 "Twinkle Khanna")
Although husband Akshay Kumar acts as editor for Twinkle Khanna's regular newspaper columns, he did not change a single word in a recent piece about potholes. In it, she mockingly adopts a pit that local authorities had failed to cover up near her home, names it Gaddu and lists reasons for readers to follow suit. Her writing is laden with such attempts at observational humour and political satire, and Kumar's main reason for supervising it is to make sure she does not get arrested, says Khanna. "Akshay wanted me to throw that entire last column in the Arabian Sea and go float there myself."
That is not a big ask for Khanna as her Juhu residence is a stone's throw away from the water body, separated only by palm trees and some sand. Decorated in teal, grey and pale gold, the tony home looks like a portion of some sea mansion that has drifted ashore. The former actress now runs her own interior design business, while Kumar is among the wealthiest movie stars in the country. Hospitality flows persistently in their household. Men in all-whites scurry purposefully in the background, making black coffee, and cookies manifest on a silver serving tray. These are later replaced with a healthier snack and green tea in Turkish tableware.
Her foray into writing two years ago was serendipitous. "I would probably never have written a word until I was 65," she Khanna, dressed in black with luminous jewels to match. A friend, who moved as an editor from one newspaper to another, had invited seven celebrities to contribute guest columns. Khanna, known to be an avid reader, was among them. Her thoughts on modern motherhood and social issues (like the squeamish attitude towards menstruation) were popularly shared on social media. Less than two months ago, she came out with Mrs Funnybones, a book largely built on her newspaper writings. According to her publicist, the title reached the top of Crossword's non-fiction bestseller chart in the Kemps Corner store.
In addition to published columns, Khanna wrote some fresh pieces for the book. Since the format offers greater wiggle room than the 750 words she wrote for papers, she also fleshed out old articles. Satirical pieces on politics were left out because they do not age well. Professional writing has taught her to start well ahead of deadline. She works for 15 minutes to an hour daily, and claims to write seven or eight drafts of each piece, revising until minutes before it is due.
Other than one book reading, she has not been touring to promote Mrs Funnybones. With public speaking, there is pressure to be politically correct, she says with a laugh. "I am almost in a state where I have to do yoga and tell myself to talk slower so that my brain has time to filter what I say." This is perhaps why her publicist asks for questions to be shared before our meeting. At the start of the conversation, Khanna races through answers like an over-prepared student at a viva examination. She slows down after a few minutes, but is a vibrant conversationalist only when the recorder is switched off, relaxed and posing questions of her own.
The daughter of Dimple Kapadia and Rajesh Khanna was born into Bollywood, which explains why she took up acting and also why she could give it up easily. "It would have been easy to lose myself in Bollywood but I was born in it and so I was not excited by it." The resemblance with her mother is apparent in the heart-shaped face and almond eyes. Growing up, she was always surrounded by books and was seen doing schoolwork, recalls film journalist Bhawana Somaaya. Khanna does not feel comfortable talking about the time after her parents split when she was 10 years old. According to Yasser Usman, author of Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India's First Superstar, an unauthorised biography, Rajesh Khanna was very attached to baby Twinkle and would take her to the doctor himself anytime she was ill. Even after his separation with Kapadia, the actor is said to have made similar efforts during Barsaat, his daughter's 1995 launch-vehicle in showbiz.
Jolly relatives on the maternal side stoked Khanna's sense of humour, which became a protective shield during her days as a plump school girl. "It is always the misfits and the oddballs who have to develop what nice aunties call 'a good personality' to make up for it. The prettiest girl in class is accepted the way she is." But Khanna was not meek either, recalling times when she stood up against class bullies, even coming to blows with them.
Her stint in cinema was short-lived and she often felt like a misfit. "There were times when I was in Switzerland with a man in red pants and a furry mustache next to me. I was so embarrassed and I wanted to hide." This was an era when there were no mobile phones or Internet. Khanna was among a few in the movies business, including Saif Ali Khan, who would read on set. After six years and 16 films, she called it a day. She took up candle making, inspired by her mother's hobby, and interior design.
Our conversation is interrupted when someone brings a cardboard box with three lit candles on it. "That's clearly a winner," she says, pointing to one that burns gently while the others emit fiery flames and form pools of wax. This experiment, with a new formula for wicks, is for The White Window, her home decor store started in partnership with Deepa Massand-Vaswani. Her design philosophy is to work with clean lines and bring elements of personal history into spaces. She plans to slow down soon as her children need her time.
Prior to her columns, Khanna had not put pen to paper in two decades. In school, she wrote morbid poems about "graveyards, maggots and sorrow". She kept these in a black folder with an orange ribbon, alongside designs for three-legged tables and drawings of "ugly" glass jewellery. Stephen King and Dean Koontz had been her favourite authors at the time. Later, she took interest in science-fiction stories by Ken Liu, Neil Gaiman and Isaac Asimov. A love for P G Wodehouse supports her frequent use of the word "blimey".
The book reads like a diary and its language is simple. Reader reviews on Amazon.in say it is "light" and "easy to finish", intending that as praise. The surface-level humour, she expects, can draw attention to problems without boring the reader. She plans to write further and on a more serious note. The book she really wanted to debut with was about love in the pre-Partition era. But it was suggested that she use her established voice as columnist to publish a fun book instead. Khanna is also working on short stories about women.
Khanna is seen as a "star-wife of substance". It seemed to have come as a surprise to most that someone in Bollywood had opinions and ably stated them. Khanna is not offended by this. Showbiz usually requires one to be self-obsessed, she says. She, on the other hand, has the advantage of being an insider and outsider - raised in privileged circumstances but not spoilt. Her writing seems to find takers mainly for the same reason. It shows how the other half lives, while highlighting their human side. Recently, observes Khanna, a woman she met in the park while playing with her children said she read her book four times and shared it with friends. That woman, it would appear, is Khanna's target demographic and it is probably her being addressed in the tagline for Mrs Funnybones: "She's just like you and a lot like me."
