[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 greed and aching desires—to all of the human passions—that had never once consumed his own days. Again and again he asks old Tariq Mia what happened and why: “I was sorry for the young man, but his story made no sense to me”; “I asked what he meant.” In response to Professor Shankar's question, “What do you want to know?,” he replies, “Why you became an ascetic, why you stopped. What all this means.” In fact, the very innocence of little brother, and his puzzled responses to the stories unfolded to him, enhance the tone throughout A River Sutra of understatement, of implicit but very real menace, and of the pulsating sense of powers and passions beyond human control.

A River Sutra is a lovely book. Its stories of the monk, the teacher, the executive, the courtesan, the musician, and the minstrel revolve around the character of the Narmada River itself. It is a river whose sources are all the human actions and longings embodied in mythology, archeology, and anthropology. As Professor Shankar, an ascetic who has returned to the world, tells his host at the rest house, the river is sacred because of “the individual experiences of the human beings who have lived here.” And when little brother explains that he has retired from the world, his guest tells him that he has “chosen the wrong place” to do so, that “too many lives converge on these banks.” So, too, had his friend the mullah admonished him: “Don't you realize you were brought here to gain the world, not forsake it?” Little brother never quite understands.

More than anything else, the Narmada River, that “unbroken record of the human race,” harbors love and desire in all their forms. The stories to which the ex-bureaucrat is privy are “only” stories of the human heart: “Listen, O brother. / Man is the greatest truth. / Nothing beyond.” These lines that preface A River Sutra inform Professor Shankar's revelation to his host: “I have no great truths to share, my friend. I am only a man.” Hearing this, little brother is astounded that so much grief and pain led merely to something so obvious. Gita Mehta's tone of quiet irony is sustained to the end. The river flows ceaselessly, and so does human life.