SOURCE: Fisher, Marlene. Review of A River Sutra, by Gita Mehta. World Literature Today 68, no. 1 (winter 1994): 214.

In the following review, Fisher contrasts the innocence of the narrator with the personalities of the individual characters in A River Sutra.

Otherwise nameless, “little brother,” as his mullah friend Tariq Mia calls him, is a former senior bureaucrat from Bombay. Following the death of his wife, he has become a vanaprasthi of sorts who, so he thought, withdrew from the world by accepting the position of manager of the government rest house on the banks of the Narmada River. Kindly and well-meaning, little brother is the perfect narrator of the stories he hears as he participates vicariously in the passionate lives of those whom he encounters on his daily walks.

The narrator's naïveté and failure to comprehend what he is told act as foil and counterpoint to the lusts and...