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Why is my Hair Curly?
Avantika brushes and brushes, but there’s no keeping her curly hair down. How she wished her hair was straight and smooth like Amma’s and Appa’s and her brother Avnish’s. Their parents had adopted the two of them when she was three-and-a-half years old and Avnish a six-month-old baby. Avantika often wonders if their birth mother had curly hair.
There are so many questions in her head, the school year has started with hair-raising troubles and Amma is busy at work. Avantika finds a confidante in the mysterious paati she meets in the park.
Why Is My Hair Curly by Lakshmi Iyer is a delightful celebration of curly hair and the courage it takes to be yourself. Interspersed with exquisite black-and-white illustrations by Niloufer Wadia, this chapter book explores genetics, family dynamics and adoption identity through a light-hearted and sunny tale.
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Hindsight
Set in the 90s India, Hindsight traces the life of Sandhya, Surya, and Aditya at college until a horrific incident tears them asunder. Fourteen years later, set in current day USA, as India debates assault and the antiquated mindsets, Aditya and Sandhya meet serendipitously and take uncertain steps towards redemption and closure.
As Sandhya pursues answers to questions that have haunted her, Aditya exorcises the ghost of Sandhya that has him bound to her all these years.
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The Smudged Hyphen
Some families are made by biology. Some by paperwork. Some by the daily accumulation of ordinary love.
In these twenty-one essays, Lakshmi Iyer traces the arc of one such family — from years of infertility and failed adoptions, to the Thursday night phone call that changed everything, to the particular joy and complexity of raising white children as a brown mother in America.
Moving through questions of identity, race, immigration, and what it means to belong to a family the world cannot easily read, The Smudged Hyphen is written with candor and tenderness. These are essays about the life that forms at the hyphen — between cultures, between families, between the self we show the world and the one we keep for ourselves.
A book for anyone who has ever had to explain their family, or chosen not to.
Lakshmi Iyer 