er in this book, and those characters able to learn from their sorrow are the better off for it. The narrator is a civil servant who has given up an important post to manage a government guest house on the banks of the holy River Narmada, and the fact that his river is holy makes the journeys taken down it and along it spiritual journeys as well as life journeys. The former civil servant is following a Hindu concept, the idea of the person formerly part of the world who withdraws to contemplate life:
The Government still pays my wages, but I no longer think of myself as a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats belong too much to the world, and I have fulfilled my worldly obligations. I am now a vanaprasthi, someone who has retired to the forest to reflect (Mehta 1).
The story in the first chapter is the story of the civil servant himself (a story that will be carried through the remainder of the book), and it is also the chapter that sets the tone of sorrow and the river for the rest of the chapters to come. He has worked as a civil servant exclusively in cities, and now he has decided to withdraw from the world because he is older. After the death of his wife, he seeks a Government post at this rest house on the Narmada River, a site that serves as a sanctuary to the pilgrim crossing India. The primary attraction for the man, however, is the river itself, a river that has spiritual connotations which are of particular importance to him at this stage in his life:
The river is among our holiest pilgrimage sites, worshipped as the daughter of the god Shiva. During a tour of the are
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