Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an English-speaking writer who was born in India in 1957 and has been living in the USA since 1977. In Queen of Dreams , a novel published in 2004 dealing with self - discovery, Hinduism and psychoanalysis, she draws the portrait of a young divorced American woman yearning both to discover and understand her Indian heritage and to bridge the gap between India and America. It is her discovery of Hinduism through art and paintings that will help her understand what being Indian means and assert herself as a free, independent and self-assured woman of mixed cultural heritage. That is why the novel is informed with Hindu symbolism and mythological references.