When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni had just started her new novel, based on the Mahabharata as seen through Draupadi’s eyes, lightning struck. Literally. “When lighting hit our house, my husband Murthy said it was a message from the gods,” she says with a chuckle. “I said no, no, it’s divine inspiration coming directly to me.”

Divakaruni says she knows well that any time writers take on sacred texts, they are inviting retribution — divine or otherwise. “It’s dangerous, but writing is a dangerous business,” she says with a smile.

It’s hard to imagine Divakaruni in any kind of a dangerous profession. With her ready smile and long black hair, Divakaruni — always dressed in demure Indian outfits — seems to be the epitome of wholesomeness. After growing up in Calcutta as Chitra Lekha Banerjee, the daughter of an oil company executive and a school teacher moved to the United States in 1976 to obtain a masters degree in Dayton, Ohio. She was 19 then, and the American Midwest people would stop their cars to stare at her sari or salwar kameez.

Divakaruni married an engineer and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she obtained a PhD from Berkeley. The author, who used to support herself by doing all kinds of odd jobs, from babysitting to slicing bread in a bakery, says she really started to write — her first book of poetry was published in 1990 — after her grandfather died in India. “I felt like I was forgetting things, forgetting him,” she says. “I really wanted to write to remember him.”

The Palace of Illusions, her latest book, is also tied up in memories of her grandfather. Divakaruni, 51, first encountered Draupadi when she would go to her grandfather’s village for a vacation. Far away from Calcutta, his home in rural Bengal had neither running water nor electricity. “In the evening he would draw all of us cousins together, light a lantern and start telling us stories from the Mahabharata,” she remembers. “And I loved it. It was so complex, so exciting.”

But it was the women who called out to her. Gandhari with her blindfold, Kunti, the mother of all mothers, and of course, headstrong Draupadi, the catalyst for the great war. “I always wanted to know more about the women,” says Divakaruni. “They were always on the edge of the story. Not much was said about what they felt, what they were thinking.”

But The Palace of Illusions is in many ways a departure from her bestselling books such as The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart and Arranged Marriage, her debut collection of short stories which won her the 1996 American Book Award and the PEN Josephine Miles Award for fiction. She’s been the interpreter of the Indian immigrant experience to America — she can never forget finding her little son sitting in the bathroom trying to scrub the brown off his skin — in novels redolent with the smells of spices and the flowers of her childhood in Bengal. She’s also been accused of peddling stereotypes to Western readers.

But the sugar and spice tend to disguise dark stories of loss and abuse, of women trapped in violent marriages in foreign lands and the bitter-sweet pain of immigration. Divakaruni has said she doesn’t know if she’d have become a writer if she had not been an immigrant.

But the Palace is not an immigrant story. “It was a different writing experience,” she says in an interview in San Francisco. “I had to create something new out of it. I didn’t want to retranslate the Mahabharata.”

But in some ways, the book treads familiar territory for her — women making their mark in a man’s world. She may have five husbands but Draupadi has little choice in whom she gets to marry — it is just another arranged marriage, times five. She has conflicts with her mother-in-law. She has a secret desire for another man she must suppress. And she tries to learn statecraft from behind a curtain while her brother’s tutor tells her: “A kshatriya woman’s highest purpose in life is to support the warriors in her life: her father, brother, husband and sons.”

Divakaruni lives surrounded by men — her husband and teenaged sons Abhay and Anand — but her Draupadi retorts, “And who decided that a woman’s highest purpose was to support men?”

That sounds more like a feisty 21st century feminist Draupadi than a Mahabharata princess. “Well, I do have the 21st century sensibility as a woman,” admits Divakaruni. But she says the reason she was always drawn to Draupadi was because “she is not a martyred woman like many of our ancient women. Sita always accepts what comes to her. Draupadi fights it. I am not saying she is always wise in her decisions. She can be quite pigheaded. But she fights. I like that about her.”

Long before she thought about becoming a writer, she says she was already interested “in the hidden lives of characters.” It’s been a lifelong character trait. In 1991 she helped start Maitri, a San Francisco Bay Area organisation helping women fight issues such as domestic violence.

Though Divakaruni and family have relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area, where most of her novels are set, to Houston where she teaches creative writing, she still serves on the advisory board of Maitri. She's also involved with Pratham, a non-governmental organisation that helps educate slum children in India.

All of this has informed her writing but nothing as much as the stories of women bonding with women. She remembers when she heard her grandfather’s stories she would wonder why the women in them rarely had important women friends. “I was struck by the aloneness of our epic heroines,” she says.

She says she did find some Bengali and Oriya women writers retelling the epics through the eyes of women. And she was influenced by Mallika Sengupta’s Sitayan which looks at what happened to Sita after Ram left her in the forest.

Draupadi, she holds, was different. She points out that few Indian women are named Draupadi. “I don’t know of any,” she says and adds with a chuckle, “perhaps it’s the bit about having five husbands that gets people worked up.” Then she pauses and says with a trace of indignation, “But no one seems to have a problem naming their sons Arjun. And Arjun went on to have a lot of wives.”

But The Palace of Illusions is not just about gender politics. The book took her four years to write at a time when her adopted country was involved in an increasingly bloody and protracted war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Divakaruni recognises there are important differences between the civil war in Kurukshetra and the invasion of Iraq. But she says there is one lesson they have in common.

“Once you start a war there is no stopping. It’s like an avalanche,” she says. “The Mahabharata might have been a great and heroic battle but there are no winners. The losers, of course, lose. But the Pandavas face a devastated land filled with widows and orphans. It will take the rest of their lives to repair this and they will never find happiness.”

And there is one difference. The war in Iraq, unpopular as it may be, seems very much removed from the lives of ordinary Americans. On the other hand when Kunti surveys Kurukshetra, she knows that whichever side wins she will lose a son. “Here we have only an academic sympathy for the ‘other’ side,” says Divakaruni. “But it was not so in the world of the Mahabharata. Draupadi sees how everyone is interrelated. Some of the people she loves most dearly are on the other side.”

Can the Panchali of The Palace of Illusions jump from the printed page to the silver screen? “From your mouth to god’s ears,” she says with a smile. “It would be lovely to see a film set in the mythic world.” Though her last cinematic adventure, the Aishwariya Rai-starring The Mistress of Spices, proved to be a box office squib, Divakaruni is unfazed. “It brought a lot of new readers to the novel,” she says, adding that two of her other stories, her young adults novel The Conch Bearer and The Maid Servant’s Tale from Arranged Marriage, have been optioned for films.

But Draupadi, she maintains, will make for a marvellous heroine in a film. People from all walks of life will be able to see a bit of themselves in the headstrong princess, she says. What about herself? How much of Draupadi lives in Chitra Divakaruni? “Quite a bit,” she says, and then adds with a gentle laugh. “I hope the more virtuous aspects.”