Dancing to a different tune

In The Last Courtesan, Writing My Mother's Memoir, Manish Gaekwad creates a formidable image of his mother, Rekhabai, and her single-minded determination to live on her terms despite the cards that life and society had dealt her.

- AKANKSHYA ABISMRUTA

BOOKS & IDEAS

That memoir read like an actionpacked film featuring adventures across dargahs, melas, goons, fire and murders in kothas. Her desire, at all times, was to provide a better future to her siblings and, later, her son. She put him in boarding school at the age of five, afraid of how he would fare in her environment. She didn't know what he thought or felt, for he was always silent. In Nautch Boy, Gaekwad breaks his silence to express how violence shaped it in the first place.