Guest Accommodations: Gita Mehta's *A River Sutra*

For me, the image of the guest house on the banks of the Narmada River, with its British accidents and Indian substance, resonates as an apt metaphor for many aspects of Mehta's rich and vivid novel. The house's prim, Victorian exterior both hides and contains the brightly colored, expansive Indian interior. Religious pilgrims and self-important bureaucrats have taken shelter under the bungalow's roof, yet no one, not even the narrator who acts as its caretaker, has turned it into a home. Even on the most general level, as an Anglophone account of Indian experience, the novel shares important attributes with the site where it begins and ends. English in appearance, but Indian in substance, the narrative is a resting place for stories that all seem to begin and end in places beyond it. Similarly, the tale of the primary narrator, a featureless and (I believe) nameless bureaucrat, becomes over the course of the novel an accidental sanctuary for the experiences of others, without ever housing more than the barest details of the life of the narrator himself. Consequently, even within his own narrative, the primary narrator operates not as a character so much as a site or location where the stories of the other characters come to rest or unfold.

And, just as the guest house has to be prepared before visitors arrive, the site of the narrator must be made ready for the stories that come to reside within him. As a novel written by a woman, *River* is curiously devoid of accounts of women's experience or portraits of femininity when it begins. Until the Courtesan appears in Chapter 10, all of the embedded narratives are accounts of men's lives. The female characters are more like flat caricatures, the nagging wife, the selfless elder sister, the faceless object of male desire. Further, during the first part of the novel, feminine experience is not merely unknown, it is unknowable, mysterious and hidden in darkness like the source of the Narmada. The turning point comes during the Executive's Story, the tale of a man haunted or possessed by female desire, when Mehta begins to explore how female experience can be accommodated in what has been established as a "man's world." Until the narrator--a man who never went to the open-air market until after his wife died--can accept at least the possibility that life may not be divisible into male and female spheres of action, he is deaf and blind to the stories of the women around him. The Courtesan's Story, which follows the narrator's moment of enlightenment, is itself a tale of a world still divided between men and women, where men are ignorant of the specialized knowledge of the courtesan, and the women take great pains to keep their secrets. The last two stories, however, of the Musician and the Minstrel, both depict a world in which knowledge is shared between men and women. By the end of the novel, the primary narrative, which on its face appears to be the story of a man in retreat from female desire and longing, has been transformed into a tale of the creative strategies that women use to insert themselves into a cultural history that is still largely controlled and dominated by men.

In reading the novel, I had a strong sense that Mehta seems to be downplaying male/female essentialism in favor of a more balanced understanding that acknowledges significant differences in male and female experience while exploring what happens when men and women work cooperatively to create a narrative in which both can take part. It is a book filled with male mother figures and bad, unhealthy mother-daughter relationships, images that undermine essentialist idealism about the inherently nurturing female nature. Although the Indian landscape is both explicitly and implicitly gendered as feminine, it is a landscape that includes the modern city as well as the idyllic pastoral countryside, avoiding the temptation to establish a dichotomy between female/nature v. male/culture. Even the narrator and his mostly male staff perform a curiously domestic role in maintaining the guest house for visitors. Like the guest house, the India Mehta depicts is something of an amalgam, of religions, classes, genders and cultures, and one does not get the sense, at least I did not, that this is necessarily an evil circumstance.