THE SIGHTED WORLD

Growing up with the writer Ved Mehta.

- SAGE MEHTA

My parents’ apartment had never looked better than on the day it was photographed to sell. As I walked through the rooms, the only thing that seemed out of place was the Statesman, which was the name of the wooden cube that my mother had selected from a catalogue to hold my father’s ashes. (He had been a writer, not a statesman, but somehow the name had stuck.) It wasn’t just that the Statesman looked incongruously modern amid the English antiques and Persian carpets; it was the four plastic bags of gray dust inside. Even though I knew they were proof that my father was gone, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I just quickened my step I would find him in the next room.

Growing up, I’d always known where in the apartment he would be. The path my father traced through the rooms was highly consistent. He sat on the right side of the sofa, not the left; on the near chair, not the far. He could often be found in the grand canopy bed that he and my mother shared, lying down with the phone, a landline, at his ear. He had memorized hundreds of numbers, and when he left a voice mail he dictated it with warmth and also a certain formality. I can still hear his voice on the machine: “Sage, it’s your father here.”

He was often on the phone with one of the auction houses. He liked to find out what was coming up for sale, hunting for the items that would make each room complete. When a carpet arrived, it would be attached to the parquet floor with hidden Velcro strips at the corners so that they wouldn’t lift up and trip anyone. Certain walls had mirrors, others had paintings. Everything in the apartment had its place, except for a pair of George III “floating chairs,” upholstered in pale-pink silk, which usually flanked the French doors in the dining room but got pulled out for big parties.