Dangerous Pursuits

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Hilarious, lyrical, witty and disturbing, these three different tales all point to the question: if all our dreaming ends in distortion and disappointment, what may we do? Write ourselves off as a failed species and let climate change lead us to well-deserved oblivion? Or keep trying to do better with more humility and an acceptance that perfection remains a distant signpost?

In “Bad People”, Ravana, Shupi and Kumbh manage to make the world veer from its destructive course and buy time for us. Ravana, of course, belongs to epic—but how does he fit into the twenty-first century? With the help of Grandma Ketumati’s balm, these three “bad” people outwit  contemporary villains. 

In “Heart’s Desire”, an old woman seeks to  make a bargain with the devil, but the devil isn’t interested, and she finds herself stuck with two angels. She and the angels do their best, but the old woman learns that a happy end and heart’s desire are not synonymous.

And in “The Dream Book”, based on The Tempest, Caliban, Miranda, Prospero and the rest find that their dreams clash and lie there as pretty and pitiless as glass shards. Yet, each time they engage once again in this dangerous pursuit.

“She is a fabulist who is never preachy. A feminist who is never humourless. A poet who is never arcane. An intellectual who is never pedantic… Her work points to a deeply internalized radicalism, one that has as much depth as it has edge. Quirky, funny, intellectually agile, capable of making connections between the mundane and the metaphysical, adept at sniffing out the archetypal in the culturally particular, they point to a mind that is as engaged as it is engaging.“ — Arundhati Subramaniam

SUNITI NAMJOSHI is a poet, a fabulist and a children’s writer who has written over thirty books. After a stint in the Indian Administrative Service, Namjoshi moved to Canada where she earned a PhD at McGill University, and then moved on to doing what she loves best: writing. A selection of her writings is published in The Fabulous Feminist (Zubaan, 2012). Suki (Zubaan-Penguin, 2013), a memoir about her beloved cat is both a book about a relationship and an elegy. Her recent work, Foxy Aesop: On the Edge asks point-blank whether it is the function of writers to save the world.