Varanasi (Benares) has been called the holiest city in India. It is considered the home of Shiva, the place where most Hindus would like to die. For over 3,000 years, the city has attracted pilgrims and seekers. The streets are filled with people; thousands go to the Ganges to bathe and be purified while others throng to the temples to perform their devotional practices. Varanasi is a sacred place where the visible and the invisible intertwine in most dramatic ways.
Peggy Payne's beguiling novel is set in this spiritual capital. Madame Natraja runs a guest house 60 yards from Dashashvamedh, the main bathing ghat. Twenty years ago, this American arrived and took over as innkeeper of the establishment owned by an Indian family. Now in her forties, Natraja has become a 400-pound recluse: "The newly arrived always stare: at my bloated flesh bathing in sweat, my fair coloring marked by freckles. I am not what one expects to find hidden away in Varanasi."
Three American guests come with their own expectations of what they'll discover in the city. Jill Thorton is a thirtysomething tourist fresh from a business trip to New Delhi; T. J. Clayton is a southerner who has a grant to study the pollution-plagued River Ganges; and Marie Jasper is a 76-year-old widow who yearns "to be seized by something other than grief."
When a Muslim is murdered by some Hindus, there is an outbreak of violence followed by the imposition of a curfew. Despite the fact that their movements are restricted, these guests experience their own adventures with an ambitious masseur, a maharaja , and a bomb that explodes in a Hindu temple compound killing a little girl. Eventually, concern for the safety of Ramesh, her Indian cook and manservant, draws Natraja out of her ivory tower to experience a transformation in the sacred waters of the Ganges.
In 1992 Peggy Payne collaborated with Allan Luks in a remarkable book called The Healing Power of Doing Good.. She also contributed to Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision and Work and God: Stories, an anthology edited by C. Michael Curtis.