Lutz is an instructor at New York University and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she explores how A River Sutra translates both the culture of India and the experiences of love for the uninitiated.

The India of Gita Mehta's A River Sutra is foreign, exotic, and unexpected. She describes an India that is ethnically, geographically, and religiously diverse. What binds the people of this country together, Mehta suggests, is both the Narmada River and the importance of love. However, what the Narmada and love mean to the various characters of the book is as various as the characters themselves. Mehta's job is to translate their experiences, to reveal the "sutra," or thread, that runs through their stories. The translation helps to bind together a people whose differences, historically, have split them apart. But Mehta is also translating for a...