A River Sutra
by
Gita Mehta
Viking – Penguin Books India,
1993 282 pp, Rs. 299/-
This
is an interesting book made up of stories either experienced or told on the
banks of the River Narmada. There is a
narrator (Sutra-dhar), an ex-civil servant, who takes up the job of the Manager
of the Narmada Rest House, a Mughal vintage building deep inside the forest on
the banks of the Narmada, as if only to
symbolise his entering the Vanaprastha stage of life. One finds vivid descriptions of the building
and its neighbourhood but the thread (Sutra) that runs the book is the River
Goddess herself.
