Review: Welcome to Paradise by Twinkle Khanna
The five humorous, empathetic, nuanced stories in this collection are largely built around delightfully batty old women and explore the entangled themes of ageing, love, loss, family dynamics and death
There’s a special contempt in Delhi’s (English-language) literary circuit for those who call themselves writers but do not possess a network, public thoughts about other writers, a Twitter career, or lately, a degree from a foreign university (although, that is not a guarantee of acceptance either, because we’re still not sure if writing can be taught).
It has taken Twinkle Khanna — Bollywood royalty no less — a decade to acquire each one of these credentials. And yet, a couple of months ago, a journalist interviewing Khanna about Welcome to Paradise, her new collection of short stories, noted her “kohl-ed eyes and dishevelled hair – just like a writer’s”. Four published books in and Khanna is still “like a writer.”
Back in 2016, a review in Newslaundry had pointed out “a thick undertone of intellectual snobbery when people praise Twinkle Khanna’s writing. It’s as though they’re surprised that a Bollywood actress can actually string together an interesting thought and correct sentence in English.” Khanna was doing more than simply stringing together ideas and sentences. Her debut, the memoirish Mrs Funnybones (2015) was quite funny. Then came fiction. The Legend Of Lakshmi Prasad (2016) consisted of four short stories — reviewed pleasantly as easy breezy to read.
But then her stories were adapted by her family, friends, Bollywood acquaintances, her own production company named after her first book. Pad Man (2018), the panned film starring Khanna’s husband Akshay Kumar, was based on her story The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land, which was based on the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, an activist working towards making low-cost sanitary pads for women in a village in Tamil Nadu. Salaam Noni Appa, based on her grandmother, was adapted into a play directed by and starring Lillete Dubey — and is reportedly being turned into a movie as well. The hype — an epitome of the nepotistic industry — was... galling. And whatever goodwill the story collection had generated was destroyed by her 2018 novel Pyjamas Are Forgiving, which was called, among other things “painful blather.” At the glitzy launch of the novel in Mumbai, Khanna said she’s only interested in writing and not adaptations of her work. She also threw shade at her acting career saying she believed all her films should be banned so no one could watch them.
The self-deprecation, as it turns out, extended to her writing as well. In 2020 during the pandemic, she has said in recent interviews, “For the first time, I realised that I was a writer.” And she set about, seemingly, to reinvent herself. Khanna spent six months at Oxford enrolled in two short writing courses, and last year, went on to get a master’s in fiction writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.
The result, Welcome to Paradise, is an impressive collection of five stories — humorous, as expected, but also clever, intricately laid out, empathetic and nuanced. And unexpectedly, even political. The first story in the collection, The Man from the Garage, is set in an interfaith extended family torn apart after the 2002 Gujarat riots, squabbling over a funeral.
The stories are largely built around delightfully batty old women and explore, delicately, the entangled themes of ageing, love, loss, the complex web of family dynamics (especially the different stages of the difficult mother-daughter relationship) and death.
Khanna is a visual, witty writer. “The cotton in Amma’s nostrils matches the white in her hair,” the first story opens. A single sentence can, wittily, sum up the atmosphere: as the family fight heats up, fighting over beef and pork and circumcision and which religion is superior, Khanna writes, “[the body] lying three feet away and the extended family quarelling over pigs and penises.” The story contains so much more: the Indian son as the crown prince, drug abuse, teenaged daughters...
It’s not just familial bonds, many of these are love stories. The elderly characters are in a variety of relationships: a wild philandering mother on her third marriage, a woman who spent her life as the other woman living alone, a woman finds love online catfishing (in Let’s Pretend, the funniest, sweetest and my favourite story in the collection). Khanna is able to show glimpses of different parts of their past lives and distill some wisdom too. “It’s easier with your grandchildren. The generational gap is wide enough so we can stretch out our arms without smacking each other in the face,” the once wild mercurial mother of the protagonist in the title story says. The protagonists themselves are middle-aged women navigating life, love and their moms.
In Nearly Departed, the finest story in the collection, Madhura, a woman with Parkinson’s, writes to the chief justice, appealing to him to let her die, instead of suffering old age:
“At my age, she added, and then recalling that the chief justice was nearly 80, amended it. At our age, how many years do we have left and what lies ahead aside from illness and suffering? In fact, my advice to you would also be to follow the same path. Not right away, of course, but perhaps when you reach 85. It is a nice cut-off age.”
This amusing set-up opens into a moving love story about a lifelong secret relationship, its quiet joys and quieter heartbreak. Through leaps in time, Khanna reveals the nature of the relationship and the sepia-toned romance blooming through the decades. The story is layered astutely, quite expertly, and Khanna unpeels it by and by, showing a cross-section of loss — of youth, love, faculties, memories... the ageing process, all the wine and vinegar of a woman’s life. In her stories, Khanna is able to capture the absurdity of ordinary life — the joys, the hilarity and inevitable inescapable consistent heartache. “Loss feels like the needle of a sewing machine – piercing through and lifting rhythmically; forgotten for a few moments, it slams down again,” she writes.
The most promising final story is based, she writes in the acknowledgements, on the stories about her great grandmother’s childhood in Satpati she heard from her grandmother. Khanna’s nani, Betty Kapadia was an Ismaili Khoja, and so the story, Jelly Sweets, is set in an Aga Khani family. It is also, unfortunately, the weakest story, which really is a pity because the descriptions and the subject are almost exquisite: the women of a family which owns a mithai shop guarding sugar-speckled jelly sweets arranged in tin trays on the terrace; envy between sisters; reading Ibn-e-Safi’s detective novels in which the hero quotes Ghalib; tragedy and unrelenting grief; and ultimately, finding the will, or at least a way, to live and love again. Khanna has said it took her a decade to write — but it still feels hasty, underdone, incomplete, like interesting thoughts and sentences strung together.
But it’s all promising still — there’s so much scope and hope here. In interviews, Khanna now talks about Haruki Murakami and Alice Munro; her writing routine (she wakes up at 4.30am to write every day, like Murakami); her deployment of non-linear narrative, inspired by Munro; and her reading list (she reads God of Small Things every day).
Twinkle Khanna, the writer, has arrived.
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
