Varanasi, India 1998
If your life were based on a lie, how far would you go to find the truth?
After a drunken confession exposes a family secret, 32-year-old Micah Connerly hawked everything but his Harley to scour India for Raj, the guru stepfather who abandoned him and the only person with the facts. But the ashram priest who knows Raj’s whereabouts refuses to help, claiming a reunion would devastate both Micah and Raj.
Determined to pressure the priest for answers and in exchange for needed medical treatment, Micah volunteers at a nearby hospice along the sacred Ganges River with four other Western volunteers, each trying to outrun a hidden past. Micah’s tough façade cracks as each of their stories is forced into light, revealing the price of secrets, the cost of truth, and the longing for forbidden love.
When a tip about Raj’s whereabouts comes with a threat against the other volunteers’ lives, can Micah find the answers he desperately seeks without jeopardizing everyone’s future, including his own?
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The Story Behind God in Drag
I’ve traveled through books since I learned how to read. As a child, I loved to pull out a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, find an exotic locale, and imagine what life would be like if I lived there. I had an ongoing fantasy about living with a caravan of Bedouin nomads, but the closest I got was a camel ride at the edge of the Sahara with a guide who claimed to be Bedouin.
In 1994-95, during an eight-month trek around India, Sri Lanka & Nepal, my husband and I volunteered for six weeks at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta.
It was among the toughest six weeks of my life mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. The work was grueling and the heat intense, but it was the peaceful acquiescence to the pain, suffering, and impending death by the vast majority of the patients that made the most impact on me.
The members of the Missionaries of Charity who dedicated their entire lives to this work were some of the most loving and humble people I’ve ever met. A close second was the long-term volunteers from around the world who served the poor, sick, and dying for months and even years.
It was probably as a self-preservation strategy to distract myself from the work there that I began to imagine “what if…?” and sketched the outline of what eventually became this novel. I transplanted the setting to Varanasi because the narrow alleyways of the Old City and the ghat culture contained Micah in a way that the overwhelming sprawl of Calcutta never could.
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