A 1982 profile, published after Mehta was announced as a MacArthur Fellow, stated that he had "gained critical note as a weaver of profiles, as an interviewer who can interpret character and context in the exchange of words with a subject. He is scholarly and journalistic and,