Ved Mehta proved that blindness is no obstacle to sparkling observation

People who had never read a line of Ved Mehta knew the story, and were telling it almost before you finished saying his name. There was this party in Manhattan. A solitary Indian gentleman in a good suit is sitting in a chair in the corner. Two other guests observe him. “That’s Ved Mehta, the blind writer on the New Yorker,” says the first. “He doesn’t look so blind to me,” says the second, noticing the confident way he takes a drink from the tray. They agree to a test: one of them stands in front of the writer and pulls all kinds of faces, stretching his mouth with his fingers, wagging his tongue – an animated gargoyle. The writer stands up in spluttering outrage. It was not Ved Mehta, but VS Naipaul.

It’s a story that dates from the time when celebrated Indians were still relatively uncommon in New York; before American writers had south Asian names (Mukherjee, Lahiri, Gawande, Kumar); when American ignorance of India was still quite profound.

Mehta did a little to alter that. After he died last month – in New York, aged 86 – the New York Times said he was “widely considered the 20th-century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India”. The New Yorker published his pieces for more than 30 years, and more often than not they later appeared as books that described and examined Indian life and history. But he was a reporter and not a historian: he encountered places and people, recorded his impressions of them, asked questions and wrote down answers. Then in a long and difficult process with his amanuensis in which every word was read aloud, he would write, rewrite, cut, reorder and correct, often several times over, until he and his editor, William Shawn, had a piece of writing they were happy with. His essays were clear and informal, and always rooted in the concrete and the particular. He came at complex subjects humbly, wanting to grasp them and then share what he found out.

There have been other blind writers – Milton as well as the New Yorker’s own James Thurber – but probably none for whom the act of observation was so important. But how could he observe? The son of a prominent doctor in Lahore, he was three when an attack of meningitis left him blind. Thereafter he learned many things, including touch-typing, English literature and European history, in an ascending scale that started with a rough school in Mumbai and ended at Oxford and Harvard. Remarkably, he never accepted his blindness as a fact.

He spurned friends’ hands that offered to lead him to taxis, rejected white sticks, rebuffed guide dogs, and hated to be referred to as “the blind writer”. More controversially, he wrote as if he could see, which led some people – Norman Mailer was one – to believe he wasn’t as blind as he let on, and others to criticise his writing as dishonest because it never shied from physical description. In fact, Mehta drew his impressions of the world from many sources: sounds, smells, a sighted companion’s words. “I made sounds visible,” he wrote, “the images resonating with the visual impressions that were hidden away like a treasure trove in my early memory”.

His most ambitious work is his 12-volume memoir Continents of Exile, which must run to more than a million words, 100,000 or so of which I edited after Granta acquired the ninth in the series, All for Love. The book tells the story of his love for four women, each of whom rejects him. In anguish, he turns eventually to a psychoanalyst, Dr Bak, a cigar-smoking Hungarian who sees him four times a week.

I think of Dr Bak as the hero of the series. After seeing him for a couple of years, Mehta bumps into a door in his office and hurts his forehead, which begins to bleed. Bak says and does nothing. Mehta says he’d like to wash himself. Again Bak says nothing. The wound begins to throb. Bak is as quiet as the grave. Mehta, hating this lack of sympathy, finally bursts out, “Don’t you know I’m blind?” In hundreds of their sessions, and during the course of his love affairs, the word has never been uttered before. He had led his entire life as if he could see: “… the fantasy had served me well in my writing”.

Not everything altered with Mehta’s new understanding of himself. Towards the end of our editing process, he asked that the punctuation be changed throughout the text. Granta’s convention was to put quotes inside single quotation marks, thus ‘…’, and quotes within quotes inside double quotation marks, thus “…”. Mehta wanted the opposite: singles inside doubles.

“But why, Ved, why?” I asked impatiently of someone who had never seen a quotation mark.

“It’s the proper way,” he said. It was how the New Yorker did it.

• Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist