The Life of a Courtesan

 

Book Review

Title: The Last Courtesan: Writing my mother’s memoir

Author: Manish Gaekwad

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023

Pages: 185

Writing the biography of one’s mother who was a courtesan is not quite a pleasant task. Manish Gaekwad undertakes that arduous task in this book and does a fairly eminent job with it.

‘Courtesan’ may not be quite the exact translation of ‘tawaif,’ which is what Rekha, Gaekwad’s mother, was. A courtesan is essentially a sex worker whose clients are wealthy men. But a tawaif is primarily an artiste, a singer of ghazals as well as a dancer. Sex is part of that job, no doubt. When a woman sings lines like Apna bana le meri jaan / Haye re main tere qurbaan [Make me yours, my love / I am your sacrifice] to a man, sex becomes a natural climax of the show.

Rekha is a tawaif. She tells her own story in this book. The author writes the narrative as if his mother is telling him her life’s story. Towards the end of the narrative, Rekha asserts that there is a marked difference between prostitution and being a tawaif. A tawaif is “trying to live with a little dignity,” she says, “working for it. Sex work in Sonagachi (red-light area in Kolkata) was an altogether different profession.” Art lies at the heart of the tawaif’s profession.

A tawaif is initiated into her profession through sex, however. The ritual is usually performed by a goon as it happens with Rajjo, a cousin of Rekha’s. “I have seen all of these cousin sisters come to me and ruin themselves eventually,” says Rekha. Many women who knew Rekha were attracted to the profession by Rekha’s success in it. But it isn’t easy to succeed in the profession because you need to be a singer and a dancer before being a seductive woman. And a lot of will to live too.

“Dekh, look, Rajjo, do as he says, I said, and no one will be hurt,” Rekha says in her narrative. She is counselling Rajjo to give in to Rab’s demand. Rab is a goon. A lot of goons are present in the life of a courtesan; they are her local guardians. Rajjo “knew she would be damaged for the rest of her life, but she was willing to go. She wanted to be a tawaif.” So she goes with Rab. And when she returns, her eyes remain lowered. “We did not speak of what happened. We just hugged each other and wept.”

Rekha’s grief is genuine. She knows what it means to be born a woman in an impoverished Indian family. She was one of the nine girl children of her parents. When she was born, her father took the newborn girl to a pond in order to drown her. He didn’t want yet another girl. But “someone persuaded him to calm down.”

Rekha says she never bothered to learn her father’s name. She called him Taadiya (toddy-drinker) as all others did. He was a night watchman in a motor company and a drinker in the daytime. And her mother was “a defective baby-producing machine, whose function was to ultimately give him (her husband) a male child and prove her own worth as a woman.” Their tenth child was a boy. The boy was treasured much by everyone in the family so much so he grew up into a good-for-nothing adult.

It is a man’s world in most parts of India even today. The man rules and the woman subjects herself to that rule meekly. As soon as Rekha grew old enough to be on her own feet, she started working: cooking, cleaning, carrying things, washing clothes… And being another man’s servant in the designation of wife. She was married to Ramlal when she was nine or ten.

The marriage was a commercial deal. Taadiya had to repay a loan and he couldn’t. So she gave Rekha to the boy of the family. And that husband sold her to the pimps in Calcutta’s streets redolent of men, semen, and music. Rekha became a tawaif, a successful one, one who went on to make a lot of money.

Rekha never became pregnant in spite of the many men who came and went through her life. So she became an object of ridicule among fellow courtesans who were already jealous of her success. Rekha asks one of her patrons, one Rehmat, to give her a child. She becomes Rehmat’s unofficial wife. But it is only after a medical intervention that Rekha becomes a mother, the mother of the author of this book.

Rekha wanted a girl child because only a girl can survive successfully in the world of courtesans. What will a boy do in that world? Become a goon? Or an ustad? Rekha is rich as well as concerned enough to send her son to a residential school in Kurseong and later to another in Darjeeling.

At the school in Kurseong, she is unable to name the boy’s father. She doesn’t want to give a Muslim name though Rehmat is the boy’s real father. She gives her brother-in-law’s name, Anoop Gagade. But the principal understood Gagade as Gaekwad and thus Manish got his surname.

Rekha died on 14 Feb 2023. “She chose a day of love, Valentine’s Day, to leave,” Manish writes. She was “a beautiful, brave and extraordinary woman,” Manish concludes her story. You are welcome to read her story in detail in Manish’s book. Writing about one’s own mother who was a courtesan is never easy. Manish has done a fairly commendable job with it though occasionally we get the feeling that certain details are modified for the sake of making the courtesan more heroic than she probably was. The book deserves a read if only to get to a ring side view of the world of the tawaifs.