Of Wounds and Inheritance

“My mother entertained the thought of killing me. A few hours before I was born. In the hierarchy of noble thoughts, I ranked second in priority. Her own life claimed the top spot—and with good reason: She had to survive before any of this. Whether my story or even hers, was possible.”

This is the first line of Manish Gaekwad’s searing memoir Nautch Boy, dedicated to the mother whose dance shaped his dreams and titled after one of the many epithets accorded to him over the course of his extraordinary life. The introduction goes on to explain why his mother Rekha had thought of letting him go. Daughters born to tawaifs like her could carry on the community trade, but sons were not as useful. The unborn baby’s illegitimate father Rehmat Khan had refused to lend his name or presence to the child. “Was there a more cursed life than to be born an orphan? She knew perfectly well how difficult it would be for me. She had seen a worse fate—as a child, she had been used to pay off a debt to a Bedia family, dressed as a child bride, raped by her husband and then sold to a kotha. When a family offered no guarantees, could one be better off without it?”

Mother and Son both survived. Father suggested at one point that the boy should be named Aurangzeb, but refused still to grant his surname. Rekha Bai - also known as Rehana - named him Manish instead. She had been an extra during the filming of the song Om Shanti Om, sitting in the audience while Rishi Kapoor danced under pink disco lights with his character name M-O-N-T-Y lit up behind him. Monty became Manish’s daak naam pet name. His surname was made Gaikwad after the principal at a boarding school in Darjeeling misheard his mother’s mumbled answer to who her son’s father was. Manish changed the spelling to Gaekwad later, with an ‘e’ instead of ‘i’, to match the spelling of Shivaji Rao Gaekwad “Rajinikanth.”

“Naazuk” was a word used to describe the author by both his mother and the other young men of his age: a lesser pejorative from the parent, and deliberately cruel from the peers. Sports held little appeal, and books were preferred companions for a boy living away from home who knew that he was queer before he was familiar with the vocabulary of this difference or had the confidence to articulate it in ownership.

There were other insults too, alongside thinly veiled fetishisation, as tends to happen for those who do not conform. In his early experiments with performing on stage for Founder’s Day (partly motivated by the promise of extra food for all those who contributed), Manish danced to Sun Sahiba Sun and a hostile crowd of students. “An English teacher named Suzanna had warned me backstage before my performance. Boys don’t do these things, she had said in a sharp, disciplinarian tone. That must have shaken my confidence. I did not have the time to react as she announced my name to perform. She was a teacher I idolised for her larger-than-life persona. She was always so immaculately dressed in bright pink and yellow minis, wore polished patent leather high heels, chunky gold jewellery, had the reddest lipstick possible that would contrast with skin as fair as hers, and matched with a perfectly coiffured bouffant—really a modern English version of a tawaif, if there was such a thing.”

A keen observer of life around him - at the Kolkata kotha and the Darjeeling boarding school - Manish’s sense of the world also began to be shaped by the books he read. Pivoting to theatre after the cold reception received by his filmy dances, he decided to adapt Cinderella into a gender-swapped play called Cinderarchie with him in the lead role (after nobody else accepted the part) and a girl named Manisha as Princess Charming, who proposes to him on stage. “I froze. I forgot my line. One word. I was supposed to say yes… The curtain dropped on my promising career on stage. I stopped putting up my name for quizzes, extempores, elocutions and poetry recitals… I grew into even more of an introvert.”

Even when he was no longer looking for a spotlight, it would be thrust upon him. In literature class, a speech by Cassius in Julius Caesar gave the boys ammunition for another mean nickname: “But, woe the while, our fathers’ minds are dead / And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits / Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish.” “Wo-Manish”. He did not react to the mocking laughter. Instead, he acknowledged the significance of those lines to his own life.

Like the protagonist in Anton Chekhov’s The Bet, Manish read as widely as he could and began writing soon after: a daily journal, translations of the ghazal lyrics practiced by the tawaifs, news features, essays, profiles of his fascinating beautiful complex tawaif mother, movie scripts, a debut novel Lean Days, a critically-acclaimed biography The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir, and Nautch Boy.

Violence is a running theme throughout this memoir. The shadows of what it leaves behind colour the experiences of both Mother and Son as they grow up and grow old. Some of it is political - the Bowbazar bomb blasts in 1993, which wiped out most kothas; much of it is societal - stigma, crude conflations, financial hardship. There is a seventeen-year gap in the book after which the narrative resumes in 2019. Many of the early loops of the story - and the intertwined lives of Rekha and Manish - find poetic rhythms of settling. The Son becomes Mother to the woman who had birthed him. He records her voice and writes her story.

“She has nothing to hide, protect or hold sacred. She will no doubt leave out intimate details, she will not have proof to back her claims, she will not have a chronology, an almanack of records or paperwork, not even photographs (actually, she does have a few).” One photograph that survives is of her ill-fated sister, Hasina—on the cover of the 1983 Merchant-Ivory documentary The Courtesans of Bombay. The other sisters Laccha, Rajjo, and Laxmi had sad fates as well, but with the added burden-blessing of obscurity. “Rekha” itself is fate, in one sense—when a doctor asks what her name means, she stretches out her hand to show him the lines on her palm. Slender threads of destiny braid together a family whose maternal ancestral surname had possibly been the nomadic Tamaich. To Manish, the word “savarna” was initially associated with dressing up (“sajna-savarna”), and only later took on the personal and political classification of Denotified Tribal identity. His own self was shaped less by these notions, more by his family, most by his mother.

Love is the other current in this book — it begins, remains, destroys — and crescendoes as the Mother remembers the tender-fierce lullaby written by Sahir Ludhianvi for the film Trishul which she used to sing to the Son when he was in her womb: “Tera koi bhi nahin mere siwa / Mera koi bhi nahin tere siwa / Tu mere saath rahega, Munne.” Rekha saw herself in Waheeda Rehman’s character. Echoes would have resonated against the story of Sahir Ludhianvi’s own mother Sardar Begum. The story is eternal. Music and memory coalesce for Mother and Son in this swan song ode to a life vanishing and a legacy preserved.