The 1993 Bow Bazaar bomb blast in Kolkata brought an end to the kothas in the busy commercial district. Over the next few years, as dance bars and disco music replaced the old-world charm of mujras, kathak and thumri, the tawaifs began to abandon the profession. Rekhabai, a courtesan, found herself at a crossroads, facing an uncertain future. Where should she go? What should she do next?
Originally from the Kanjarbhat tribe, Rekhabai was sold and trained as a tawaif while she was still a child. In the 1980s, when kothas were no longer recognized as centres for aesthetics, and society disapproved of the tawaif's art, as it felt it was sex work in the guise of adakari (performance), Rekhabai made a name for herself in Calcutta and Bombay as a singing-dancing star. It was an era when she had to dodge guns, goons and Ghalib's ghazals to carve out her own destiny, provide for her large family and raise her son in an English-medium boarding school.
In this poignant memoir, she narrates the unbelievable story of her survival to her son with candour, grace and humour, never missing a beat and always full of heart.
Manish Gaekwad has worked as a journalist for such publications as Scroll.in and Mid-Day, and freelanced for The Hindu. This is his second book. His first novel, Lean Days, was also published by HarperCollins India in 2018. He has written a web series, She, with filmmaker Imtiaz Ali on Netflix, and is currently working as a senior script creative at Red Chillies Entertainment. He lives in Mumbai.
I HAVE HAVE ENTERTAINED THE THOUGHT OF KILLING MY MOTHER. MULTIPLE methods have shimmy-shimmied on the dance floor of my neon- lit mind. As we sway under the pink and purple lights, I stylishly club her head with a blunt utensil from her filthy kitchen - in particular, that hideous, black-bottomed aluminium begging bowl in which she cooks her fragrant, small-grain, gulab swaroop rice. Or I choke her gutka-scented breath with a musty white bolster that's shining like a strange, fluorescent weapon in one dark corner of her bed, as if it is a discarded artefact of an unrecorded era no one wants to return to. I chuckle when such visions tickle my thalamus. A tingling sensation jerks through my body, in the same manner as, pardon me, a steaming log of stool passes through my anus. I know I sound wholly inappropriate, so I'll try sober.
I often think of my mother's death for a great opening sentence like Camus' in The Stranger. Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
A few years ago, my friend Pravesh and I were walking behind the Versova dargah, which also houses a poorly maintained cemetery. My first book was going to be published soon. You should write about your mother next, he said. I took a long sigh, smiled, feeling the cool air of the tall coconut trees from the cemetery reach us like a cue, and agreed with him, saying I only know the beginning. I don't have an end. And just like that, a coconut should have fallen at that moment and been my end for thinking aloud.
My mother's death, I have mulled for many years, would be the only way for me to write about her and best Camus. It has little to do with my quest for an immortal line, and more with finding a befitting end to her story. Her story reads well, I am aware of that; so engagingly well, in fact, that I worry from the very beginning, because I know the end before she gets there. The end is so ordinary, dull, forgotten and unsaleable that death alone can revitalize it with a scandal: an unheard, extraordinary tale of survival. Of course, I don't want to kill her, although a jail just might be the perfect place for writing. I mean the forcible sex, whose unjust rewards I might resentfully enjoy more for the heck of gathering material for another book, along with feeling a kinship with Wilde.
I would want her to die to save her the embarrassment of finding out the unkind things I am going to be revealing about her. Or not die, and survive this too. As long as she does not learn how to read in English, I am safe. She did, however, ask me, on the release of my first novel: Why is it not dubbed in Hindi? She is cute like that. Simple people are. Cute and regrettable. She should get selective amnesia when my version of her story raises a stink. I already see her reaction: Maine aisa kab kaha tha? When did I say such a thing?
When I tell her my earliest memory of her involved a drunkard she was fighting with, and in which one of her fingers was chopped off, she says that never happened. Who will believe her if I don't? But you told me that when I was a child.
Hindu (908)
Agriculture (123)
Ancient (1098)
Archaeology (795)
Architecture (550)
Art & Culture (918)
Biography (717)
Buddhist (529)
Cookery (168)
Emperor & Queen (540)
Islam (226)
Jainism (322)
Literary (840)
Mahatma Gandhi (379)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Statutory Information
Visual Search
Manage Wishlist