The Twinkle Tickle

Midway into her book Mrs Funnybones, the author Twinkle Khanna recounts an amusing incident. It is 10.30 at night, and Khanna is walking out of a movie theatre, groggy and tired. She has been up since four in the morning. First, fretting about a magazine photo shoot where she has to transform from a middle-aged, vaguely stylish woman into, in her words, “an ageless goddess”. And later spending most of the morning and afternoon in uncomfortable clothes without undergarments, walking from one location to another with nothing but hope to keep her breasts in place, and holding what she calls the teapot posture (where the hands perch at the midsection to make her look thinner).

She is so tired that she accompanies her husband, Akshay Kumar, her son and a niece to the theatre underdressed and without any makeup. When the movie gets over, she takes the lift to exit, while her husband runs down the five floors. And as luck would have it, when the lift doors part and she begins to walk to her car, flashbulbs go off. In front of the exhausted and ill-prepared woman—who has nothing more than a bright yellow bag to clutch on, which clashes terribly with her worn-out blue kurta, and without a sliver of makeup to save the day— are at least a dozen camerapersons from various national dailies. Her husband Akshay Kumar has escaped unnoticed down the stairs, onto his bodyguard’s bike and into the night. ‘For anyone who has ever thought that these encounters with the paparazzi are pre-planned,’ she rages, ‘kindly use some sense. We have some vanity as well and allowing yourself to be photographed in a state that you would not want to put up on Facebook, let alone be published in national newspapers, would be rather demented.’

She is at the theatre the following day, this time to catch a Hollywood film with her son. She blow-dries her hair, wears a pair of extremely uncomfortable heels and finds a suitably fashionable top. But when she arrives at the theatre and later leaves, lo and behold, there is not a single cameraperson in sight.

The principal task of a celebrity column is to attach a famous and pretty mug to an otherwise dreary piece. To provide, amid the terrifying gloom of news pages, a touch of glamour and levity. The piece itself will usually have little new to say, let alone offer more than a mere peek into the author’s life. It may or may not even be written by the celebrity. And, if the objective is to be funny, help! Worthier writers have dug deeper graves trying humour.

So it is with some suspicion and incredulity that many began to view Twinkle Khanna’s humour column when it first arrived. The daughter of India’s first superstar and the wife of a current one, Khanna was last seen about a decade ago unsuccessfully attempting to become a Bollywood star herself. But then one popular column followed another, going from one weekly newspaper piece to two pieces in two broadsheets, and now here she is as the author of her first book, a collection of her essays, both published and new pieces, titled Mrs Funnybones (Penguin Books India, 240 pages, Rs 299).

The former Bollywood actor turned celebrity columnist, however, has a fearful reputation of being forthright and outspoken. No political correctness or mutual backslapping, like the rest of the film industry, is she known for. She is believed, as evidenced in her interviews and columns, to have gotten into trouble several times for her candour. As a result she has been forbidden from appearing on Koffee with Karan, the talk-show hosted by the filmmaker Karan Johar who is known to wrangle politically incorrect statements from his guests. And no column of hers has ever gone to print without her husband carefully vetting it for any political or cultural reference that can land them in trouble. According to her, he has deleted many words and references, including the lotus symbol of the BJP and the words ‘penis’ and ‘Pakistan’, several times already.

When I call her on her phone for an interview, I half expect a tempestuous personality. But the voice on the other side is soft and courteous. She speaks candidly about her writing habits, the difficulty of finding time to write while taking care of her children and her job as an interior designer, and how she spent most of the morning staring out of a window trying to come up with a topic. Everything goes smooth, until I commit my first blunder. I ask her if she sees herself—now that she has a published book under her name with another two as contracted with her publisher Penguin to go—pursuing a career in writing more seriously. What I intended to and should have asked is her opinion of her writing and whether she would choose it as a full-time career. “What do you mean?” she asks, her tone gregarious and good-natured, but the rapidity of her speech indicated mild irritation. “I have been writing columns every week for two years now. I have one book and two more to go. How much more serious can I get? Should I become a journalist? Will you consider me a writer only then?” I clarify myself. But then another question about her reading habits ticks her off a bit. “I don’t get it,” she says. “Why does everyone ask me this? Are people amazed that I can write or that I can read? Is it because I’m connected to the film industry? Doesn’t every person read?”

Khanna remembers spending much of her childhood in a boarding school under the shadow of her illustrious parents. People were of two types, she says: either cloyingly sweet, or, like some of her schoolmates who’d tease her about her parents, quite mean. “I just wanted to be my own person,” she says, “Not following my parents or wanting their spotlight.” Teased throughout childhood for being overweight and nerdy, Khanna also began to develop, according to her, a crucial personality trait—her humour. “You see,” she says, “with a name like Twinkle, you can’t not be funny.”

Her interest in reading, also led her in her teenage years to attempt a novel and a few amateur poems. “The poems were all morbid and focusing on death and maggots,” she says dismissively. She imagined becoming a published author, but the image that occurred to her was of a woman somewhere in her sixties sitting down to write her first book. “The way I look at it. This book (Mrs Funnybones) happened 20 years too early,” she says.

By the time she was 16, she had joined the film industry as an actress. “There are the same expectations as a doctor’s or engineer’s son,” she says. “You have to join the family business.” She enjoyed the financial independence it offered, but she hated the job itself. She found herself a terrible actor and the occupation itself a drag, but her mother continued to goad her saying she was improving with every film. “I remember making candles while doing films, hoping I could find an alternate career. I was so desperate,” she says. “I wanted to quit long before I eventually did. I was supposed to do Awara Paagal Deewana (the 2002 Bollywood comedy), but I wanted to quit so bad that I got my husband (Akshay Kumar, then her boyfriend) to get me out of it,” she says.

The two got married soon after. She quit acting, became a mother and soon a successful interior designer.

About two years ago, the editor of DNA’s entertainment supplement approached Khanna, asking her to write a weekly column for the newspaper. “She said, ‘You are always reading and cracking lame jokes. How about trying out a humour column?’” as she recounts it. Khanna decided on a diary entry- like format, where she would use her experiences, several of them exaggerated versions of the truth, and the characters she encounters to write humourous anecdotes and observations of her life. Thus Akshay Kumar becomes ‘the man of the house’, her 13-year-old boy becomes ‘the prodigal son’, and her two-year-old daughter, ‘the baby’. Her mother, her staff and her husband’s family also appear.

Written in diary format, the columns are what one could perhaps term ‘mommy- lit’, where the protagonist who despite having a ringside view of the rich and famous, is caught up with mundane issues like other Indian moms. She writes about balancing a career while being a mother to two kids, about Bollywood parties, mothers-in-law, Indian husbands, autorickshaws, sagging boobs and Indian rituals and traditions. All of them with a light deft hand.

In one piece, she talks of the 2009 incident where she was arrested for obscenity for picking the top button of her husband’s jeans as an advertising gimmick for a denim brand. ‘I am horrified…,’ she writes, ‘but he takes my hands up to his waist and I quickly open a single top button in the manner of a harried mother opening her toddler’s pants.’ Oddly enough, she is at Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi the following morning, accompanying her husband as he receives the Padma Shri award, when she gets a call informing her that she is to be arrested for indecent behaviour in public. Two days later, she’s at the Juhu police station in Mumbai, providing fingerprints and having her mug shot hung up on the station’s wall. She’s let out on a bail bond of Rs 500. ‘Finally, the tally of this little adventure,’ she writes. ‘The man of the house has a big fat cheque from the denim company and he also has the Padma Shri, while I have the privilege of carving out my place in the history books by taking part in an obscene crime.’

In another incident, she finds herself seated with a stranger and her baby. As the smell of poop engulfs the two mothers, Khanna and her neighbour indulge in what she calls the longest ‘your baby vs mine’ standoff: ‘After peering at me… pulls her baby’s pants down and there it is. She fumbles inside her Gucci bag and, to my mounting horror, pulls out a bottle of floral perfume, pulls the diaper down and sprays around the baby’s bum, Pampers and poop, and calmly puts the baby back on her shoulder.’

As her column caught on, The Times of India also asked her to write for it. Soon, she had a three-book deal with Penguin. She claims she first learnt her column was popular from online feedback. But it rang home when her husband was out promoting his film, Brothers. He’d get back home and tell her, “It’s all about you. Everyone wants to know when the book is out and what’s it about.”

Awara Paagal DeewanaBrothersKoffee With KaranMrs FunnybonesTwinkle Khanna