Afterglow

Never one to colour inside the lines, Twinkle Khanna has racked up a CV that qualifies her as an actor, author, interior designer, entrepreneur, columnist and producer. When she went back to school in 2022, she flipped the timeline that society imposes upon women and their time to shine. By ANKITA SHAH. Photographed

- MANASI SAWANT

At the launch of her 2023 book, Welcome to Paradise, Twinkle Khanna was asked why her protagonists are primarily older women.

She answered that their lives are richer, more textured, but ignored. “When an old person puts on a hearing aid, the people around them seem to turn deaf to their stories,” she added.

I think of those words when we sit in her sunlit office facing Juhu beach, and she tells me how she pictures herself striding into her 60s. “Either I am riding my scooter in Goa, nails chipped, hair uncombed, or I am doing a PhD. Maybe not the scooter, because if I fall, I might not recover from that.” She laughs, and I see a woman refreshingly at ease with growing older. It is unusual, given that the first port of call in her long career was the youth-obsessed film industry, which never quite allowed her to escape public scrutiny.

In any case, ageing, for women, is a tussle. With the body. With the world. The female body is always in flux, and its transitions ask us to constantly relearn and adjust how to inhabit ourselves. The world, too, changes its gaze. In youth, we are seen—whether we want it or not. But just as we age into a surer sense of self, craft and authority, the scrutiny shifts toward our sexuality, our indulgences, our appetite for pleasure. It feels like a constant negotiation with the terms of the world and the terms of our bodies. Which is why Khanna’s comfort with ageing is striking.

That comfort took its time finding her. Khanna made her acting debut at 22 with