Died, January 9, 2021. IN 1949, at the age of fifteen, Ved Mehta boarded a plane in New Delhi and, forty-seven hours later, disembarked in New York. He was travelling alone for the first time, spoke broken English and was desperately homesick. He was also blind. On arrival in the United States he was met by a woman he did not know who, with her husband, had agreed to look after him. The culture shock was seismic. Everything was different: the food, the on-tap hot water, the casual intimacy of husbands and wives. “As a Hindu, I had never eaten beef,” recalled Mehta, faced with a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, “and the mere thought of it was revolting. But I recalled another of Daddyji’s sayings, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’.”