MASTERING SUBTLETY

TWINKLE KHANNA says she has finally STARTED thinking of HERSELF as a professional WRITER

- SMITA TRIPATHI

There is always a lot of pressure to be Mrs Funny Bones. But I am nearly 50 and I am not going to accept any constraints put by the world. I refuse to be put in a box, I have a few more years to be put in a box anyway, and buried underground. So maybe at this point, I don’t need to do that,” says Twinkle Khanna, revealing her funny bone, as we start a conversation about her latest book of short stories called Welcome to Paradise.

Twinkle says that while her themes have not changed dramatically since she has always looked at women’s lives, “this sort of displacement that women have from the world and from the way the world is constructed” [The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad had a similar theme], what has changed is that there is no forced humour. “They do have some dark humour. They have a tongue-in-cheek twist to them. But there is nothing that does not serve the story,” she says. Explaining how she has pared the prose she adds, “Metaphors and similes come easily to me. So, I generally like to put them all in. But here, I have a whole deleted folder of such metaphors that I have chucked aside.”