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As kids mouth it!
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‘The Finger Puppet’ talks of the Vedas through the lives of children
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Real and surreal Anu Jayanth
Anu Jayanth seems taken aback by the attention she received at the launch of her maiden novel (in Delhi) by Harper Collins. But she might as well have expected it, since Pandit Ravi Shankar released the book. And since when did the sitar maestro get interested in debutant novelists?
Autobiographical
Perhaps since his sister-in-law became one. True to tradition, the big names of the Shankar family — Panditji, Anoushka and Sukanya (Anu’s elder sister) — arrived to whoop cheerily for the author.
But Ravi Shankar’s sister-in-law hasn’t just written any old story. Anu’s “The Finger Puppet” is an autobiographical novel. One in which you could safely bet on the inspiration for at least one character — the beautiful Padmini, whose childhood ambition, her sisters blurt out one day, is to marry Pandit Ravi Shankar!
The novel has “borrowed shamelessly” from Anu’s family, the author concedes. When Anu remarks, “As it is I’m a recluse, and once you start writing, you become even more of a recluse,” one is tempted to ask if that is a quality she shares with her protagonist Tara, who opens her heart only to her own finger puppet. Anu emphatically denies the parallel. “I’m definitely not the narrator.”
However, drawing parallels to real-life characters need not overly concern readers, and the author certainly has a greater purpose. The novel, believe it or not, started as Anu’s research into the Vedas, in which she has an abiding interest.
The best stories teach us something without a spelt-out moral. For the author, already working on a sequel, the message is important. “Any time a writer picks up a pen, I feel it should make a difference to at least one reader.”
ANJANA RAJAN
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