The red letters

"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…