Cordelia ah Cordelia!

Who art thou?

Adulthood, wifehood, motherhood did not diminish the playful Cordelia in me. The Finger Puppet did. As the youngest of three sisters, I have escaped many a beating. But I have always wondered what it must have been like for my mother, for my siblings. And so, I would pretend to be them and that is why, perhaps, I would be the one to tell the story, which broke me completely. I'm still in the process of putting myself together again.

Four years into the novel, I made a trip to Tiruchirapalli, which I had never seen before. Originally, I set the story in Chennai and then transplanted it in Tiruchirapalli because I wasn't sure if my sisters, or even I, would be OK with revealing that I have borrowed liberally from our lives. Gandhigram and I are well acquainted. It was goosepimply to sit on the very slab of stone I sat upon as a child and bathed out in the open fields. Now the stone had grass and weeds twisting over it and the water tank stood dry, but the image of sari-clad women planting rice would come away with me, and would be the first of a series of paintings I am working on currently.