Writing a book about one’s own mother is a tricky assignment, to put it mildly. Concepts like authorial distance and subjectivity feel worthless compared to the emotional heft of the moments you’re writing about. Purple prose feels just around the corner, lurking like a thief who knows his chance will come soon. And even if by some convergence of skill and circumstance you manage to do a good job, the best-written passages will always make for uncomfortable reading; Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother is a particularly good example of this curious phenomenon.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly Manish Gaekwad’s The Last Courtesan flows across its 180-odd pages. We see the remarkable Rekhabai dancing for strangers in Calcutta and Bombay, fighting unimaginable odds to send her son to an English-language boarding school, looking back at her own life with wistfulness and wry humour. By any standards, Rekhabai is a formidable character, a ‘funnysad’ protagonist par excellence. And in her son’s skilled, empathetic hands, her story soars.
Manish Gaekwad
The inner eye
There’s very little sentimentality in the conventional sense here. Gaekwad depicts his mother as very much a flawed individual, but his writing never devolves into cruelty. It helps that both writer and subject have an excellent eye for the countless ways in which art and commerce intersect, the countless ways in which art makes and re-makes our personalities. The following passage, for example, is part of a stunning sequence where we see Rekhabai learning a lot of things very quickly indeed — the cadences of Urdu ghazals, the finer points of ‘customer profiling’ (deciding which song was best suited to which patron).
“A ghazal I was taught was: ‘Humare baad andhera rahega mehfil mein, bahut charagh jalaoge roshni ke liye.’ Darkness will consume the gathering when I am gone, you will unsuccessfully light several lamps to illuminate it. I loved the words of this ghazal. The sadness of its poetry struck a chord. (…) I had mastered ‘Hasta hua noorani chehra’ and this ghazal. I was confident of these two particular songs because together they mirrored the happy and sad versions of me. The chirpy melody was for the raees patrons who came for entertainment. The ghazal expressed my personal feelings.”
Rekhabai
Gaekwad has chosen to write this book in the first person, adopting his mother’s voice. This is a writerly decision that pays off really well, especially towards the end when we see Rekhabai talking to her son about his life, his dreams, his vision for his own existence. The way she talks about her gratitude at the fact of Gaekwad’s English-medium education, for example, is quite touching. It’ll take an especially hard-hearted reader to be unmoved by passages like this one.
“You used to open your books and read nursery rhymes. I used to stare and wonder what you are reading. It was music to my ears. Better than our music. It sounded bright and positive, full of rhythm and dance in your rising cadence. It was unlike the lives my siblings and I had ever lived. This new foreign language that you spoke was the language of the rich and the prosperous. It did not belong in a kotha. That alone reassured me that you were going to do better things in life.”
Rekhabai is a formidable character, a ‘funnysad’ protagonist par excellence.
Book with a big heart
The Last Courtesan isn’t perfect, of course — there are places where the prose slips into cliché and not all of the book’s baggy midsection holds up under critical scrutiny, But it’s a book with a big heart and an expansive view of humanity. On the first page itself Gaekwad compares his daydream about killing his mother, a daydream he compares to a similar scene from Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Now, “kill your mother” in the metaphorical sense is a common literary device or saying, which signifies stepping away from one’s formative influences as a writer (see Colm Toibin’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother). In that context, this book is also an oblique chronicle of Gaekwad’s coming-of-age — I feel like he is visibly a better writer by the end. And I can’t wait to see him writing another memoir.
The Last Courtesan
Manish Gaekwad
HarperCollins
₹599
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
