‘Pulse racing, I rush forward, bringing the blade down on him’: this line taken from Laxmi’s latest piece of fiction, short story ‘Untamed’, published as part of the magical and morphed anthology ‘Uncommon Bodies’, is the perfect little reflection of her unique, writerly approach. Magical Realism and Fantasy are literary traditions notorious for blurring the boundary between reality and abstraction through inversion and exaggeration, but Laxmi attacks her subject matter in such a way that destroys the line completely. As we read through the fevered first-person eye of Leana the wolf-girl, on an epic mission to right a family wrong in a hybrid-filled cosmopolitan Bombay, we practically become one with the evocative atmosphere, and are never really released until the final, gasping throe. “Why do I write?” Laxmi asked us. “It’s the intrigue to understand myself better. Why is it that I do the things I do and the things I don’t do? Why do I react to situations in a certain way? Realising the answer to these questions helps me jump forward to the bigger questions, ‘Who am I? Why am I here?” Not afraid to reach into the furthest recesses of herself – even if it takes her somewhere dark – the journalist-turned- writer helps us negotiate emotionally all those larger cerebral concepts: coping with a conflicted identity, the seeping through of globalisation into the personal sphere, and an insatiable, existential yearning for a set purpose in our lives. Living life to the full as she writes it, Laxmi has already received several awards for her novella series, ‘Ruby Iyer’ since her plunge into fiction-writing, following careers in television and commentative writing– she has launched TV Channels for MTV and NBC Universal Syfy, and contributed to publications such as ‘The Gaurdian’ and ‘Huffington Post’. As the writer herself best surmised then, there is every reason that through her stories and “shared experience, you can find yourself too”.
