I speak to actor and memoir writer Kabir Bedi, for his recollections of Gita Mehta. Bedi is in Kashmir to shoot for a web series, but he takes time before the shoot, to talk about Gita Mehta. The two had many things in common – including parents who were freedom fighters – Kabir Bedi’s parents Baba and Freda Bedi, both fought for Independence.

“I first met Gita when I was in college at St Stephens, Delhi. I was friends with Gita’s younger brother Naveen Patnaik. I’d go to his home and there she’d be – an effervescent person, so alive, full of ideas and insights. Wow, what a girl - terrific to listen to, very fond of reading”, Bedi recalls.

The writer William Dalrymple writes on Twitter about Gita Mehta’s generosity.

Dalrymple has just finished a recording and is getting on a flight from Heathrow to Boulder, USA. Walking through airport security, speaking from the bus, on the way to the aircraft, he confesses to being dazzled by Gita Mehta, from the very first time he met her.

“She seemed to have been everywhere and know everyone. And she was incredibly helpful and kind”, says Dalrymple. Gita Mehta looked through early drafts of Dalrymple’s own book The City of Djinns and even helped suggest some corrections, particularly with dialogue that didn’t sound right. Later she introduced him to Sonny Mehta, who became his publisher.

“They (Sonny and Gita) were truly a power couple. Together they made sparkling conversation” says Kabir Bedi, who recalls the evening at their wonderful Park Avenue apartment in New York. They hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers.

That was just who they were, says Dalrymple, reminiscing over evenings spent at their Chesham Place house in London and at their Park Avenue apartment in New York, with its beautiful Afghani rugs and art, sculptures and Jamini Roy paintings.

“ I’ve never met somebody who could tell so many amusing stories, from meeting Jackie Kennedy to Salman Rushdie to Indira Gandhi, and it wasn’t name dropping, it was just how their life was – they’d have just met Leonard Cohen last week and be off with Nelson Mandela the week after”

I opened my Kindle copy of Karma Cola, the book Gita Mehta wrote after a few years of being a film journalist, where she got acclaim for covering the Bangladesh War for Independence. You rarely spot Karma Cola in bookstores today, but when it was first published in 1979, the book was an instant hit, a trip fiction guide to India, much before Indian writing in English hit the award circuit.

“Karma Cola was a cult book – everyone coming to India wanted to read it”, says William Dalrymple. “Today there are a million books from India, but in those days you had Gita Mehta and RK Narayan and Salman Rushdie at a different end of the market” says Dalrymple.

Gita Mehta’s second book Raj, her first book of fiction, tells the story of Princess Jaya of a princely state in British India. This was quintessential Gita Mehta, telling a story from a different point of view – not just an Indian, but an Indian from a princely state, and an Indian woman.

“For many of us growing up in the 1980s and 90s, who turned out to be writers, playwrights, directors and so on, reading Gita was hugely formative. On our shelves at home we had copies of Karma Cola, Raj, Snakes and Ladders, and later, A River Sutra, says British Asian writer Preti Taneja.

“Raj was a favourite, it filled the gaps of much that British children are not taught at school. Indianness in Britain in those days was often depicted in media as backwards, funny accented, snake charming, eye-ball eating,” Taneja says she loved Karma Cola as well for the way it reversed the Western gaze, for the way it made fun of the Western commodification of parts of Indian culture

Preti Taneja is on a writing retreat in Scotland, but takes time early morning, to reflect on her inspiration from Gita Mehta. She read her in her teenage years but only met her in person much later, when Sonny Mehta and AA Knopf acquired Taneja’s debut novel.

“We met for lunch in London for the first time in 2017, in an Italian restaurant he(Sonny) and Gita loved, just around the corner from their London flat. By chance, (I think!) she was having lunch with a friend there that day too, though they arrived separately. All through the lunch I was conscious she was sitting, laughing and chatting just a few tables behind Sonny's shoulder. As she was leaving, she stopped by our table and congratulated me, and complimented me on my book: it meant the world that she had read it and her kindness and elegance, as well as the twinkle in her eye and her rasping voice, full of laughter is something I'll never forget. Sonny loved We That Are Young partly because of the way I wrote the female characters and their subversiveness: how they find their own ways to stand up to patriarchy. Meeting Gita, I could see why that resonated with him”

Over the course of her writing career, it is interesting that Gita Mehta wrote just five books. '“She wasn’t that ambitious as a writer, she didn’t need to make her living by the pen”, says Dalrymple.

And then there was her marriage partnership with the publishing icon Sonny Mehta.

“It was extremely rare for a non-American to get the top job at an American publishing firm for so many years. Sonny was brilliant at spotting books and Gita was an inseparable part of the team’, says Kabir Bedi.

“Gita used to spend her winters in Delhi and Sonny had to be in New York. But when Sonny became ill, Gita dropped everything to be with him. She rallied around and became super protective and was constantly by his side. When they were together in a room, they were always engaged with each other, maybe sometimes disagreeing but always together”, says Dalrymple.

Sonny’s death affected Gita deeply, says Kabir Bedi. At a memorial service for Sonny Mehta in London in 2020, Preti Taneja recalls a quiet moment with Gita Mehta.

“She knew I was going to touch on Sonny's experiences as an Indian-origin publisher first in the UK in the 1970s and then in the USA, and to read a poem by Kabir. She very generously gave my hands a strong squeeze. Standing on the platform to read, I confess I almost lost it and cried. It was her nod that kept me going”

Three years after that service, as Gita Mehta passes away and we commemorate her life and times, dear reader, let’s read one of her five books. Each is very different in tone. A common thread that runs between them all; they each engage with the history and polity of India in a way that defies a cliched Western gaze.

So which one should you pick?

A River Sutra is my favourite, says Dalrymple

“For me, as a young writer, living in the United States, her books, put me in touch with the India that I had left behind and allowed me to see it in a way that perhaps. I would not have seen it even if I had continued living there. She had so much perception”, says Chitra Divakaruni.

“I was most impressed by A River Sutra. It was at once deeply wise and beautifully lyrical” says Divakaruni, who loved her use of language and imagery, and learned a lot from it when she wrote Mistress of Spices, her first novel.

As for me, I am halfway through A River Sutra myself and can’t wait to get back to it.

Here’s a taste for you -

“From the doorway of his wooden shack, he studied the secrets of the bazaar. He learned how its streets changed to accommodate necessity. Widening to seduce the Moghul armies that came to put them to the sword. Contracting in times of peace to such intimate dimensions a man could cross them in two paces to pursue a bargain or secure a loan. Expanding to absorb the goods pouring out of the factories of the British Empire. Shrinking for the austerities preached by Mahatma Gandhi.

Remember, in this squalid bazaar, your family learned to negotiate, manipulate, intrigue, and bargain. Armed with that knowledge—in only four generations—we parlayed three small diamonds into an empire”

Until next week then, happy reading!

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com

The views expressed are personal