Khyrunnisa A’s Butterfingers series has bowled over readers, cricketers and celebrities, alike. Cricketing legend, the late Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, in a letter appreciating her first book, Howzzat Butterfingers! wrote ‘What great fun! It brings back long lost memories of my prep school days’. V.V.S. Laxman described her third book: Clean Bowled! Butterfingers as an “exuberant mix of school, cricket and fun.” Well-known Malayali director and screenwriter K.S. Sethumadhavan complimented her on how much he enjoyed the humour in her stories. The series revolve around the sports-loving, fun, adventure-filled life of Amar Kishen fondly called butterfingers by his friends and relatives.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Khyrunnisa, based in Thiruvananthapuram, has won a slew of prizes. But when we met the warm and genial author in Bengaluru, where she had meet-the-author sessions in certain schools and was chief guest at the annual day celebrations for grade three to five at National Centre for Excellence, she tells us, writing happened to her by sheer accident. “I always loved English because I always loved reading. It was a part and parcel of my upbringing. Books were always in my house. The school I attended, Holy Angels’ Convent, encouraged reading and writing. We were members of the public library which had a lot of children’s books. I loved the composition class. We had letter writing and outline stories to expand.” But that didn’t immediately translate into taking up writing as a profession. She had a brief stint as a banker and before that as a teacher in All Saints’ College and Holy Angels’ Convent. She later left the bank job and returned to teaching at All Saints’ College. The turning point came when she submitted a story for a Tinkle competition for an all-India adult writers for children’s fiction.
“My story, Butterfingers won second prize for that. Some months later, I had a visitor, Prabha Nair, the assistant editor of Tinkle at the time.” Khyrunnisa smiles as she reminisces. “She wanted to meet me to see if I was as bubbly and lively in person!”
After that, for seven years, Khyrunnisa won the first prize. Then in 2007, Unisun had an open competition. “I entered that and got a call to say I got both the first and second prize!” she says.
The second innings of Butterfingers occurred when Luis Fernandes, the editor of Tinkle at the time, got in touch with her to create a regular character for Tinkle .
“Butterfingers was living in my head. I sent two stories. It was an eight-page comic strip created like a page turner, action packed with illustrations by Abhijeet Kini. I thought I wanted to publish these as a collection of short stories and not compromise on my writing style. I sent some of my stories to Penguin for their consideration.” And thus began the third innings of Butterfingers . “For the novel, I went back to my first Butterfingers story.” She is passionate about sports and so it was only natural that it would form the core of her stories. “I love sports. I always read the sports page first.”
Besides cricket, Khyrunnisa also loves football and tennis. So after Howzzat Butterfingers! which is on cricket, she based her second book, Goal, Butterfingers! on football. Her plan of basing her third book on tennis didn’t work out as the publisher wanted it to be on cricket. But the book is completely different in plot from the other novels.
When asked about how difficult it is to write for children, Khyrunnisa says writing for adults and children are completely different. “I was a teacher, I know the tricks of the trade,” she concludes.
