SOURCE: Mehta, Gita, and Wendy Smith. “Gita Mehta: Making India Accessible.” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 19 (12 May 1997): 53-4.

In the following interview, Mehta discusses her writing career, her multinational living arrangements, and the inspirations behind Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India.

Gita and Sonny Mehta's apartment is an oasis of tranquility in midtown Manhattan. Outside on a chilly March day, Park Avenue traffic is at its mid-afternoon worst, and the chatter of kids exiting from a school next door nearly drowns out the honking horns and screeching brakes. Inside, all distracting sounds seem to be absorbed by the crammed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, custom-built when the couple moved to New York from London in 1987 when Sonny replaced Robert Gottlieb as Knopf editor-in-chief.

In conversation, Gita Mehta is as voluble as her husband is (famously) taciturn. Formidably well-informed rather than ostentatiously intellectual, she'll jump in one breath from the right kind of...