It is, she believes, a time of fragility for the fabulist project, a theme she explores in her new book, Foxy Aesop (Zubaan), a retelling of the life of Aesop. But she seems to have arrived at a place of doubt.

When Namjoshi, 77, has had “to understand something”, she found it best to write a fable about it. Not too many Indian readers were familiar with the work of the queer feminist until Zubaan did us a favour and published The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader (2012), which curates her work from the 1980s, spanning erotica and poetry, fables and speculative fiction. “I would be very unhappy with a fable that made an extremely good point, but which was not beautiful,” she says. Namjoshi’s fables have the zing of rage that has metamorphosed into delight.

But the poor, delicate woman catches a cold and dies. We meet that princess too, who is so much the real deal that she can feel a small green pea while lying on top of seven thick mattresses. A woman prays to Lord Vishnu and asks for a boon: “I want human status.” “The god hedged and appointed a commission,” Namjoshi writes. Her first book, Feminist Fables (1981), prised apart old fables and myths and turned them into sharp, jewel-like stories, which glinted with a wicked wit and mocked the absurdities of an unequal world. Namjoshi is a fabulist with a difference her brilliant, playful and subversive work is impossible to stuff inside a box of didacticism. It is a cloudy Bengaluru afternoon, and the UK-based writer is in the country on a private visit. Can they change the way children think? “Can stories change anything? I am not sure.” The voice of scepticism belongs to poet and rewriter of fables, Suniti Namjoshi.

Feminist fables by suniti namjoshi