It is no use pretending that Twinkle Khanna can be read with the same lens as any other author. She is the daughter of stars, the wife of another star, extremely visible and openly admired. And yet, if there is a surfeit of famous people writing books and getting favourable reviews for them, and also a surfeit of famous people writing books and getting unfavourable reviews for them, then Khanna’s work falls into a crack in between. Her latest collection of short stories Welcome to Paradise illustrates exactly how this crack is made of mild but multiple dichotomies.
‘Welcome to Paradise’, Twinkle Khanna, Juggernaut, 2023.
The most salient aspect of the book is something pointed out by – of all people – her husband, the actor Akshay Kumar. In a video clip from a book talk posted to Khanna’s Instagram account, Kumar is seen asking Khanna from the audience, “All the main characters are women. Does this mean that men are irrelevant?”
Khanna’s storytelling is subtle enough to skirt straightforward characterisations like these. Men weave in and out of the five stories that make the book – assaulting women, loving them, dying on them, and meandering. Maybe they are good. Maybe they are bad. But they are not the focus. Kumar is right. Women are the main characters.
And this truth Khanna delivers with one of the strongest tools in her toolkit – her language. It is often rich, but a long way from stilted. In dialogues, when expressing stray thoughts, for detailed descriptions and to give window to rituals exasperations, Khanna’s language is easy, clever and – incredibly in a world teeming with writing – her own. It subsumes vernacular lilts – here, a ‘chalo’, there a ‘quick walk-shalk’.
It is her language that ensures that Khanna’s books are bestsellers, and also language that helps her tackle the question of the unavoidable politics of her husband. Kumar is a supporter of Narendra Modi and has been vocal in this role. Many realities of present-day India are irreconcilable with rightwing thought, and because Kumar’s reputation precedes him, a reader comes to Khanna with the knowledge of this fact.
But this is at odds with Khanna’s own repeated and careful assertions that her political views differ from her husband’s. So different were they that Modi once told Kumar in an informal and largely panned interview that there must be domestic bliss considering Khanna’s outrage against him on Twitter. But Khanna has maintained that it is unfeminist to posit her as her husband’s mouthpiece when it comes to these things.
This territory is distinctly tricky. I don’t think readers who arrive at the last story ‘Jelly Sweets’ and realise that it is about a Muslim family can be goaded into reading it with a clean slate. And yet it is refreshing to read of Muslim women forging unconventional paths for themselves, speaking of love and loss, and just being – with no sanctimony in the narrator’s voice, no compulsion to devote an entire episode to polygamy.
Without indulging in the odd Smithian sympathy we feel for the privileged, you feel almost grateful that such non-motivated portrayal does exist and that a great deal of craft and thought went into it from a person who could have perhaps got away without both.
There are many questions one can ask about what a short story is supposed to achieve. Khanna’s latest collection delivers satisfactory answers to almost all of them. The stories are gem-like in length, they end leaving you full but you also actively wonder as to what happened to the characters, and most importantly, they are a journey through the times.
Many authors urge less successful ones to write of realities most known to them. Others are fantasy writers. A large part of Khanna’s reality is for us to see because she is almost always under the spotlight. But a larger part seemingly makes it possible for her to honour the twilight days that the Indian woman leads – days which just are, without incident, without noteworthiness, but chock-full of pain, anticipation and happiness. Her treatment of time is perceptive and something that allows her to carve her niche among writers today. Most of the stories have significant leaps in them through years. Most also speak of the many Indias we have lost. Most honour the power of a told tell, a small anecdote, an articulated memory. The story ‘Nearly Departed’ is an ode to a science teacher who taught Freddie Mercury in Panchgani – without this becoming the central focus of her existence.
Welcome to Paradise is an all-around celebration of women by an author who is – in the best way possible – very difficult to ignore.
