In the courtesan world, female children were considered assets, believed to follow their mothers’ ghunghroo-clad footsteps. Sons were unwanted, often unloved. Nautch Boy, Manish Gaekwad’s follow-up to his affecting 2023 memoir, The Last Courtesan, is the story of what it means to be born a male child in that world, while also tracing the life of his formidable mother, Rekhabai, who inspired the first memoir, after she left her career as a tawaif.
While Rekhabai went to considerable lengths to keep her son as far from her work and her workplace as possible, the Bowbazar kotha did cast a long shadow over him. There was much subterfuge in his young life: Manish was a formal rendition of his given name Monty, after Rishi Kapoor’s character in Karz; Gaekwad was a surname arrived at by chance. Gaekwad’s father was actually Rehmat Khan, an on-off visitor to Rekhabai in the kotha, who did not wish to bestow his name on his illegitimate son.
Gaekwad, who grew up far away from Foras Road in Bombay and learnt to engage with the world in fluent English, could not jettison his love for music and dance, nor some of his effeminate mannerisms, early signs of his sexual orientation. This kept him forever at one remove from his schoolmates, and later, from his illiterate kin in his mother’s family in the low-income Bhat Nagar in Pune.
The author’s gaze continues to be a discomfitingly clear one. He tells readers how his mother wasn’t really too maternal in disposition, as “violence was a form of care and protection for my mother”. His father beget him only to prove his virility and was least interested in him thereafter. Faced with violence in the kotha, Gaekwad grew quiet, inward-looking, and pacifist most times. All the accumulated scars are laid bare for the reader to see; the heartbreak peeking through the deliberately adopted tone of pragmatism.
Just like in The Last Courtesan, the author makes some things clear to the reader. That the tawaif who performs a mujra at a mehfil is not a sex worker, though by the 70s, many tawaifs were pushed to or entered sex work to survive.
When I started reading this book, I wondered what fresh insights Gaekwad could offer with this story. But all through, the reader is held to the page, intent and interested, and quite moved by the account of a little nautch boy who has never really been able to shake off the scars of his checkered past. The language continues to be uneven in this book, too. A blue pencil could have been deftly employed to do away with the (many) syntax errors without compromising Gaekwad’s unique voice and style of storytelling.
Gaekwad grows up acquiring a brittle exterior, shunning any show of affection yet yearning for it. Acts of tenderness, love, and care, he tells us, do not shine through the fog of memories. His maternal kin, from the Kanjarbhat nomadic tribe, lived in squalor. When her in-laws sold Rekhabai to the Bowbazar kothi in Kolkata, she settled in without protest. He recalls dancing endlessly—at the kothi, at his boarding school—and finding in words a way to “nourishing his soul, helping him deal with the chaos both inside and outside”. He writes of the 1993 bomb blasts that wiped out the Bowbazar kothas, forcing the tawaifs into a new reality “when skin replaced song in a dance bar.” He remembers his mother’s later years, steeped in prayer and longing. And when he discusses sex in the kotha, it is the reader who flinches, not the writer. It is in such moments that Nautch Boy fairly shines.