Shining Star

Twinkle Khanna is back with Welcome to Paradise, a collection of short stories laced with her trademark wry humour

- Amit Dixit

Welcome to Paradise, Twinkle Khanna’s latest book—a collection of short stories—came to life with her daughter sleeping beside her, in a dark room illuminated by a laptop screen. There’s no waiting for the muse for the disciplined Twinkle, who starts writing between 4.30 and 5 am, nearly every day. “You sit at your desk, and if the muse is on their way to someone else, you are right there to catch her and bring her carcass to your desk,” she says. Twinkle’s other writerly hack is to use a terrible font for her first draft—“so I am not intimidated by the idea of perfection at that stage”.

The title may seem breezy, but these are tales from a less than-perfect world, delivered in Twinkle’s trademark wry humour, her “salve over life’s innate calamities” that she employs to such splendid effect in her avatar as celebrity columnist Mrs Funnybones. "The title is subversive; everything that appears idyllic on the surface may have a different reality underneath," she says. "I didn't set out to write stories that dealt with mortality, loss, and love, but there were images floating inside my head like trays of jelly sweets setting on a terrace, or a particular anecdote that then made its way into 'Let's Pretend' about the young, flat-chested girl who gets advice about a vigorous breast massage." The collection has been in the works, on and off, for a while. For instance, Twinkle started writing the story Jelly Sweets' almost eight years ago, and yet it was the last story she completed.