From Munro to Murakami

In a new anthology of stories, Twinkle Khanna experiments with her craft and broadens her horizons

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

It took Twinkle Khanna close to a decade to complete ‘Jelly Sweets’—the last short entry in her new five-story anthology, Welcome to Paradise. The other stories took close to four years to come to life. Every morning, starting 4:30am, she puts pen to paper at her work desk, which is next to a balcony that looks out over the Arabian Sea. For Khanna, writing feels like getting drowned in the light-soaked view for hours on end.

At 48, she is out with her fourth book. The creative process, she says, still remains almost totally opaque to her. “There have been times when I have written 10 chapters of a book and dropped it. I do that often. I have many unfinished stories languishing in my folders waiting for daylight to strike them,” she tells me. We are in her office, and she—dressed in a loosely buttoned shirt with bent collars and cotton trousers—is sipping black coffee.

Khanna could have easily produced her fourth book without labouring much. It could have been Mrs Funnybones Part 2, a sequel and a compilation of her columns, all of which were already there; in fact, her publishers advised her to do it, but she turned them down. “I didn’t want to take the easy route. I would rather stab myself in the heart, and that is what I did with this book,” she says.

The five stories in Welcome to Paradise can be read in a go. The degree in creative writing she recently earned has, in a way, influenced her manner, style and form of writing.