Sister India

New York: Riverhead Books / Penguin Putnam, January 2001. Hardcover. First Edition / full number line. Fine book in a Near Fine jacket. Interior pristine. Spine straight and tight, ends lightly bumped. Jacket clean and bright with remainder mark across ISBN. Not from a library. Not clipped. 275 pages.

The exotic and suspenseful story of an eccentric guest-house keeper in Varanasi, India, and the passions evoked by her sacred city along the Ganges. Lonely Planet recommends the Saraswati Guest House, and meeting Madame Natraja, "a one-woman blend of East and West," as well worth a side trip. Over the course of a weekend, several guests turn up, shocked to encounter a surly, obese, white woman in a sari. Then a series of Hindu-Muslim murders leads to a citywide curfew, and they unwittingly become her captives. So begins a period of days blending into nights as Natraja and her Indian cook become entangled in a web of religious violence, and their guests fall under the spell of this ancient kingdom-at once enthralled and repelled by the begging children, the public funeral pyres, the holy men bathing in the Ganges at dawn. This is a traveler's tale, a story about the strange chemistry that develops from unexpected intimacies on foreign ground. Peggy Payne vividly conjures the smells of the perfume market, the rhythms of holy men chanting at dawn, the claustrophobic feel of this ancient city's tiny lanes, and the magic of the setting sun over the holy Ganges. For anyone who has harbored a secret desire to go to India and be transformed, Sister India takes you on this journey without ever leaving home.