The red letters

by Ved Mehta

"Ved Mehta's acclaimed Continents of Exile series ends where it began - with a portrait of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta. But this, the final installment of the eleven-book series, which has been appearing over the last thirty-two years, is its emotional crescendo, the story of the author's discovery of his father's affair with a married woman in the British India of the 1930s." "The story has its origins in the 1960s, 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 and summer capital of the Raj. 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