Chasing Kites

Michael Wood

  • The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period by Ved Mehta
    Sinclair-Stevenson, 190 pp, £15.99, November 2004, ISBN 0 9543520 6 8
  • Remembering Mr Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’ by Ved Mehta
    Sinclair-Stevenson, 414 pp, £19.99, November 2004, ISBN 0 9543520 5 X
  • Dark Harbour by Ved Mehta
    Sinclair-Stevenson, 272 pp, £17.99, November 2004, ISBN 0 9543520 4 1

In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart ‘will come to such sights colder/By and by’. The child will one day find better reasons for her tears, including the fate of humankind, falling and falling again since its first lapse in Eden: ‘You will weep and know why.’ And in any case there will always have been a secret reason for her grief. Early and late she will have been crying for herself: ‘It is Margaret you mourn for.’

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