Book Review: The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad Is Happy But Disappointing

They’re uplifting stories, but we want more of Twinkle Khanna the columnist.

WrittenBy:Rajyasree Sen
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I’ve always felt that there’s a thick undertone of intellectual snobbery when people praise Twinkle Khanna’s writing. It’s as though they’re surprised that a Bollywood actress can actually string together an interesting thought and correct sentence in English. Khanna, to give her credit, is pretty much the only Bollywood actress who has carved an identity for herself in a field unrelated to the film industry. I, for one, was a great fan of her first few columns in The Times Of India, written as “Mrs FunnyBones”. They were, true to the name, funny, sharp and a welcome change from the usual columns we read by either a celebrity or a non-celebrity.

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The columns soon turned into a book – Mrs Funnybones. Which is when matters went a little South. It’s one thing to write a 750-word column once a week. It’s a whole different ball game to write 26 columns published as a single volume, and ensure each is as interesting as the last. Frankly, what seemed a breeze to read once a week was more than a little trying to get through in one book.

Now, Khanna has published her second book in just over a year, which is a praiseworthy achievement for any writer. The Legend Of Lakshmi Prasad is a collection of short fiction. The fact that it was fiction piqued my interest, coupled with the fact that I find Khanna’s emergence as columnist and author in her late thirties quite impressive. The book is 287 pages in length and consists of four separate stories: “The Legend Of Lakshmi Prasad”, “Salaam, Noni Appa”, “If The Weather Permits” and “The Sanitary Man From A Sacred Land”.

I read the book within two hours, so it’s an easy read. Women play pivotal characters in each story. “The Legend Of Lakshmi Prasad” is about a young girl called Lakshmi who changes the way women are treated in her village. “Salaam, Noni Appa” is about an old lady called Noni and her sister, and the man Noni finds love with. “If The Weather Permits” is about a young girl called Elisa and her quest for contentment, and just being left in peace. And the fourth – which is the longest as well as the most trying with its length of 150 pages – is about a man who isn’t particularly educated and who creates an affordable sanitary napkin because he wants to improve the lives of the women in both his immediate family and beyond. Obviously, “The Sanitary Man From A Sacred Land” is based on the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham.

The art of the short story is to infuse richness and nuance despite the length of the story. The reader is drawn into the lives and adventures of the characters even though the acquaintance is brief. Just think of the relationship between a bull and his Muslim owner in Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s “Mahesh” or the young girl who is deified by her father-in-law in Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s “Devi”. Or even in short little novellas like Gillian Flynn’s The Grownup.

Unfortunately, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad fails to do this. The focus of this volume is women, who are both protagonists and catalysts. There’s nothing wrong with that. Each story has a happy ending. Even if a main character dies, there is a certain happiness even in that death.

Yet, even though she’s got these two easy hooks with which to bait a reader’s attention (particularly a woman reader like yours truly), you never really feel involved in The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad. The characters don’t make you sympathise or empathise. For instance, in “If The Weather Permits”, which is the weakest in the collection, you don’t care if the main character, Elisa, lives or dies. She seems to have no purpose in her life, other than to not love the men she marries. She doesn’t work, she doesn’t look after her home or her parents’ home, she’s not funny or entertaining or even morose. She’s just one of the many whom you wouldn’t miss if they were gone. Much like the story itself.

The writing also suffers from a lack of editorial insight: it’s too floridly descriptive. There are sentences such as, “Elisa’s father…sat in the first pew holding on to his Christianity like he was the weary custodian of the last crumbling communion wafer.” And then there are the moments of a rash of adjectives further inflamed by philosophy: “Women have been looking for a cape and have been handed an apron for centuries. But here was a man who wanted to help women swing their apron around, let it flutter down their backs and watch them soar through the clear blue skies.” If only she and her editor had remembered that basic tenet of writing: keep it simple.    

What Khanna does get right is her tone. There’s also promise in the characters she conceives, even though they needed to be better fleshed out. Whether it is Lakshmi, the young feminist in her village; or Noni, the reluctant ageing lover, they are all interesting ideas. Sadly, they’re left a little blurry around the edges, almost as if Khanna had to rush through the story. Both Lakshmi Prasad and Noni’s stories would have made for entertaining novellas. But therein lies the curse of the short story: you have to keep it short.

For a first-time collection of fiction though, it’s a good effort. Still, Khanna’s strength evidently lies in non-fiction and commentary, rather than in fiction. Her trademark wit and tongue-in-cheek comments are missing in this collection of stories. That’s particularly sad, because it’s such an integral part of her writerly charm as a columnist.

You can download The Legend Of Lakshmi Prasad for Rs 60 from the Juggernaut App or buy the paperback for Rs 189.

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