I'm Not Mrs Funny Bones!

Three years ago she rose unexpectedly from the ashes of an unsuccessful acting career and has since forced her critics into silence. Fresh off the release of another best-seller Pyjamas are Forgiving, Twinkle Khanna proves that she is in control of the narrative – pen in hand and tongue in cheek. Meghna Pant spends an invigorating morning with the outspoken author.

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I’m going to begin this article with complete honesty, as twinkle Khanna would. It was easy to dismiss her when I heard she’d published her first book Mrs Funnybones in 2015. “Another celebrity author driving us serious writers further down the pecking order,” was my first thought. It was hard for me to imagine twinkle as a writer. Celebrities cannot be artists, just like an artist should not be a celebrity. Fame repels creativity. The praise around her book didn’t impress me either, for people kowtow to anyone touched by Bollywood's stardust, whether deserving of it or not.

Three years and three books later, when we sit down for a long chat at her sea-facing office, twinkle asks me whether I’ve read her books. I tell her that I have but only before our scheduled interview. “It’s okay,” she replies. “People were surprised that I could even spell my own name!” Her self-deprecating humour throws me off. I laugh. What I don’t tell her is that her writing has left me with a feeling I didn’t expect: surprise. As a short story writer and a devotee of stalwarts like Alice Munro and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I judge writers by their brevity. I therefore introduced myself to twinkle’s writing with her debut short story collection, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad (2016), expecting to be left apathetic like I am with most bestselling (read: awful) books in India. I wasn’t. Instead of relying on hackneyed plots about bollywood that would’ve come easily to her, she’d entered the world of rural India, female infanticide, gerontophilia, feminism and menstruation, with the deftness of a surgeon and the empathy of a nun. Not only did she know how to tell a story, she also knew how to write, a truly rare combination for Indian authors today. I began reading her debut novel