Welcome to Paradise review: Twinkle Khanna's new book establishes her as one of India's best authors
Welcome to Paradise review: Twinkle Khanna's new book establishes her as one of India's best authors
I’m in a room filled with superstars. The luminescent Dimple Kapadia whom I gush over. The affable Akshay Kumar who gushes over his wife. Karan Johar, whom I love so much from afar, that I’ve never gathered the courage to speak to him. Sonali Bendre whose ethereal beauty and intellect make for a delightful sidebar chat about books. Jackie Shroff who insists we take a photo by a plant. Yet, my eyes are on the biggest superstar in this room––Twinkle Khanna, who is launching her fourth book and second short story collection: Welcome to Paradise.
As Kiara Advani, Shabana Azmi and Vidya Balan take stage to read excerpts from Khanna’s book, I find myself startled. These are tales of women at the brink of, or in the throes of, death, disease, depression, desperation, and desolation. It’s a complete departure from Khanna’s earlier work, and her trademark titular titles. Fatality and decay are as inevitable as wry humour and social commentary. People of all genders and ages are fading and failing here––from a grief-stricken mother’s only son, to a feisty Bua who seizes life to the fullest, to a beloved Amma whose death breaks and binds her family.
The phenomenology of characters in these five slow-cooked stories translate into the larger themes of polarity. Her characters are doomed as much as they are loved (but never judged) under Khanna’s contiguous canopy of tenderness for them. Their lives untangle like loose threads that she lays bare, but not once do they unravel.
I’m in awe. Like her characters, Khanna has assumed the transformative power of conviction with this profound exploration of her multi-hyphenate talents. Her heightened awareness, perhaps from her Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, or from lived experiences, has modified the everydayness of her writing. Her razor-sharp wit is now bolstered with bare-boned insights and unapologetic poignancy. Her quotidian consciousness has become an ecstatic form of reflection in the construct of the mundane, an absurdism that is at once captured and freed.
In the first story, Huma and Sara bond once their Amma is dead, as the funeral (Team Cemetery and Team Crematorium as the blurb mentions) forces them to confront their feelings about family members and each other. Driven by loneliness, Amita captures why women and men want the search for love to end, the fabrications and charades to stop, no matter what their age or circumstances. In Nearly Departed—the longest story in the book, running into almost 80 pages—a woman Madhura Desai seeks legal euthanasia setting off a chain of events that are linked to both her past and future. Garima extracting silent revenge on her wayward husband by giving birth to a child from her lover and not letting anyone know in the eponymous story with the lead title is subversive and engaging. But it is the final story––about finding love and friendship in someone who has experienced similar grief––that is my favourite. Nusrat is coping with the loss of her child, and subsequently her marriage, when her neighbour Fayyaz draws a portrait of her deceased son. It is the collection’s most tenderhearted story.
These lines in the book, with the reminiscent touch of Alice Munro, whom Khanna and I discussed as our shared common love, stood out for me:
—Pretending to be someone else gives you more freedom to be yourself, but, perhaps, pretending to be someone else gives you respite from being yourself.
—At different temperatures water may turn to ice or steam but it does not disappear. Name and form alter, not the composition.
—His absence was not a constant ache, nor did it come equipped with a full stop. It lived between pauses and emerged at unexpected moments.
—People called life a gift, but it was a loan. All briefly borrowed.
Welcome to Paradise is also Khanna’s homage to her Ismaili Khoja ancestry and her nani, to whom the book is dedicated.
It’s no surprise then that in less than a month the book has become the top-selling fiction title of 2023, ranking no. 1 on Nielson BookScan and Crossword. The book is also the fastest-moving title on publisher Juggernaut’s list and Khanna’s fastest-selling book to date.
As someone who began her career as a short-story writer and believes more in the format than in novels or non-fiction (try convincing publishers of that though), it is heartening for me to see a book of short stories sell well.
Additionally––if accessibility was a fear after Khanna’s lauded social commentary on parenting, everyday situations and relationships became hugely popular, then the massive popularity of her last two books, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad and Pyjamas Are Forgiving, that touched upon the less cromulent subjects of female agency and disenfranchisement, and now this, is a definitive win––not only for authors, but especially for women authors.
Therefore, the age-old adage that the responsibility of the artist must be to make you think is lazy. If the artist can make you think and laugh, isn’t that something? Depth does not have to be dreary. Weightiness does not have to be weary. Sensitivity does not have to be soporific. Contemplation is not didacticism.
Especially when, over the past years, writers in India have been afflicted with the weariness of nepotism, the drudgery of back-stabbing and backbiting, the same set in Delhi giving each other the same awards, and a complete disdain for otherness unless a gora, neta or abhineta hand is at play. It’s no longer about what the writing does for you, but what the writers (or their chachas and chachis) can do for you, dreadfully so. The industry has been lacking newness, uniqueness, eclectic voices, and keen observational humour.
But grandiosity and grandstanding are not in favour in 2023. Authenticity, relatability, and simplicity are. Whether in the writer or the writing. This is what Khanna’s new book captures.
That, at the end, authenticity always wins.
On the cusp of her fiftieth year, Khanna is at her peak. Not only is her iridescent beauty luminous beyond belief, but her wit is also at its sharpest, her writing at its bravest, and her voice unshakeable and self-assured. She is shining. In a country where bestselling authors are afraid to rock the boat, consumed by statis, and hashing out the same hackneyed genre and dare-I-say the same hackneyed stories, year after pitiful year, I love that Khanna is not afraid to push the veritable envelope, or mine her history, or underscore the cataclysmic experience of being a woman in India.
Getting old is a mathematical equation, she writes on Instagram, and she is showing us how getting older looks like a multiplication rather than a subtraction as the Legend of Mrs. Funnybones is a prodigious Welcome to Paradise.
Meghna Pant is a multiple award-winning author, screenwriter, columnist and speaker, whose upcoming novel THE MAN WHO LOST INDIA (Simon & Schuster) will be published in February 2024.
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