Mumbai-born poet Suniti Namjoshi’s writing appealed to us for its pleasing melancholy. Suki — that’s the book we first read, and couldn’t stop thinking of her intuitive connection with her Super Cat. Through negotiating the loss of her cat, the author shares her learnings about losing those whom we dearly love. But the octogenarian is better known as an active agent of feminism and the gay movement. Namjoshi’s work is characterised by humour and satire. And almost accidentally, they hoist the messy beauty of our lives.

Ask her about that quality in her fables and poems and she says, “Sometimes, I am inclined to agree with author Jonathan Swift, when he holds up a mirror and shows us Yahoos. But perhaps the satirist — whether raging or mocking gently — only does so because human beings could be so much more — as they sometimes are — and yet can make such an appalling mess of things. If that has come through in my work, then I am glad of it.” The author feels that being angry about narratives dominated by cismen and their idea  of minority identities doesn’t help. “What helps is to have readers, and a context in which it [the text] is read in the way it should be.” Namjoshi adds that a poem or a fable exists between the writing and the reading. Trying to make sure that it’s read in the way one would like it to be read is a technical problem.