The Red Letters - My Father's Enchanted Period

The story has its origins in the sixties, when Mehta by chance finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother?s shoulder during a New York dinner party. As a result, the son begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father?s British past in Simla, the magical hill station. Step-by-step, he is forced to confront his father?s passionate clandestine affair with Rasil, an exquisite beauty who in her teens was abducted from her poor family and raped. She was subsequently rescued by a Hindu philanthropist, only to end up trapped in an abusive marriage to a rich businessman. Mehta?s exploration of his father?s love affair proves painful, as the son realizes that the entanglement, a passing episode in sixty-one years of a loving marriage, had shattering psychological side effects on his mother?a close friend of Rasil?s?and also on his own life. The Red Letters is Mehta?s masterpiece, a work of extraordinary intensity that perfectly re-creates the exotic, closed world of British India.