Author Manish Gaekwad has conducted a remarkable creative experiment — writing two explosive memoirs on the subject of growing up in a kotha as a courtesan’s son. The first one from his mother Rekha Devi’s perspective — The Last Courtesan — and the second, now 17 months later, Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My life in the Kothas, drawn totally from his own insights. Both arrest the reader’s attention with a unique compulsion, but Nautch Boy draws the reader to the terror and egregiousness of the underbelly of life at the margins, in Calcutta, where the young boy grew up, learning how to survive.

In this book, Gaekwad revises the stylistic elements of the English language that the Irish writer James Joyce had done in Finnegan’s Wake, where Gaekwad uses the vernacular and the English language twiningly, with ease and aplomb.

This is a book for those of us who grew up in Calcutta or love this city. The close references to the Kali Temple are very powerful, and Rekha Devi’s faith in the Goddess Shakti earned her the blessings that helped her succeed in many crises. Nautch Boy will give them an opportunity to know a part of the city, the Bowbazar area, where the kothas flourished till the late 90s.

With pride and showing a strong touch with reality, Gaekwad maintains: “I grew up in the Calcutta Bowbazar kotha district, which is no longer around. Old baaris have been demolished or lie in ruins, so my childhood has either been wiped out or is in tatters. My memoir of my childhood years in the kotha is permanently lodged in my head. That’s where the research is, to return back in time, and recreate it as honestly as possible. I have no complaints about its physical appearance, or rather, disappearance. I don’t romanticise the past. I live in the present. Personally, I am a tourist in Calcutta, and I like it that way, always discovering something new each time I visit. Like even seeing a shiny new corporate building where a kotha once stood. One has to adapt with the times.”

Excerpts from a chat with the author.

Right from the start, in the first two paragraphs of Nautch Boy, your growth as a writer is discernible, your style is more trenchant and more sardonic, funny with sharpness. How did you reinvent your style?

My mother was an unlettered woman. I wrote her memoir in first-person narrative. She is incredibly practical and good-humoured even in the face of calamity. She is always looking for a solution instead of dwelling on her problems. That shines through in her rustic voice when she is describing something as scary and violent as being ambushed by dacoits or a gangster pulling out a pistol on her and asking her to dance. She jokes and laughs in retelling these horror stories, treating her scars as medallions.

Her resilience is a survival tactic she has passed on to me. I mean, I grew up in the same kotha. I learned from the best. We are very similar in that sense. But she also ensured I got the best English-medium boarding school education since the age of four or five. That’s where I translated all the razzle-dazzle of the slightly unhinged desi world of the kothas, folding it into the sophistication of the English language. Simply put, I observe in Hindi and write in English. Distance does not alter our memories; neglect dilutes them. It was perhaps the right time to tell.

Your images burn into the brain and are haunting, and they leave a lump in the reader’s throat. Refer to that passage where you are an infant and you hold your mother’s hand, and as you negotiate the puddles, you see the reflection of you and your mother’s face in the puddle. Do you see yourself as a visual artist in Nautch Boy?

I think this might have to do with how we retrace memory and what influences our telling of it. I grew up in an environment that was like a film set where a musical number was in progress. A tawaif would be singing, dancing all night and would spend the day in riyaaz. She was a performing artiste who also orchestrated the entire show, from choosing the setup for the mehfil, to designing her costume to choosing what flowers and drinks should be presented to the patrons at the entertainment hour. All of this is coated with colourful glitter in the memory’s lens. It automatically makes one reflect like a painter, and as writers, we often have a visual of what we are writing, inspired by various media that inspire us, including art, literature, music, dance, cinema, and poetry. Fortunately, all of this was present and alive in the kotha. I did not have to seek the theatrics of reconstruction. It flows unbroken.

Did this major development in sophisticated visualisation to craft this autobiography happen with some conscious effort? You are such an avid reader. Which authors influenced this vividness of your writing?

Yes, it takes years to hone the craft by reading and writing. I often look at my style from my early days and baulk at how awful it was. I have moved from showy to less is more. It happens over time with experience. We learn to chip away at the rock to carve it into a marble figurine. Just recently, I was reading a poem about how it takes just one matchstick to burn a city, which led me to devise my own couplet about how it takes a single stroke of a kohl stick to set a heart ablaze. It’s a matter of perspective. For me, prose must sing and dance like poetry. It must have a beat, a rhythm, but with its ear to the ground.

Where do you think you have been able to break new ground with Nautch Boy?

Writing both books was to understand and connect with her. In writing The Last Courtesan, I got to find out so many things about her life before me. How she fought her way out of being trafficked and raped. What were her dreams, aspirations, how she sees herself independent of her roles as a daughter, sister, mother, courtesan, her own persona, her sense of duty to her parents, siblings, relatives... so many aspects to her. It was such a powerful revelation of her grit, defiance, free spirit.

How many of us know our parents outside of our relationship? Knowing her outside the boundaries of our mother-son equation has been a gift. It helped me immensely to make my peace with her for all the years we lived apart. In Nautch Boy, I was able to love her more than I probably showed in person. Not just as my mother, but as a woman of her own mind and body, not dictated by anyone, and perhaps really as a feminist who doesn’t even know what it means to be one.

Do you think you managed to complete some unfinished business with your father by writing Nautch Boy?

Oh yes, long ago. It’s just that in the book I have been able to put my thoughts to words. The father is illegitimate, not the child, if such a father abandons the baby at birth. And there is nothing to despair and be ashamed of being raised by a single mother. Yes, society taunts a fatherless child, but my mother was enough to raise me without bitterness. In the book, I have drawn a parallel with Sahir Ludhianvi and his mother’s abusive relationship with his father. My mother did not teach me to hate. I met my father a few times, and I have pleasant memories of him as a guest, a patron in the kotha. He didn’t mean anything more to us because, like Ludhianvi’s notoriously bigamist father, it was best for us not to have him burn our house down.

What would you say to critics or readers who might say you have used your mother’s story to sell not one, but two books? Do you see any ethical issues in writing the books?

I am quite certain such critics and readers will not be cynics after reading any one of these two books, and are likely to turn into empathetic converts if they read both. So far, I’ve only had readers and reviewers come up to me and say it broke their hearts. When was the last time you read a book about a courtesan narrated in her own voice? Please don’t say Umrao Jaan! Or about a boy telling you about his life in a kotha? This is a first.

It’s always a historian, a scholar, an academic, a journalist, an outsider telling you such a story, colouring it with their own perspective, where the stories of the courtesans feel disembodied. And here we are, insiders, telling it in our own authentic voices. Shouldn’t that be the most ethical way to tell a story if we are doing it with our full consent and eagerness to share it with the world? The poet Vinod Kumar Shukla says you don’t need a person’s permission to write if they are the reason affecting you to write. Getting a chance to tell our stories is a celebration, a victory. It’s not even about luck, or being fortunate, it’s a triumph for the marginalised, stereotyped, misappropriated and silenced voice.

Julie Banerjee Mehta is an author of Dance of Life and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College, and curates and anchors the monthly Literary Circle of the Rising Asia Foundation