Prometheus in Pomona : THE STOLEN LIGHT <i> by Ved Mehta (W. W. Norton: $19.95; 462 pp.)</i>

“With the publication of this, the sixth book, I feel that the series (of autobiographical books) has a manifest architecture, and am therefore emboldened to give it the name I have carried so long in my head: ‘Continents of Exile.’ ” That is how Mehta prefaces this book. The earlier volumes described the onset of his blindness at age 4, as a result of meningitis, his attempts at coping with this tragedy in the midst of a large, loving family; and his painful separation from the family, when, as a young boy, he is sent away from his native Punjab to a school for the blind many miles away. At age 15, he embarks on a further exile when he leaves India for the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock to spend the last three years of high school. In this volume we meet Mehta at age 18 pondering his future. His well-wishers feel that he should think more of his happiness than of academic success and recommend “an easygoing college”; a much admired blind person and University of California professor strongly suggests Berkeley, adding ominously, “If you go to a private college, you’ll have to go it alone.” “To my horror,” says Mehta, “I found myself saying, ‘Then I’ll go it alone’ “--then he characteristically adds that aiming high is part of his character.

He opts for Pomona College and the book describes his venturesome years there in the early 1950s, when he comes of age and launches himself as a writer. One of the first impressions of the narrative is the cultural contrast: Claremont, sunny and golden, sanguine, rich and comfortably parochial; Mehta, Indian, blind, poor and desperate. One of the evocations of that contrast comes early in the narrative, when 30 years after graduation, he meets up with a girl named Johnnie, the great love of his college years, who always remained romantically beyond his grasp. “I never got anywhere with you. I mean I was in love with you. . . . How did you view me?” Mehta asks her. To which she replies, “For one of us to go out with someone who didn’t fit into that mold, which was athletic, waspish, very materialistic--what I mean is that you, Ved, just didn’t rate. And besides, you were . . . Indian.”

In 1988, when he meets another classmate, Mehta remarks, “It had taken me years of maturity to appreciate him for what he was and to accept myself for what I was: to view the life of fruited gold and the life of rolling sagebrush and see in each of them its own justification. . . . My years of growing had not diminished the old pain of standing and waiting at the rich man’s gate.” Mehta, however, did more than stand and wait.

With steely determination he set out to prove himself, to overcome the many reasons he had for feeling inadequate and to tread the path to social acceptability. And prove himself he did. Not only did he stand first in his class and achieve a reputation as a formidable intellectual, he also partook of all the usual experiences of a bright, energetic undergraduate, from fraternities to journalism to clubs and dating. To the consternation of his friends, he insisted on walking around Claremont without a stick, on riding a bicycle and even driving a car, relying solely on his “facial vision” and his perception of “sound shadows.” At the end of his four years at Pomona, he won scholarships both to Balliol College, Oxford, and to Harvard, choosing to go first to Balliol.

As important to him as his scholastic achievements, however, were his friendships. Johnnie says of him, “It seemed to me that you had more emotions than we had . . . as though you had come from a place in which people had stronger feelings.” He was able to win the admiration and affection of his teachers and a few male friends. At the same time, he learned to put up with the hurts and disappointments inevitable in his extraordinary situation. The suicide of his best friend, a Japanese-American ex-farm worker, however, left him visibly shaken. Indeed, judging from the later suicides of quite a few others, Pomona, for all its Southern Californian sanguineness, was not without its own muted version of Fitzgeraldian darkness.

Women, however, were a tougher proposition than men, especially for someone who, in his own eyes, “came from a country with practically no tradition of romantic love.” In addition to the expected difficulties of a blind person’s being accepted romantically, he has his own share of prejudices as an upper-caste Hindu, not wanting to associate with “common” women, and as an intellectual looking down on non-literary types. As it turns out, his most fulfilling relationship is with a simple, deeply Christian Southern woman, who ignores his intellectual snobbery and gives him longed-for tenderness. Describing his parting from her, as he prepares to leave Claremont, he says, “At that moment, Mary seemed to me Lahore, home, church. She had served me tea and cinnamon toast, comforted me and sent me on my way.”

Finally, Pomona was significant to Mehta, because it was there that he discovered himself as a writer and started on his first book. Initially seen as a project to win the attention and affection of Johnnie, it took on a life of its own, as Mehta sought to understand himself as a product of two worlds, (or in the title words of an earlier book, as a “ledge between two streams”). Earlier, reflecting on his education, he writes, “Just as living in a sighted society was making me contemptuous of everything to do with being blind, studying in America was making me contemptuous of everything to do with being an Indian.” He is tortured by his shallow understanding of his Indian heritage and regrets the distorted picture he paints of his parents and their world. Was his Pomona education going to leave him a “wog,” a Westernized Asian gentleman? His publisher suggested a title for his book, whose irony was not lost on Mehta, “Face to Face,” from St. Paul’s words, “for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” That line, which could serve as an epigraph for any biography, is particularly apt for Mehta’s remarkable, still unfinished autobiography.