Book review: Nautch Boy by Manish Gaekwad

Bittersweet memories

Nautch Boy is a companion piece to the author`s affecting 2023 memoir of his mother, The Last Courtesan.  Here, while still training focus on the formidable Rekhabai and her life after retiring/giving up the career of a tawaif, he opens a door into his own life and growing up feeling unloved and unwanted because of his gender. Female children born to tawaifs were assets for obvious reasons, boys were not.

So, while Rekhabai went to considerable lengths to keep her son as far from her work and her workplace  as possible, the 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. Manish`s father was actually Rehmat Khan, an on-off visitor to Rekhabai in the kotha, and did not wish to bestow his name on his illegitimate son.

While Manish grew up far away from Foras Road in Bombay,  learnt to engage with the world at large in fluent English, he also found he was not able to jettison his love for music and dance and some of his effeminate mannerisms, early pointers to his sexual orientation. This kept him forever at one remove from his schoolmates, and when he went to his mother`s family in the low- income Bhat Nagar in Pune, his illiterate kin.

The author`s gaze continues to be a discomfitingly clear one. He tells readers how his mother wasn’t really too maternal in disposition (“violence was a form of care and protection for my mother“),  that his father begat him only to prove his virility and was least interested in him thereafter. That faced with much violence in the kotha, he grew quiet, inward-looking, pacifist most times. All the accumulated scars are laid bare for the reader to see, all the heartbreak shows 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. That while the little girls more or less followed in their mother`s ghunghroo- clad footsteps, the boys grew up battling the stigma and acting out,  mainly to prove their masculinity.

A brittle exterior

I have to be honest: I wondered just what fresh insights Manish 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 in any way compromising on Manish`s unique voice and style of story-telling.

Manish grows up acquiring a brittle exterior, shunning any show of affection yet yearning for it. When he says that acts of tenderness, love and care do not shine through the fog of memories; when he tells us of his maternal kin who belong to the Kanjarbhat  nomadic tribe living in utter squalor; when he mentions that when her in-laws sold her to the Bowbazar, Kolkata, kothi, Rekhabai settled in without demur; when he talks about how he danced and danced, at the kothi, at his boarding school; when he talks of words “nourishing his soul, helping him deal with the chaos both inside and outside;“ when he describes how the 1993 bomb blasts wipe out the Bowbazar kothas and forced the tawaifs to turn the corner (“when skin replaced song in a dance bar“); when he tells us his mother had lived a number of quiet years immersed in prayer and longing; when he discusses sex while recording his mother`s years in the kotha and it’s the reader who flinches not the writer, that is when Nautch Boy fairly shines.

 Nautch Boy by Manish Gaekwad. HarperCollinsBooks. Rs 499. 197 pages.

https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/books/2025/Sep/14/boyhood-in-bowbazar

This appeared in the New Sunday Express Magazine of 14 September 2025.

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Book review: The Last Courtesan by Manish Gaekwad