Set in a winsomely evoked Tiruchirapalli of the sixties, The Finger Puppet, describes the special girlhood years - of jasmine and pinhead bindis, convent school and Carnatic music, temple idols and Raja Ravi Varma paintings - that eleven-year old Tara shares with her two sisters. It is a childhood enriched by her mother's gentleness, her vast store of mythological tales and her understanding of the Vedas; but made sordid by her Westernized father's arbitrariness and abuse. As her father's temper expresses itself in increasingly violent ways, Tara wants only to retreat further into her...