'Pyjamas are forgiving' by Twinkle Khanna

I read Twinkle Khanna's latest book 'Pyjamas are forgiving' last evening. Since it had only some 200-odd pages, I finished it in a couple of hours.

Plot spoilers ahead:
The book is about a woman who goes to an ashram for a detox only to bump into her ex-husband, who is there with his new wife. Predictably, she has an affair with him, while going back in memory lane and remembering what it was that drew her to him. However, as she finds out womanisers never change.
She also faces a moral dilemma when his cousin does something shocking that merits an FIR. How she handles situations that present themselves right through from the husband hitting on her to his cousin's unspeakable act form the crux of the book.

I like the way she has written this book. She has created a word portrait of a womanizer, complete with the charm, the lies, and the heartbreak in a believable fashion. Since it is set in an ayurvedic retreat, the book is laced with vata, pita, kapha references and some truly bizarre treatments. Twinkle's sense of humour bubbles up through the story although some parts are pretty grim. If you are a woman reading this, you will keep asking yourself how you would have handled similar situations.

Comments

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang - A Book Review

This book has been on my TBR since the time it was featured in The New Yorker in 2019. I bought the Kindle edition recently and read it over 2-3 days. The author Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer who has written the novel, The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She has received the Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine. Wang has been diagnosed with a slew of health issues: schizoaffective disorder— bipolar type, idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, complex PTSD, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme disease, and the extremely rare cotard’s delusion and capgras syndrome. Wang calls her book “the collected schizophrenias” to include all the diseases that go into this basket, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Since she was into psychological research herself, her awareness about these matters ...

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties. So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...

Ray Bradbury and Ma Perkins rule my heart

Ray Bradbury is a literary giant. I read one of his short stories recently. This prompted me to go looking for his book of short stories that I'd picked up years ago, which was languishing unread in my home library. The book cover tells me he is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer prize special citation, winner of the 2004 National medal of arts, and a couple of other literary honours. This collection of stories is called ' We'll always have Paris'. But this title story is not my favourite. This one is about two men. A married man who leaves his sleeping wife in the room and goes out for a walk, following another man who leads him through the streets of Paris only to kiss him goodbye. They don't understand each other's language. The way the story was told, I took this to mean he was gay and was checking if the married man was, too. But the married man who was charmed with this man decided he wasn't and went back to his sleeping wife, forgetting all about t...

Ash Talks Books

Search This Blog