Between art, flesh and motherhood

The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir

Author: Manish Gaekwad

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 200
Price: Rs 499

“True story, I grew up in-between boarding schools in Kurseong-Darjeeling and now erased from memory and history — the kothas of Bow Bazaar, Calcutta, and Congress House, Bombay, where my mother worked as a courtesan or who you call a tawaif, or a baiji.  Ask me more if you are curious. It is not something I am ashamed of, nor should you hesitate,” Manish Gaekwad wrote in a 2018 blog post.
 

Five years later, he steps up and writes the story of his mother — with compassion and an impossible empathy, coming from a son for a mother “with a past”. In The Last Courtesan, Gaekwad’s words — acting as a surrogate — give birth to his mother’s story; as if repaying the debt of life (and its strength). A son’s story is his mother’s as much as it is his own, which we see clearly in the mother-son duo becoming the narrator-writer of this moving memoir of tragedy and survival —a true against-the-odds story.
 

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Rekha-bai — the last courtesan of the bomb-hit, abandoned, early nineties’ Bow Bazaar and Bandook Gully — played many roles. As a daughter, she was born to a drunkard father — whom everyone called  Tadiya, for all the toddy he drank — and a mother, “Gullo” — who fed the family and had no time to waste singing lullabies to her nine daughters. Only the final child, a son, enjoyed such privileges. She grew up in a poverty and hunger-stricken home (if we can call it that), in the shadow of Meena Kumari — “thinking of herself as a tragedienne like the actress — unwanted and unloved.” 

At age 10, she is married— rather, sold — into a family of bednis — who sell her on to a kotha in Calcutta upon hitting puberty. Transferred like property from one owner and one place to another, Rekha spends a lifetime trying to take control of her life – through money, reputation, courage and faith— between Poona, Calcutta, Bombay (and its lovechild, Bollywood) and back. Gaekwad pays each role its due. It is his mother’s memoir but he makes sure that it is not just a mother’s story, but of a woman, a fighter, and a survivor. “She never weighs what she wants to say. I measure its worth,” he wrote.
 

Having had to restart many times in her life, Rekha-bai had “mastered the art of the return”. Naseeb — fate, destiny — is a prominent theme in her story. Rekha accepts her fate, perhaps out of necessity, and moves forward. Sporting a Thums-Up bottle on her head, her picture on the book cover indicates an innocence that most of us lose as life wears us down. Drawing her strength from ghazals, Bollywood songs and Bollywood heroines, she says, “It was good in a way that all bad things happened to me so early in life — so there were no surprises left for later.” She finds kindness in strangers and opportunities in dark, violent alleys.
 

Most of all, she learnt to read men – their gaze, touch and general presence – before she learnt to read books. Young, fierce and resilient despite her circumstances, she raises a son and gives him the life she and her siblings were denied. “In a kotha, a girl is more precious than a boy,” and yet, Rekha made sure that her son got an education, even if it meant steering him into a life alien to her own — of forks and a foreign language she could never understand, things that had no place in her world. One can imagine the pride with which she must have gleamed as her son grew up and found a way to converge his world with her own. 
 

Gaekwad — author, journalist and script writer — has written poems, stories, essays and profiles for <i> Scroll, Midday and The Hindu and co-written the 2020 Netflix show She with Imtiaz Ali. His debut novel, Lean Days gave us a glimpse of his life and aspirations. In a conversation with Harper Broadcast he shares his journey as a writer, the challenges of finding “objectivity” in writing his mother’s memoir. “As early as 17 is when I wanted to tell her story. I attempted the first chapter but gave up. It took me twenty years to return to her story,” he says.
 

The Last Courtesan – recorded and written in the final years of Rekha-bai’s life — gives us the context of his literary journey. He is now working on his father’s story — a man who was absent for most of his life, even in his scattered presence — a daunting task, if you ask me. Nonetheless, this continuity — of an artiste’s aspiration —easily becomes a child’s closure — of finding and telling one’s parents’ stories, and by extension, one’s own.
 

With on-screen/literary representation of tawaifs as seen in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), or Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s  Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022), or as early as Shyam Benegal’s Mandi (1983) or Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1972) for that matter, The Last Courtesan  not only adds to the genre, but gives it a touch of reality that we often fail (or perhaps, fear) to confront. The book stands for the sobriety of the fading performative arts, as opposed to the indignity of being compared to sex-work because “anything a woman does independently has always been read as her compromising her body”. It is an astute reminder of why we need to tell our stories and a reassurance that life is built with courage and nothing less.

The writer reviews books on Instagram @read.dream.repeat