It is not unusual for a well respected Indian middle class household to keep the familial conversations limited to a list of socially acceptable topics.
Even among the semi-progressive relatives, sex and menstruation are best left in those invisible zenanas because, no-it’s-not-orthodoxy-it’s-just-decency.
And that’s where I think Twinkle Khanna’s new book The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad comes in.
The Line Between Flippant and Preachy
This book wasn’t exactly ‘Funnybones’ but it was an amusing light read that I wouldn’t mind picking up in place of a grim Hemingway for a train ride.
But when I say light, one shouldn’t mistake it for a flippant book. It, in fact, dabbles with extremely important themes very common to a lot of Indian households and paints simple short stories with a fluid, easily comprehensible tongue.
I have to admit that I’m a complete stranger to Twinkle Khanna’s writing, barring a few hurriedly read Sunday columns and other people’s opinions about her sparkling wit and humour.
The book offers no big revelations for avid readers who are up-to-date with social issues, but if you have recently lost a debate on women’s rights or marriage laws with your mother or that ever-inquisitive aunt, this is the book to gift to stop all future fights.
Instead of handing out sociology lectures (which is often hard for an older generation to digest without feeling that a self-important brat has delivered a sharp blow to their acquired wisdom of 75693*&%#@-year-old Indian culture), The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad can be your best mate.
It delivers easygoing lessons on how to withhold those ancient moral judgements against taboo topics of companionship in old age, women and their (absolutely non-essential) coy femininity and menstruation.
The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad
Publisher: Juggernaut
Pages: 232
Price: Rs 299 (Paperback)
A Potpourri of Cultures
What I also thought was interesting was the detailed attention paid to the far flung cultures of the four extremely different households that Khanna portrayed.
Take for instance, the conversations between members of the old world middle class and their NRI relatives.
Binni eagerly took the coveted items from Mallika and dramatically declared, “These British are really third-rate people, I tell you, their only saving grace lies in their first-rate bras...”
Or, for that matter, the humdrum of an orthodox Mallu-Christian household:
They sighed about the dwindling Jewish community in Kerala, the handful of Malabari Jews and even fewer Paradesi Jews that were now left, making the Paradesi the smallest community in the world. Mr Kurien regaled them with a ghost story about the Lakkidi gateway haunted by a tribal leader called Karinthandan who during the Raj helped a British engineer find the shortest route to Thamarassery and was murdered.
But most of all, I think, I managed to surprise myself. The book and Khanna disturbed my pre-conceived notions of an author who belonged to the Bollywood fraternity and hence must be aligned (or so I’d thought) with the industry that has for years objectified female leads and encouraged rape culture.
But it goes without saying that Twinkle Khanna’s new book is an excellent rebuttal to Chetan Bhagat’s awfully flawed understanding of social concerns and women.
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