Twinkle Khanna is having major withdrawal symptoms when we meet at her home in Juhu, Mumbai, one morning in mid-August. It has only been two weeks since she wrapped all work on her début novel, Pyjamas Are Forgiving, and already she does not know what to do with herself. “I’m feeling lost,” she says, damp-haired and scrubbed face, sipping on the day’s first black coffee. “[Writing the book] was like having a backup. Like if I was at a boring dinner, I could always pop into this world. I think I miss chewing on something constantly.”
A similar sense of restless wistfulness apprehends Anshu, Pyjamas ’ protagonist, a wry, plump divorcee in her 40s — but for different reasons. When we meet her at Shanthamaaya Sthalam, an Ayurvedic spa in Kerala that she has been coming to biennially for years. She is having trouble sleeping and is counting on the retreat’s stringent regimen of ghee-pulling, deep-breathing, sattvic eating and lymphatic massages to set her right. But the unexpected arrival of the ex-husband she is still not over, along with his young new wife, threatens to throw her doshas all out of whack, as it dredges up all the desires and disappointments she has long repressed.
At the real-life Ayurvedic retreat that inspired Shanthamaaya Sthalam, Khanna discovered her dosha constitution: “a precise half pitta -half vatta . Fire and air. Pitta is very determined; vatta is scatterbrained, creative, you leap between different things,” she says. This is easily observable of her, even if you only take into account the recent past.
What’s age got to do with it?
The novel is Khanna’s third book in three years, after the non-fiction Mrs Funnybones , which was modelled on her wildly popular Times of India column of the same name; and The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad , a collection of short stories. In this time, she has also managed to squeeze in producing and globally promoting Pad Man , the Bollywood film adapted from one of those short stories, based on the life of menstruation activist and entrepreneur, Arunachalam Muruganantham. She continues to package the Indian zeitgeist in sharp, toothy morsels in her fortnightly column — first for DNA Afterhours and now for TOI — since 2013. All of this quite apart from the magazine covers, speaking engagements, awards and endorsements this second wave of celebrity has brought with it.
Khanna reckons it is also the timing. “It’s all [happening] in my 40s suddenly. I think I’m feeling like I’m at the halfway mark and mortality is not that distant,” she says. “The siren sound has begun, so maybe I’m trying to get everything together, do whatever I’ve always wanted to do.”
Young-hearted women past their (socially-prescribed) prime are Khanna’s favourite subject. Like the senior siblings of Salaam, Noni Appa (another short story from Lakshmi Prasad that was adapted into a play directed by Lilette Dubey last year), one of whom finds love with a younger married man. Or like Anshu. “When you write you’re playing out the arguments in your head,” she says. “Like, how does the world look at a woman who is not the so-called right age or size; she’s professionally successful, but also single and childless. Is ‘adequate’ the word that resonates?”
I could easily see Pyjamas being adapted for the stage, too. The confined setting, a wisecracking lead wreathed in sadness, a supporting cast of gays, gurus , millennials and reprobates, each repping a social hot topic — feminism, communalism, LGBTQ rights, the #MeToo movement. And some illicit sex for good measure.
Mistress of metaphors
The book makes for a snappy read and offers frequent glimpses of Khanna’s potential with longer form. She has a flair for setting and mood; the severity of the Shanthamaaya purge is told through the uttappam -ogling hunger of its participants who are weak from unstoppable diarrhoea, the anticipation of a shaky phone signal at the ramshackle bar down the road. The plot, too, unfurls in interesting and unpredictable ways; and if allowed to immerse in her roiling interior life, you might even start to feel a little protective of its heroine.
But then come the volleys of metaphors and witticisms — fun in an 800-word column; wearying in a 220-page novel. Anshu is too often indistinguishable from Mrs Funnybones, issuing fully formed, culturally up-to-date rejoinders nearly all of the time. “My editor has chopped a lot of my metaphors and thrown them in the deep blue sea!” Khanna protests, but a little later admits, “I want people to be entertained, that’s my weakness.”
Over 1,00,000 sold copies of each of her previous books say she has succeeded. Khanna has a loyal fan base and it is not a stretch to imagine Pyjamas will rake in similar numbers. It will also likely set off a fresh round of ye olde debate about her popularity and how much of it is simply because she is Bollywood elite, by birth and marriage (and by starring in a few terrible films in the early oughties). The very topic makes her bristle. “[Chiki Sarkar, founder-publisher of Juggernaut Books] published a book by Kareena [Kapoor] and said it didn’t work,” she says. “The other thing is, how long could it last? I’ve had the column for five years. Did [the Bollywood connection] initially evoke curiosity? Yes. But to go on doing it successfully, I would say, is self-explanatory.”
Family matters
Khanna probably won’t catch much of the grumbling this time though because, like a lot of us, she is trying to reduce the time she spends on her phone. “It’s a struggle,” she admits. “Earlier I could read for an hour without getting up and now I can’t go 15 minutes without checking my phone. It really bothers me. We’re getting a sort of cultivated ADD.”
Time away from her phone also means time away from Twitter controversies of which she has had a string over the last year. The last one was over her move to auction the Navy-uniform costume her husband, Akshay Kumar, wore in the film Rustom , for charity; incensed Indian Armed Forces personnel said it disrespected the uniform. “There are people taking strange, incomprehensible — at least to me — stands,” she says. “But now I’m picking my battles. You can’t get too involved in that fishbowl.”
The one thing she is enjoying about her post-book break is the undivided attention she can now shower the family with. The long hours spent at her desk, especially in that last rush towards publication, were long hours spent ignoring them, she admits. When she skipped the first part of their summer vacation to stay back and finish her manuscript, she says her five-year-old daughter could not understand it. “There is no ambiguity — when I am in that obsessive phase of writing especially, I am not a present mother. Or a present human being,” she says. “Really I don’t know if there is another way. I think you can only do one thing at a time really well. But I console myself that my children will grow up learning that work doesn’t have a gender, and being used to a strong work ethic.”
NEW DELHI : Best Actor award winner Akshay Kumar with wife Twinkle Khanna at the 64th National Film Awards function at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi on Wednesday. May 03, 2017. Photo: Shanker Chakravarty
Luck be a lady
I wonder if there is a sense of having to cover lost ground that also accounts for this razor focus. Khanna found her passion for writing as a young child (the first few pages of Noni Appa are apparently verbatim from the manuscript she wrote at 10) — and then spent the next 20 years not doing it.
She tells me her mother (veteran actor Dimple Kapadia), is always saying how Khanna would sit at her desk writing as a child and how she wishes she had encouraged her then. “One time, I got pissed off and yelled, ‘No, but you just kept telling me to go for dance class, dance class!’,” she says. “And my mother said, ‘But what if you started them and it was over by the time you turned 40? Aren’t you grateful you have something to hold on to now?’,” What does Khanna think about that? “The explanation makes sense to her, so it’s fine,” she chuckles.
Her husband, friends, even her editor, have all categorically insisted she needs to take a break, but that has not stopped the wheels turning for Khanna. She says she is mulling over a dystopian idea for her next book (“It isn’t lending itself to comedy yet though, it’s very serious. I’m not enjoying it. I don’t want to be a dreary writer.”). She says she recently also reached out to the publishers of A Man Called Ove (the novel by Fredrik Backman), which she hoped to adapt into her sophomore project under Mrs Funnybones Pictures. “They wrote back saying, ‘Sorry, Tom Hanks already bought the rights.’ I was devastated,” she says.
But only as devastated as you are allowed to be when you are finally doing what you truly love, and have the spanking good luck to be very successful at it, too. It is not something Khanna takes for granted. “A friend of mine likes to say, ‘ Accha hai tu ne yeh sab kiya, varna tu mar jati aur kisi ko pata bhi nahi chalta ke tu kaisi hai (Good you’ve done all of this, or you would have died and no one would’ve even known how you really are)’,” she says. “I do think about that.”
Published by Juggernaut Books. ₹325. Available at leading book stores.
