Roy, of course, has her critics, both in India and outside. There are those who don't like her impassioned, intuitive polemics, who claim that, living in her comfortable Delhi house with her film director husband, Pradip Krishen, she is just another champagne socialist. The way she sees it, this constant carping and name-calling is a saving grace. "Fortunately I don't get too fawned over. I get so insulted and called names and sometimes I feel grateful for that. Because I don't want to forget what it feels like to be treated badly. Success is hardly the stuff of everybody's dreams and it's not mine.

"I remember when I was a very little girl it was my birthday and everybody was giving me free advice about coming first in class. And my mad uncle showed me a bauble and said 'I'll give this to you if you fail'. I thought, you know, failure became something worth striving for. I don't think success is all that interesting you know. Loss and grief and uncertainty these are areas I have much more time for, so success for me could be viewed as a kind of failure. The more successful I am the more suspicious I am about it."

I begin to quote to her the activist Ramachandra Guha, who suggested she should "stick to writing novels because her vanity and self-indulgence devalues the work of more serious activists", but before I even finish she says, "Oh, him. He's like a school prefect. But you know, I think partly it has to do with this thing that part of me can understand, this disproportionate interest that the world has with one person, which can be quite annoying. And also, it's quite difficult to classify what I do. It is its own particular idiom and some people have a lot of problems trying to pinhole it, and find it annoying."