When Mrs Funnybones was released by Twinkle Khanna in 2015, it became an instant bestseller, packing Khanna’s sharp wit, humour and a bit of palatable gyaan into an everyday life setting. It was a comforting package that could be unboxed, curled up with on a couch, chapter after chapter. She makes the mundane stimulating. Its sequel took 10 years to reach readers, and it does not disappoint. The 26 short chapters first hook you with their titles — Ek Tha Tiger, Fifty Shades of Bigotry, Married Not Branded, Motherhood, Kal and Aaj, How to Survive Marriage Without Going to Jail, and others — which quite naturally have a Bollywood influence and serve as teasers to Khanna’s inimitable writing style. Each one takes the reader on a journey, both inward and outward, without dictating it.
Khanna shares that she was reluctant to write a second book in the series. “I never ever wanted to write a second part, which is why it’s taken 10 years. I thought that I was done with it. The first book was lovely, and I would always look back at it, maybe because it was something that I took for granted. My editor tells me that I don’t value it enough, because it comes more easily to me than, I would say, my slightly more serious fiction, where I feel like I really have to work at my craft,” said Khanna over a Zoom call.
She is well aware of her craft’s popularity and how it connects with people. “I realised that it means so much to so many people, because everywhere I went, people of all ages kept talking about it. There was a crew that came to interview me for the BBC, and one of the reporters said that she took the book with her when she was covering the Afghanistan war. And I was like, wow, if my book is travelling so much, maybe I should also look at what I’m doing with a little bit more,” she said, agreeing to change her perspective.
‘I don’t name my characters’
The subtitle of the book, delivered with the author’s signature tongue-in-cheek humour, reads: She Is Older and Wider But Is She Wiser? She has clearly sharpened her craft and knows what to put on the page and how to connect with her readers. Talking about the idea behind her part-fiction, part non-fiction book, Khanna said: “My initial idea — and it still stands the same — was that I wanted to use a family to reflect the social structure and the cultural structure of India. And I thought, why not use my family as an example, but as a foil? I don’t name my characters because I want them to be reflective surfaces where I can bounce these ideas of India and its social and cultural structures. It’s an amalgamation of reality. It could be incidents that have been spread over a couple of years, which come together in the shape of a column that takes place in a day. And it could be things that happen to somebody else.”
With clear dexterity, Khanna uses the wand of creative writing to put forth her ideas, reveal as much as she wants to, and keep readers guessing. She explains that striking a balance between what she wants to reveal and what she wants to put out is not as challenging as one might think.
“I’m only revealing as much as I need to make a point. And the things that are actually precious to me, nobody really knows. I think it’s very easy to hide behind these characters that I’ve created. I don’t feel that I’m uncomfortable, or that I am revealing more than I need to, because unlike communicating verbally, you have time to look at that piece, you have time to chisel it down to what makes you comfortable,” she said, adding that her count of drafts has come down considerably.
But we had to ask whether something that caught our attention was deliberate. In the first chapter — For God’s Sake, Can You Find My Phone? — she picks up a universal topic plaguing all parents, but also uniquely delves into religion, comparing it to the recipe for a basic sponge cake.
“I thought it was important. And I thought that the book should open with the themes that are important to me, and important to society. And my job as a columnist is to mask this with laughter. It’s an antibiotic syrup, but you have to flavour it with a sweetening agent so that people will swallow it. And that is what I do, or try to do. So it was very important to me, because I do believe in a secular India. I believe in a secular country. I believe in a secular world.”
‘A great learning experience’
Returning to the topic of the chapter, the mother of two shares her real-life challenges with doomscrolling. “I try very hard to limit my screen time. It’s an issue for all of us, including me. I miss the time when we didn’t have this distraction. We have to literally build a fortress to safeguard our attention and divert it towards meaningful things. So when I get up in the morning, I can’t say that I don’t look at my phone. I do look at my phone, but it’s only while I’m drinking my first cup of coffee, and then I put it away and get to work,” said Khanna, who also shared a downtime hack gone wrong, by which her phone automatically switches off for four to five hours, instead of her daughter’s phone.
Sharing the struggles of a modern-day mother, she said: “I have a 23-year-old and a 13-year-old. With the 23-year-old, my job is done. I did the best I could. I put him on the path that I thought he should be on, and now it’s up to him. The 13-year-old I have to monitor and mind every day. And I think this sort of modern parenting, where you have to be all-encompassing — we have to be nutritionists, we have to be nurses, hairdressers… you have to be everything — makes me wish I were in the days when parenting was much easier. But in a way, I also think we are more equipped to handle our children and their psychology.”
While talking about social media, the discussion pivoted to Twitter (now called X), which has earned quite a reputation among users. But Khanna sees a silver lining in a space that is often marred by controversy and hate. Sharing her Twitter experience and what she learnt from it, she said: “With tweets, because there was limited space, you make a joke and there’s no nuance to it. It can be interpreted in any way. And I would get into trouble on Twitter for those jokes for years. Eventually, I saw a lot of other people across the world who were writing about different things on Twitter and getting into trouble themselves. And I thought it’s really pointless, because I think I’m entertaining people by making them laugh, and often entertaining myself. But people are not going to understand that.
“Having said that, writing on Twitter really honed my skills in terms of editing, because I had to make sure it would fit into that much space and that the joke was conveyed. Every word had to carry its weight. So it was a great learning experience in that way. Also, I got to see different perspectives from people on Twitter, and that was interesting.”
Moving back to her craft of blending the art of storytelling with humour, she said: “I haven’t mastered how to make people laugh. I just write about the things that I find absurd. I write about things that are true and put them down. And because there aren’t any layers, and people are thinking these things but aren’t saying them, they find it funny because it’s actually the truth. There is no humour without a kernel of truth in it,” said Khanna, who is working on a new book.