Tell A Thousand Lies

16-year-old Pullamma is too dark-skinned to have dreams. For this reason, she's obliged her old-fashioned grandmother by not doing well in school. She’s also resigned to remaining unwed; with three girls in the family, there’s simply not enough dowry to go around. Then a wedding alliance arrives for her oldest sister—a fair-skinned beauty. There's great rejoicing in their household. And, why not? The prospective father-in-law is the right-hand man of an important politician. As Pullamma helps ready the house for the bride-viewing—by washing the cow, by stringing flowers along doorways—she prays for the alliance to go through. Then something happens. Something so inconceivable, it will shape Pullamma's future in ways even the local soothsayer couldn’t have foretold. Tell A Thousand Lies is a sometimes sassy, sometimes sad but, ultimately, realistic look at how superstition, and the colour of a girl's skin, rules India's hinterlands.