SOURCE: Dalrymple, William. “When the Mocking Had to Stop.” Spectator 270, no. 8604 (5 June 1993): 38.

In the following review, Dalrymple commends Mehta's prose and tone in A River Sutra, contending that the separate stories within the novel are varied yet unified in direction.

The Hampstead novel this is not. In Gita Mehta's slim new volume [A River Sutra] we meet a cast the likes of which has rarely been seen before in the precious pages of English literary fiction. Eat your heart out Anita Brookner: this book has got ash-smeared ascetics and bejewelled courtesans, shy river-minstrels and enlightenment-seeking suicides, ardent young bandits (seduced—of course—by kidnapped virgins on ‘thin cotton quilts’ in the jungle), ‘charms that give men the strength of elephants in rut’ and, most extravagant of all,

an underground civilisation stretching all the way to the Arabian sea, peopled by a mysterious race, half human, half cobra.

Forget...