I’ve broken every bone in my body: Twinkle Khanna on ‘Mrs Funnybones’ and humour in writing

Her family is terrible at names, Twinkle Khanna says with characteristic candour and humour, and she may have just continued the tradition with her own written in first person columns and books titled “Mrs Funnybones”.

The origins of that go back to her childhood when she kept getting injured, breaking many bones.

“I have broken every bone in my body — every bone. There’s nothing left. I’ve broken my tailbone, I’ve broken my collarbone, I’ve broken my arms, my legs. I have 40 ligament tears on my left, 10 on my right,” Khanna said.

Those days of staying at home also laid the ground for her love of words and writing.

“It’s caused me a lot of pain over a period of time. But it also gave me, I would say, time to just sit and read. Because I couldn’t really move, so I had no choice. And it made me the person I am today,” she said.

“I think I broke my collarbone when I fell off a window, bounced on a cycle, and fell on the floor... And I must have been maybe eight or nine. That was the first one I broke. And then it kept going on,” added the former actor-author and daughter of Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia.

She is called Twinkle, her mother Dimple and her late aunt Simple?

“It’s terrible, I agree,” Khanna replied, adding that she has adopted quite a few of her own in later years.

“Mrs Funnybones and Baba Twink Dev... I can’t even blame my parents; they were all done by me. When I wanted to get an ID on Twitter, ‘TwinkleKhanna’ was gone, ‘Twinkle_Khanna’ was gone. So I said, ‘What should I do?’ And I just thought to myself, ‘Okay, maybe I am perhaps slightly funny, and I have all these funny bones’. And that’s where it kind of joined and became Mrs Funnybones.

“Everything that causes you pain — there’s a silver lining, you can find laughter in it.”

The 51-year-old, who is married to superstar Akshay Kumar, has carved an identity all of her own through her writings.

She started as a columnist and soon gained popularity with her humorous and insightful observations about life in general.

In 2015, she came up with her bestseller “Mrs Funnybones”, a collection of her newspaper columns.

Ten years later, comes the sequel “Mrs Funnybones Returns”, published by Juggernaut and launched recently.

Khanna, who did her masters in creative writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London last year, said she never thought she would come up with the book’s second part because she wanted to focus on fiction writing.

“It was during the tour of my last book, ‘Welcome to Paradise’, when I realised that the first book ‘Mrs Funnybones’ meant so much to so many people. They kept talking about it, they kept telling me about how it was their comfort food...

“And I felt that I may take it a bit for granted, because I’ve been doing the ‘Funnybones’ columns for so many years, but it really connects with people. I don’t know why it connects, but it means something to them. And I felt it was the right time to do a sequel.”

Khanna has often spoken about her brief acting career that led to movies like “Barsaat”, “Mela” and “Baadshah” in her columns, confessing that she was not cut out for acting.

What was it to fail at something and then take a plunge into writing?

Khanna, also an interior designer, said it is her innate nature, perhaps shaped by early experiences in life, that when she is doing something, she does not think about the outcome or the reaction.

“I think about: ‘how do I get better at this? What are the skills involved? Am I prepared?’ The only things in my hands are my preparation and my execution. The outcome is absolutely variable. Everything I’ve ever done in my life, I’ve always gone and tried to study the craft behind it.

“I’ve been writing for now 13-14 years, but a couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to go back to university and get a Masters in writing because I was interested in all the scaffolding behind books, behind novels, like how do they work, how do you break them apart and put them back together?”

Over the years, Khanna said she has perfected a routine away from the demands of being a celebrity, mother of two children and a working woman. And now guards it at all cost.

“I remember when I was writing ‘Pyjamas Are Forgiving’, I was in the midst of the 11th draft and my daughter came to me and said, ‘It’s been a week and we haven’t opened my birthday presents.’ And it really hit me that I’d been kind of blindsided and focused in different ways. But now as I’ve aged, I’ve found different ways of managing my time.

“So, I tell my family that my mornings are precious, because that’s when my brain works, that’s when I can write. I get up very early, it could be 6-6.30. If it’s 6, I immediately get a cup of coffee, I sit down, and I start writing.”

Has getting a degree brought any change in her writing?

Khanna said she can see the difference in her fiction, but her non-fiction voice is still the same.

“In fact, Chiki Sarkar (her publisher) was very worried when I told her that I’m going to do my masters. She was worried that my voice would change and I would become stiffer. It didn’t happen and it surprised her; it surprised me. So the columns didn’t change, but the fiction changed drastically, according to me.”

The author, who is now 30,000 words into her next novel and her sixth book, said she takes life as a “to-do list” not as a “wish-list with grand plans”.

“I had stories in my mind, and that was the most important thing. I was writing half a novel when I was in my teens. I’ve tried to write that book at least four times in my life and failed all four times. I’ve never been able to write that particular book.

“But I had different stories, and I kept writing those stories. I never thought: is this going to become a book, is this going to be a short story? I just wrote, and eventually I had enough work.”

Khanna’s other books are “Pyjamas Are Forgiving”, a novel, and “The Legend of Laxmi Prasad”, a collection of short stories.