[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 marital infidelity in NW1: in A River Sutra top executives do it with snakes.

All this comes as something of a surprise from a writer who first made her name—at the end of the flare-flapping, tie-dyed Seventies—by demythologising India. In Karma Cola: Marketing of the Mystic East, Gita Mehta had great fun mocking the gullible Westerners who unloaded their purses into the open palms of crooked gurus and bhagwans cruising past in their pink Rolls Royces en route for the deposit counter of the nearest Grindlays Bank. Under chapter headings like ‘Om Is Where the Art Is’ and ‘Sex and the Single Guru’, Mehta lovingly dissected the fraudulent hocus pocus which saw them being so readily lapped up by the credulous hippies wandering India in search of grass and nirvana.

Thirteen years (and a Hindu revival) later, Mehta's tone is very different. This time Hinduism is treated with more reverence: there are no gags in this book about sexy swamis and holy hash. The key question is: has Gita Mehta finally embraced the mumbo-jumbo she so ferociously mocked in Karma Cola?

Although at first sight it may seem so, Mehta is far too clever and careful a writer to let herself fall into this trap. She walks a thin line, demonstrating her love for the poetry of Hindu mythology and her admiration for the genuine spirituality of rural India—while always managing to distance herself from anything overtly mystical: she quickly sends up any of her characters who seem in danger of taking the shakti too seriously. In A River Sutra Mehta has a pretty good crack at having her Karma cake and eating it.

The narrator of A River Sutra is an elderly bureaucrat who, on the death of his wife, retires from the red tape of the City and takes a job as the humble manager of a government rest house on the banks of the Narmada. The book develops through a series of self-contained stories and fables told to the rest-house manager by his guests and acquaintances. The stories are united not only by their being told on the banks of the river, but also by their themes, all of which reflect the river's name: Narmada derives from the Sanskrit word for desire. The stories are parables, each bearing a Chaucerian title (“The Monk's Story,” “The Musician's Story”) and illustrating a different aspect of the destructive nature of love and lust: some also examine the possibility of renunciation.

For all their fantastic subject-matter—demon lovers, naked wanderers, and so on, the fables are beautifully told in a wonderfully stark and simple prose style. The stories sometimes read like modern fairy tales, and in both style and content A River Sutra owes a lot to R. K. Narayan, the Indian writer Gita Mehta most admires. She shares Narayan's ability to secrete a powerful and serious message in writing of deceptive naïvety, and as with Narayan it is often only on reflection that the true weight and import of a story dawns on the reader. Indeed the book's brevity and concentrated economy belie the importance of its concerns.

It is only when we move in the territory of courtly India that Mehta's descriptive faculties begin to spin out of control. In the “Courtesan's Story” we get pages of this sort of thing:

[My grandmother] spoke of being rowed to lake palaces under a star-filled sky. Of gossamer nets hanging over beds strewn with jasmine blossoms. Pearls scattered on the sheets. Arched doorways opening to balconies, below which the water lapped softly against the stone foundations.

And so on and on. As many others before her have demonstrated, the courts of the Maharajahs are perilous places for a writer to enter, as they have a tendency to envelop even the finest books on India in a hot mist of purple superlatives. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is at her most unconvincing when dealing with pearl-hung rajahs; even Paul Scott ran into trouble with an excess of peacock fans.

Yet despite this, A River Sutra most resembles an album of courtly Mogul miniatures. While these images lack the solid proportions and carefully calculated perspectives of their Western counterparts, they still have an exquisite charm of their own. In Western art, men are portrayed as men. In Mogul miniatures they are elevated to saints, sufis and heroes, gorgeously attired in bright primary colours, and arranged in compositions which hint at the possibility of the fabulous. So it is with this book. The result is certainly every bit as unexpected and enigmatic as the jewelled images produced in the mysterious ateliers of the Great Moguls.