Twinkle 'Funnybones' Khanna: The author who puts a bit of herself in her characters

A dramatic blue wooden door separates Twinkle Khanna and husband Akshay Kumar's sprawling apartment from their Juhu building's tropical-inspired lawns. Dressed in a midnight blue bohemian dress, Khanna is reluctantly posing against the matching door, hoping it will work for the camera. "This is not my good profile," she grumbles to the photographer. "Oh wait, I've forgotten which one is my good profile," she adds sheepishly, returning to the original pose. When she finds a small branch dangling right in front of her face, she doesn't quite know what to do with it. "Shall I shove it in my nose," she offers, giggling to herself.

Goofy and good-natured Khanna refuses to befriend the camera. She never has. Not as an actor working with the industry's top names in the late nineties and early noughties, and certainly not now, as an author, columnist, designer and a 42-year-old mother of two. "I've already done the dancing-around-trees routine and now you're making me lean on trees," she quips, when the photographer offers an alternative location on the lawn. She's using humour to get through what is for her a tiresome, but unavoidable ordeal.

Tickling your funny bone, author Twinkle Khanna. Photo courtesy: Dabboo Ratnani

Promoting her books-her first, a collection of her newspaper columns Mrs Funnybones: She's A Lot Like You and a Bit Like Me and now a set of four short stories titled The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad-has brought her back into the limelight she had managed to avoid for nearly two decades.

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GENRE BENDER

Her two books are starkly different. While the first has her taking digs at her family, friends and loyal household help, something she continues to do regularly in her columns, her latest offers a set of four inspiring, poignant, endearing tales. Mostly fictional, except for 'The Sanitary Man from the Sacred Land' which is based on the inspirational story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, the stories are linked by their focus on women's lives and on gender equality. "I think in a way, which probably I didn't realise and that people brought up later, even the Sanitary Man is a feminist. He's a bigger feminist than the women in the story, which is about women finding their place in their lives and about a man who gets closely associated with removing taboos from women's most intimate biological function," says Khanna during our chat indoors, at her second-floor office, remarkably bare in comparison to her art-filled home.

A lot of her goes into the characters and it's easy to spot Khanna's strong feminist voice (remember the Twitter hashtag #MarriednotBranded) peering through Lakshmi Prasad's angry, climactic announcement. 'Salaam, Noni Appa', a story she has been harbouring within her since she was 18, reflects much of her childhood realities. Inspired by her maternal grandmother, who would drag her to the Ismaili jamatkhana (community centre), Noni and her sister Binni were originally supporting characters in the novel she began writing as a teenager. "Noni's 18-year-old granddaughter was the protagonist because I was that age then.

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The second time I tried to write the story, her daughter was the lead character. This is my third attempt. I finally realised that every other character paled in front of Noni and Binni. They were such eccentric, idiosyncratic, colourful characters," she reveals. The relationship between the sisters mirrors the one she shares with sister Rinke, while Noni and Anandji's habit of spending endless hours playing Rummy comes from Khanna and 49-year-old Kumar's obsession with the game.

(from left) Khanna with daughter Nitara, son Aarav, and husband Akshay

HEAD OVER HEART

There's little that is banned from Khanna's fortnightly column, which the more discreet Kumar insists on screening before she sends it off to her editor. Her assistant, who Khanna teases incessantly, has to beg her to be left out of it. The author, in turn, threatens to write an entire book on her eccentricities. "Just this morning, while I was doing yoga, she opened the door to take a peek. When I asked her what she wanted, she said 'Oh I was just checking if you're breathing'," says Khanna with a chuckle.

Because Khanna makes light of practically everything, it might seem like she is an open book. But she's a brilliant wordsmith, and has the ability to hide cleverly behind words, revealing very little about herself and the struggles she has had to face. It was at the New Era High School, a boarding school in the hill station of Panchgani, away from home for the very first time in her life that Khanna came into her own. "My grades were really good. More than English, Mathematics was my subject. I scored 97 per cent in Mathematics in the tenth standard CBSE board exams," she says. Intending to become a chartered accountant, she studied commerce at NM College in Mumbai, but dropped her plans to study further to debut opposite Bobby Deol in the 1995 film Barsaat. What made her change her mind? "Shall I say it made mathematical sense," she counters. "For a woman my age to make that kind of money just seemed logical. Besides, there was a certain expectation that came from being my parents' daughter."

Apart from lacking any real interest in putting on a show for the camera, Khanna believes she sorely lacks the emotional quotient required for the job. It is and always has been head over heart for her. Before she agreed to marry Kumar in 2001, she drew up a list of pros and cons. On a television chat show, the couple also joked about her thorough research of his bloodline and the diseases that ran in his family. One marries only to have children, she reasoned.

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HUMOUR AS HER ARMOUR

Her practicality, candour and sense of humour-those are her strong points. "When the dragons were breathing fire on me, humour was my armour. It shielded me," says Khanna. "But I could also fight effortlessly." So, as a teenager when people teased her, she'd retaliate in one of two ways-using either her words or her weight. "Twinkle, Twinkle, a large star," exclaims Merylin Joseph, recalling her first impression of Khanna.

Joseph, artist and owner of Andheri East-based Hotel Samraj and Just Kerala restaurant, was among the friends Khanna made during her years living in her grandparents' Juhu bungalow before she was packed off to Panchgani. "She was a celebrity kid unlike the rest of us, a little plump, very pretty and vibrant. Naughty and a 'rebel without a cause', she had an infectious personality and was lots of fun. We all had similar angst growing up and the simple unhappiness and fights we have at home with our parents attempting to discipline us," recalls Joseph.

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It was Joseph Khanna she called every time she wanted information about the Syrian Christian community for her story 'If The Weather Permits'. Her friendship with Joseph and other girls from Juhu has led to her deep involvement with 'Rastaa Chaap', a voluntary group set up by 11 women (including Joseph) who have been working alongside government authorities to help save trees for over a year. It's, from these experiences, that Anandji in Salaam, Noni Appa gets his love for mealy bugs and borer worms.

SCRIPTED FOR SUCCESS

Commenting on her first book, old friend Karan Johar called Khanna the 'discovery of the decade'. Publisher and editor Chiki Sarkar, who has worked with her on both books, agrees. "I think it is because of her voice, and of course, the back story. I think she is one of the few crossover writers I have worked with in India; someone who appeals to critics, writers and also to a wide range of regular readers," says Sarkar. There may be a large section of people who finds it hard to believe that Khanna writes her columns herself, suspecting she has a ghost writer doing the work for her, but anyone who has met her has been privy to the author's wit and knows she spouts one-liners like they were scripted. This is a role she believes she's been preparing for since she first learnt to read. "A lot of it (the ability to be able to write) comes from being immersed in the world of words since I was about seven," she says.

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As a young girl, Khanna was once invited to a fancy dinner in Milan. "It would have been an experience worth having, but the people seemed a bit dull so I chose to sit in my room and read my book. The next day I was upset with myself for missing out on the opportunity, but today, I believe all that reading has paid off." Because she believes everything she reads influences her, she tries to avoid books while she's writing. The only constant is her science fiction short stories, which help her fall asleep. "Some people count sheep, I read sci-fi. It's my version of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The disciplined writer, who is at her desk every morning at 7.45 am as soon as her children Aarav, 14, and Nitara, 4, have left for school, says she thrives on deadlines and Sarkar confirms that she's good at keeping them.

"Deadlines are my saving grace; they do things to my brain. They're a wrecking ball to all sorts of writing blocks," says Khanna. With the second book out of the way, she can't wait to start on the third. "I wanted to start the day I finished. No matter what else you're doing, your characters continue to rattle in your head. It should be a relief that the book is over, and I thought I'd be excited and celebrate, but I felt abandoned. I've lived with these people in my head for months and they've become my imaginary friends." She now has an idea of a dystopian story of India, and Sarkar and Khanna have been talking about shows like Black Mirror that tackle the genre brilliantly. "But she had another genius idea this weekend which would be a surefire hit and a more linear follow-up to this book. What I do know is we will have many such conversations, and we'll hit on one good idea at some point," reveals Sarkar.

FINDING FUNNY

Khanna is able to find the humour in everything. "I could always laugh at the absurdities that I observed around me. If I'm included in that, then yes, I would laugh at myself too. Sometimes when you look back at life, you think about all that you dreaded the most and realise it's the most fortunate thing to have happened to you. I wasn't the conventional prom queen, was a social misfit. I was plump, I liked to read, had a strange name. My imperfect persona as a young girl serves me well as a writer today," notes Khanna.

According to the her, humour cannot exist without candour. "Everything you laugh at is funny because it's showing you an intrinsic truth. You may be showing it in a peculiar manner, but it has to be true, otherwise you will not laugh." Working since she was 15 years old, doing all sorts of odd jobs including delivering fish and lobsters for her grandmother's sister's fishing company, Khanna feels fortunate to have finally found something that she not only enjoys but is so successful at.