Faced with a childhood speech impediment, an abusive father, and two sisters whose beauty and articulation outshine hers, Tara has only her thumb to talk to Set in a wistfully remembered and charmingly evoked Trichy of the Sixties, The Finger Puppet describes the special girlhood years of jasmine and pin-head bindis, convent schools, temple idols that eleven-year-old Tara shares with her sisters, beautiful and kindly Padmini, and eccentric, whiplash-tongued Cordelia. It is a girlhood enriched by her mothers passion for Carnatic music and her well of illustrative stories from the Vedas, but made sordid by her westernized fathers arbitrariness and abuse. As she watches her mother and her sisters being roughed up time and again, Tara retreats to her imaginary world, choosing to cope with her ankyloglossia and the bewildering conflicts of her childhood by talking to her thumb. But her tiny alter-ego is less forgiving. Less a multiple personality story than the sensitively recounted growing-up tale of an awkward and abused young girl, The Finger Puppet, Anu Jayanths debut novel, masterfully captures the dark and light shades of childhood.
All Editions
Paperback, 5th Edition
ISBN13: 9788172236953
Harper Collins Publishers India, a joint venture with India Today Group, 2008