Welcome to Twinkle Khanna’s 'paradise'

Twinkle Khanna

When celebs write memoirs, there is a feverish wait in the air. Paris Hilton’s latest book, Paris: A Memoir, was lauded for its honesty, though she had written a tongue-in-cheek Confessions of an Heiress in 2004. And Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me went viral even before publication, with its excerpts about her relationship with Justin Timberlake. The painful admission of abuse mentioned in Hilton’s book and about abortion in Spears’ disarmed readers, whose appreciation of authenticity goes beyond their ear for lurid details. Sach Kahun Toh by Neena Gupta, Unfinished: A Memoir by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Open Book: Not Quite a Memoir by Kubbra Sait, which came out last year, went into the ups and downs of their cinematic careers, which is as it should be when actresses get chatty.

But when celebs turn to fiction writing – the realm of creative imagination – readers buy it a little more hesitantly. Huma S. Qureshi came out with Zeba this year, a debut novel about an irreverent girl who turns into a superhero, 208 pages of sheer fiction. Twinkle Khanna, who is no novice at fiction, with previous books that include the novel Pyjamas are Forgiving, and the short-story collection The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, has just come out with her second short-story collection Welcome to Paradise.

In the world of humour, Khanna is already an established name, a world she inhabits with great verve and follow-up in her live interviews and columns; blurting out irreverent one-liners seems to be easy enough for her. In the field of fiction, while she mutates the humour into a blacker wit, at times even morbid, it is the realism that grounds the reader. If anyone comes in expecting Page 3 tittle-tattle or even a Moni Mohsinesque social butterfly, what they get is a surprising look at issues and events.

From the cover design, which turns on its head the sweet title, to the dedication, ‘For Nani, who can’t read this book because she is dead. And may not have bothered to if she were alive’, the text is infused with a self-aware wry energy. The five stories in this collection vary very much in thematic concerns, but hum with secrets and back stories. Characters appear to be everyday ones but the strangeness that afflicts them – not discernible at first glance – is laid bare to us. The dialogues have an accent you can almost hear.

Welcome to Paradise

Under the conversational lightness the author obliges with, there is an entire ecosystem of dead serious. The bury or burn debate between Team Crematorium and Team Cemetery, for instance, is a blade that almost touches national bone. ‘In the schmaltzy movies Garima had seen, there was always a grand cathartic moment. Mistakes admitted. Forgiveness distributed. Teary reunions against a sweeping soundtrack,’ she writes in one of the stories, separating the real from the reel.

If fiction can get Khanna this close to the truth, perhaps she is the ideal candidate to take it to a new peak in her non-fiction.