Sister India: A novel by Peggy Payne Cultural Impact of Afghan Refugees
- Reviewed by Ron D. Voigts

Natraja is the innkeeper at a small hotel off a narrow street in the holiest of cities, Varanasi.Born with the simple house wife's name of Estelle, she fled to India to escape scandal from the segregated, 1950's town of Nevus, North Carolina. She has taken the Hindi name Natraja, found a place with a prominent family and twenty years later manages the Saraswati Guest House. Natraja, a shy blonde and middle aged, has more flesh than Ganesha, the elephant faced god, but when on her feet moves like an Indian, sinuous and flowing. Her skin is fair and freckled; her eyes, light brown, almost golden. From her rooftop, she can see the Ganges, the bathers, the funeral pyres nearby. Disillusioned, she has exiled herself to the Saraswati. She entertains her guests telling what she wants and keeping what she does not want.

Guests arrive at the hotel for a weekend. Jill Thornton, a 30-something woman on a business trip, comes to rest and see the sights. T. J. Clayton, a bureaucrat from northern Florida, arrives on a grant to study the polluted Ganges River. Marie Jasper, whose husband has died, hopes to find peace by the holy river. When a series of Hindu-Muslim murders rack this sacred place, the city is placed under curfew that forces Natraja and her guests into an awkward confinement where her secrets are laid bare. She and her cook Remesh become entangled in the mesh of religious violence as her monastic world unravels. The guests soon find themselves under Varanasi's spell both captivated and repelled by it. Sister India is a novel of spirituality and growth. It is a complex tale looking deep into the soul of one woman and through her eyes the guests at the hotel. It is the contrast and parallels of two worlds, North Carolina and India. It is the rebirth of Estelle.

Sister India has been named a New York Times Notable Book for 2001. Peggy Payne will talk at no charge to any Book Club about Sister India. She can be contacted through the website www.peggypayne.com.

Biography
From Peggy Payne's website, http://www.peggypayne.com



Peggy Payne is a freelance journalist and a travel writer whose work has taken her to more than 25 countries. She has been the recipient of an NEH grant to study fiction at Berkeley, and an Indo-American Fellowship to research Sister India in Varanasi.

She is author of the novel Revelation, and a co-author, with Allan Luks of The Healing Power of Doing Good. She also wrote a book on a clothing firm, Doncaster: A Legacy of Personal Style, which is available through that company.

Her articles, reviews, or essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Travel+Leisure, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many others.

Her public speaking has taken her to locations from Banaras Hindu University to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. Peggy Payne writes-and teaches-in a sunny corner office near downtown Raleigh, then drives home to a log house on a pond in rural Chatham County where she lives with her husband, psychologist Bob Dick. A lifelong North Carolina resident, she was born in Wilmington.