The Finger Puppet

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.

Anu Jayanth grew up in Chennai in the 1960s, surrounded by her mothers South Indian Carnatic music and her fathers English literature books. She is mostly self-taught. A stubborn idea and two fiction workshops at Inprint resulted in The Finger Puppet, which is loosely based on her family. Before writing became a passion, she dabbled in art. She now lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and her son.