laxmi Hariharan drew from her own experiences as a teenager to create a character of a female robo-cop who follows her own instincts and fights the world. The writer shares details with Divya Kaushik
She is cunning, fearless, ever ready to take risks and free-spirited. Most importantly, Ruby Iyer is presented as someone most women would want to be. She never hesitates in following her own instincts and knows how to fight the world. “Ruby is her own person. She acts on impulse. She leads. She is the angry young girl of today. The millennium belongs to her. She stands up for herself mentally, physically and emotionally. She does not need anyone to save her. Ruby’s choices are not always correct, yet we empathise with Ruby because she does not hesitate to follow her instincts whether it is to save another girl from being molested by the hand who also assaulted her, saving the man who tries to commit suicide from the Bandra-Worli Sealink or teaming up with the cop Vikram Roy to save Bombay from the clutches of the devious Dr Braganza,” explains author laxmi Hariharan. Ruby is the central character of author laxmi’s book The Many lives of Ruby Iyer.
The story originated from what the author observed around her. “The rape of the journalist in Mumbai in 2013 (following the rape of the girl in a moving bus in Delhi in 2012) affected me for I, too, had been a young journalist in Mumbai not very long ago. I wished there was a female robo-cop, a vigilante figure who would take the law into her own hands and protect the women. Robo became Ruby Iyer. As a young girl travelling in the local trains of Mumbai I was at the mercy of those men who groped me, felt me up on each trip... I was helpless. Ruby is not. I started Ruby Iyer as a weekly series for a local website and I got the feedback from the very first episode. People either loved or hated Ruby but the interesting thing was that she stuck in their memory. So I would be asked what Ruby was going to do next. That’s when I knew I had to write her story,” shares laxmi.
Ruby is an 18-year-old who runs away from home. She is molested and thrown on the railway track. When she wakes up she realises she has changed. While she is trying to figure out what is happening to her — her best friend gets kidnapped. She teams up with a mysterious cop — Vikram Roy — and together they travel through Mumbai that is being systematically destroyed by the mastermind who is also behind the kidnapping of her friend. The mystery ends with surprise. On why the author decided to base the story in Mumbai, she says, “I write fast-paced, action-oriented, fantasy-thrillers like this one. My protagonist is a teenager. And my memories as a teen are in Mumbai, that is why the story came from that city. Also many western novels are set in a dystopian lA or New York or San Francisco of the future. I think in Mumbai dystopia is today. It’s contradictory, urban, extreme and unforgiving.”
laxmi comes from the world of branding and marketing. She is a content branding expert with over 20 years of experience in the global media industry. She is also the marketing and sponsorship adviser to london Indian Film Festival. But she says that she is a writer before anything else. “I was always a writer. But at different points in my life different things took priority. In my younger years it was about being independent... finding my place in the world. I started writing my first novel The Destiny of Shaitan as a series of short stories when I lived in Hong Kong. Perhaps it was the experience of living on my own in a strange, futuristic, mish-mash of cultures — a dystopian urban city which is apparently the base chakra of the universe, where greed is at its peak — which influenced me to write an epic fantasy novel set in the year 3000.
But while writing Shaitan, one of the characters — Ray — came from a futuristic Mumbai... and once I uncorked a futuristic Mumbai there was no looking back. It fascinated me,” shares laxmi, who is highly influenced by the writings of Salman Rushdie. “I have always found his writing lyrical, complex with a touch of tongue-in-cheek humour. Nowadays I tend to read a lot of fantasy novels like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Angelfall andUglies,” she added.