REALITY what it takes to be
“One night,
I hummed
something
when one of
the boatmen
told me, this is
mother Ganga
singing you
a lullaby.”forgot about it while he got back to his
kitchen duties and wow-ing his customers
will unique delicacies.
Cut to 2013, one evening, he turned on
his computer as usual, only to find his home
page flooded with images of widows playing
Holi! It was a time when a Supreme Court
order broke a centuries-old taboo, enabling the
women to splash each other with the “colour
of freedom”. Although Khanna admits he died
again primarily due to the memories, he felt,
“Aaj spring aa gayi. Colour has now become
the representation of independence.” Freshly-
inspired and determined to not hold anything
back, the chef went all out to begin writing
a novel, Colorless, inspired by the widowed
woman he had countered back in Vrindavan.
“I did my research on who perpetrated the
movement, how it reached the final stage, and
what the naysayers had to say, among many
other aspects,” he informs.
The layers of other characters added on in
a natural progression, since all of them were
inspired by Khanna’s life experiences. The
other protagonist of the novel was a feisty girl
who he met on the ghats of Varanasi. Fraught
with the guilt that he was not able to take
care of everything post his father’s passing in
2015, the food expert took a break from the
shooting of Masterchef India Season 4, and
went to the city of final abode, Varanasi, for
closure. Listless, he would spend his time onthe ghats and sleep on the boats on
the summer nights. “I couldn’t get an
ounce of sleep in the hotel, so I just
used to wander the ghats and crash
on the nearest boat when I felt like
it. One night, I hummed something
(and he hums it for us) when one of
the boatmen told me, this is mother
Ganga singing you a lullaby.”
It’s on these ghats that he met
Chhoti. “A tight ropewalker who had
just finished her show, she came and
sat next to me, asking how I liked her
trade. She said she was working hard
to collect money to go to school, she
wanted to become a policewoman to teach
a lesson to those who harassed her at night.
I offered her the money, but the encounter
left me deeply moved and added a dimension
to Colorless,” he says. Meeting the interesting
people in the ‘holy town’, all of whom he
characterised, only served as fodder for the
book. “There was this hijra (eunuch)
on the ghats, Ashokji who was fiercely
protective towards the children there.
He served as a major inspiration.”
In Varanasi, Khanna visited many local
ashrams, and meeting the people there left him
with a longing to go and find the old widowed
woman in the narrow back alley of Vrindavan.
As they say, where there is a will, there is
a way. “When I finally met her, she said, ‘mainActor Neena Gupta
plays Noor in The
Last Color
Chhoti, the flower seller
and ropewalker in the film