Shadow Lines

For Manish Gaekwad, growing up with his courtesan mother between Kolkata and Mumbai meant living on edge, choosing his rebellions, but always letting life swerve on the axis of hope.

- By ARMAN KHAN

One day, in a boarding school up in the hills of Darjeeling, Manish Gaekwad decided to physically break his own jaw by eating a drum full of chocolates.

Loneliness? Perhaps. As with life in most boarding schools, he missed his mother. Missed the way she could walk into a room with fearless certainty and hold its nerve centre in her hands. Once, when a man tried to molest him, she ran up to him and confronted him publicly. The molester did not know what to do. Men seldom do when the smallness of their actions is held up to their faces. When Gaekwad's father suddenly tried staking a claim over him at a train station—refusing to let him go when his mother wanted to start a new life in Mumbai—she simply called his bluff. “Sure, take him,” she said. “I can have more.” And so the father, who had his 'legitimate' family waiting for him, relented. His actions were also too small, too petty, for the largeness of her spirit, for her son's, too.

“By nature, I was the kid always standing alone in the park when the others had paired up for play dates. I wasn't the kind to pick from a lineup. I waited till someone picked me, and most times I was left out,” he tells me. “That did not upset me. It was a gift. So while the other kids jumped and rolled in the mud, I would walk into the bushes to smell the wildflowers or lie on the grass and watch clouds form shapes I recognised as cartoon figures from a comic book.”

Looking back, he believes these small joys helped him understand that he was different. In Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas, he writes of how he hated competitive sports. The principal tried, against all odds, to get him to play football, but he had no idea what to do with the ball. Kick it? To where? To whom? “I was no team player. I had an individualistic identity. I nourished it by escaping into the library, finding an idle corner to unconsciously shape my personality as, can I say, a child of letters,” he explains.