Pyjamas are Forgiving: Twinkle Khanna on her first novel

Book: Pyjamas are forgiving
Author: Twinkle Khanna
Publisher: Juggernaut Books
Pages: 256 
Price: Rs 200

Twinkle Khanna is back with a new book, a novel – her first – this time, intriguingly called Pyjamas Are Forgiving. The line, says Khanna, sipping black coffee at a five-star in Delhi, came to her as she struggled to zip up her jeans after a few weeks of festive indulgence during Diwali. "There I was in front of the closet, thinking, 'Pyjamas are forgiving, but it's jeans who know how to hold a grudge!'"

The droll humour is, of course, something readers have come to associate with Khanna, especially the legions who follow her Mrs Funnybones column in a leading national daily, many of which also went into her bestselling first book. Her second book, a collection of four stories titled, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, wasn't as LOL, but it showed Khanna as having a light touch that showed humour in unlikely places. "I like writing humour; I don't like saying serious things seriously; I like saying them irreverently. I think that way, they stay in your head," she says.

Pyjamas Are Forgiving isn't funny – it's rather grim in parts – but readers will find shades of a familiar irreverence in protagonist Anshu's whimsical asides and descriptions of doshas and vatas and the exacting ghee-laden regimen, and other bizarre treatments at Shaanthamaaya, a high-end ayurvedic spa in Kerala where she checks in for a month-long detox package.

But the light touch shows considerable strain as the novel gathers pace, especially when Anshu meets her ex-husband Jay, and, much against her better judgment, has an affair with him, right under the nose of his now wife, Shalini, who's not just considerably younger, but was also the cause for their marriage breaking up. That's morally iffy, but Khanna has no qualms about her protagonist having shades of grey. "Being a strong woman does not mean that you don't have weaknesses and foibles. Why is storytelling about black and white?"

But there're yet darker happenings – the rape, or near rape of Jenna, a young Western woman, inside the spa by a wealthy Indian businessman, puffed up with a sense of entitlement. The episode, drawing on shades of the Mahmood Farooqui case, and the accusations against American actor Aziz Ansari, references some of the issues raised by the #MeToo movement. Khanna's take is, however, surprising: "The ambiguousness of consensual sex is itself interesting," she says. Jenna's actions, she adds, "can be interpreted in multiple ways. But…[while] there isn't complete consent, you can't call it rape either."

Surprisingly, for one who's such a popular columnist and has three bestselling books under her belt, Khanna confesses, "Even today, I find it hard to believe I am a writer. In my head I am a reader. That's my passion. I love the world of words and I love escaping to that world."

It's this passion that led her, around two years ago, to apply for a postgraduate course in literature at Oxford University. Khanna didn't go to college, joining what she calls "the family business" immediately after Class XII, and missed the formal mechanism of the education system. "Oxford had two prerequisites – one that I had to read Great Gatsby. And two, that I had to be a graduate. F Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favourites, and I have read Great Gatsby multiple times and knew it really well. But they didn't take me because I was not a graduate." Ironically, Khanna was invited to speak at Oxford this January about Padman and making movies with a social consciousness. To be sure, she brought up the point and made a joke about it.

What next? "A lot of people feel happy when they finish a book, but I get depressed because then I don't have that much to chew on. So I'd better start writing another one."

She's already got two ideas – one, an Indian dystopian novel that she's written the first three pages of and also plotted down completely, but which she's a little unsure of because it'll have limited space for humour. The other, is a more contemporary story.

As for film scripts, Khanna doesn't see herself writing one. "For me, the form is not important, it is the story. If I have a story [like Padman] that will make a good movie, what I will first do is write a book or a novel or a short story about it."