Twinkle Khanna doesn’t take the easier path with her new book (though she could easily have)

The eponymous first story in Twinkle Khanna’s book is set in the Gangetic belt, in a “village surrounded by thousands of trees” where “the foliage is so dense that it is difficult to see the rooftops of the small, brightly coloured houses that line up against the unpaved roads”. The village is remarkable for its Jardalu mangoes, and, also, because “it is the only village in the entire district where the birth of a girl child is celebrated with joy.”

To understand this premise, we must go back in time to young Lakshmi Prasad, a pigtailed teenager who comes up with a game-changing idea.

The other three

If the first story is a bit of a feminism-flavoured starter, by the time you begin reading Salaam, Noni Aapa, a moving account of love and friendship, you begin to savour Khanna’s eye for detail (the way she captures the Ismaili quarter of Bombay, for instance, and her talent for portraying both chatter and quiet most aptly), and the clean lines of her prose, edged with humour.

The sexagenarian sisters Noni and Binni, whose “nice Ismaili names” that “had been bequeathed by the great Aga Khan himself had probably been wiped out of everyone’s memories except theirs,” between banter and remembrances of their late husbands and scattered children, find new fads to amuse themselves: art classes, cross-stitch, embroidery, singing, baking, laughter club. Actually, it is Binni who finds new fads and Noni accompanies her good humouredly. When they take up yoga, unexpectedly, it brings to their life a warm new chapter:

“The two sisters walked to the garden. They were an incongruous pair. Noni Appa was shorter than her sister, frail and delicately boned, while Binni was well rounded. She had a large bosom and even larger hips, ‘like a Coca-Cola bottle’ as she liked to think of her formidable figure.

Binni called out to Bhondu, the cook and general dogsbody, to lay out three towels in the grass before the yoga teacher arrived. She told her sister, ‘Take your rollers out. You look completely demented. And where are you going that you want to get all dolled up?’ Noni Appa merely said, ‘Is the teacher here to make me breathe in and out rhythmically or to pant over my beauty?’

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting cross-legged on their towels in front of Anand ji, their new yoga teacher. Binni, who had once gone away for a seven-day vipassana retreat only to return in three days, was giving more instructions than the yoga teacher himself.

“Anand ji, tell Appa how to do kapalbhati properly, can’t even see her stomach go in and out! See Noni Appa, like this, watch me.’ And Binni, her entire body quivering, began violently inhaling and exhaling, while making pitiful bellowing sounds like an asthmatic buffalo.”

The entry of Anand ji, retired from the gardening department of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, gently overturns the many boundaries in Noni Appa’s life. And gradually, the revolution enters Anand ji’s Gujarati household, which is dominated by his cantankerous wife.

While the third story, If The Weather Permits, is perhaps the most anomalous in this lot, it is also, arguably, the one with the best opening gambit:

“The weather forecast in the Indian Express had predicted a week of sunshine but on the day that Elisa Thomas was getting married for the third time to the same man, it began to rain.”

A feisty protagonist, more savoury than sweet, more square peg than round, Elisa, with her memorable coffee-coloured face and her tendency to drift into marriages with “unsuitable” boys is by far the most striking character in the book; she is definitely an original. I am not a fan of the ending though. In my book, the story ends somewhere, mid-bite, a couple of pages before Khanna’s ending.

The back story

The title of the fourth, The Sanitary Man from A Sacred Land, put me off a bit, until I started actually reading it.

But before that, a little prelude about its very interesting muse. Social entrepreneur and grassroots activist Muruganatham Arunachalam, it would not be remiss to declare, achieved the impossible: he started a conversation about menstruation in the small-towns of India.

In the late 1990s, when the young Muruga was besotted with his young bride, he discovered how difficult it was for her to create hygienic sanitary pads for herself, at home. Store-bought pads were too expensive for families like Muruga’s, where several women lived together and the family budget could not accommodate their cumulative needs every month. This set him upon a courageous if somewhat rocky path – the quest to create a low-cost sanitary napkin that would show up the extreme greed of multinational corporations for what it was.

On this progressive-on-so-many-counts journey, Muruga loses much – including, for a long time, the respect of his family and neighbours who were quick to judge his period obsession – and he attempts several brave if bizarre experiments. (I don’t want to reveal too much, but animal bladders were involved, and used sanitary pads.) Skip over the years and years of hardship, until Muruga eventually went on to patent his own inventions, win the Padmashri, and end up on TIME as one of the 100 most influential men in the world.

Khanna came across his story while researching for her column and she was so inspired by it, she chased “him for months” until she wore him down and “he finally agreed to meet me and then, after lengthy interviews, gave me permission to fictionalise his story for this book”. In Khanna’s fictional scape, the canvas is Madhya Pradesh instead of Tamil Nadu, and her meticulous research creates an entirely believable and poignant narrative arc that follows the protagonist Bablu Kewat on his adventures with science and society. It is the longest story in the book, just stopping short of novella, and is divided into bite-sized chapters.

Doing the right thing

Twinkle Khanna’s first book, Mrs Funnybones, was not only a rollicking bestseller but also made her the most popular woman writer of 2015, with reportedly more than one lakh copies sold. In my opinion, that sort of publishing success brings with it a certain responsibility – however dull it might sound – especially for those whose celebrity makes them youth icons.

Within the confines that come built-in with popular craft, they must try to overturn stereotypes and question the handed-down platitudes that continue to sell so relentlessly, rather than unwittingly reinforce them. And for this, one cannot but give Khanna full marks (apparently, she likes being given marks – but wait, it might just be by her husband), for hitting all the right notes.

If Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend made an idiotic statement in the final analysis – Biharis must learn English in order to beg American innovators for financial aid – something I had taken great exception to, being the daughter of proud Biharis, Khanna’s emphasis on both indigenous scientific breakthroughs (the critical importance of which is the subject of at least 50 per cent of my husband’s monologues), and her well-rounded, quintessentially Indian characters – drawn from the east, west, northish and south of the country – hearken a fine, bright voice that does not forget humour in service of its social statement.

Recounted in a tone that departs entirely from that of the Mrs Funnybones avatar, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad is a perfectly pleasing crossover book that will, one hopes, lead to many more. In my review of Mrs Funnybones, I had idly dreamt of a funny memoir by Khanna, Tina Fey style. I remain in hope.

The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, Twinkle Khanna, Juggernaut Books.

Devapriya Roy is the author of two novels, one long-dragged-out-and-nearly-abandoned PhD thesis on the Natyashastra, and most recently of The Heat and Dust Project: The Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, which she co-wrote with husband Saurav Jha.