Daddyji

Daddyji is a biographical portrait of Amolak Ram Mehta, a distinguished Indian public-health officer, written by his son Ved Mehta. As the story unfolds, it also becomes a re-creation, in crystalline detail, of a whole world – the everyday life of a family in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India.

Growing up in Punjab villages, Daddyji moved to Lahore (which he had always heard was "the educational center of the world") and encountered running water for the first time. Completing his studies in medicine there, he sailed for London to take degrees in Public Health and Tropical Medicine and returned to India to do notable work in cholera and bubonic plague. Many journeys later, he succeeded his father as head of the Mehta family and joined the Punjab Public Health Department. Along the way, he married, built a house in Lahore, flashed about on a motorcycle on medical errands, became a rationalist and an irrepressible gambler and raised a large, talented family. Ved Mehta has written about his father with objectivity and filial affection. He has written about India with pure magic.