On masculinity, memory, and learning to be soft

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 line-up. 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.

PERFORMING TENDERNESS 

While boarding school meant short-lived romantic liaisons and kissing straight-passing boys who also played football, the world around him reacted very differently to his tenderness. The boys could not fathom why he preferred dancing to sports. But, concurrently, when he visited the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, the flower sellers recognised something in him: protecting him from the world outside.

“A boy’s masculinity can become a curse, but his femininity is never a blessing,” he writes. “I had to learn to balance the two.” At the dargah, the exchange with the flower sellers lasted barely a few minutes. Why then does the memory endure so fiercely? Why was that fleeting recognition so essential to the making of his life? 

“It could be because in the dargah, when my mother and I were free from the kotha’s limitations, in a spiritually charged atmosphere, I was, for the first time, in direct contact with men, unlike the patrons of the kotha, whom I never met, only saw through a hole in a purdah I peeped through,” he recounts. It was the first time he made eye contact, in a way, with performers, sitting opposite them on the khadims’ (hereditary custodians) gaddi in the foyer, listening to qawwals belt out Damadam Mast Qalandar. He was, for the first time, smelling the mogras in the mehfil and offering the nazrana, a monetary token, for their performance. 

“The qawwals, the phoolwala, became the bee-workers, the tawaifs of the kotha,” he says. “In a subversive way, I became the patron of the arts. In my eyes, a tenderness reflected that perhaps the phoolwalas recognised was meant for them, just as the tawaif reads her patrons.”

PERFORMER AND THE PERFORMED 

As one reads the book, it becomes clear that Gaekwad is not speaking to his mother. There are no scores to settle. He is not speaking to his bullies either. Even the reader is a faint blur on the horizon of comprehension. He is, if anything, speaking only to himself, and everyone else is simply allowed to listen. If it were an audiobook, it would be narrated in a whisper. The details force you to confront a life beyond the sanitised universe of Bollywood.

Unlike the visually inflated imagination of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films—and the lone series that massacres all sense—the kothas Gaekwad inhabits are not geometrically constructed fantasies of symmetry and form. In the book, he notes how, except for the entombment of Anarkali in Mughal-E-Azam (1960), no Bollywood Film comes remotely close to the lived realities of the kotha. After all, none of these works ever depicts someone like him: the boy peeping from behind a translucent purdah in a dimly lit corner. 

It was always a world of contradictions and anger. For one, his mother never performed for him and swore she never would. For the longest time, he resented her for not even letting him touch the baaja, or the tabla, or rattle the ghungroo. “She would slap my wrist if she caught me, saying, ‘Mat choo, gandi cheez hai, tere kaam ki nahi, apni padhai mein dhyaan de (Don’t’ touch, it’s dirty; none of your business, you concentrate on your studies).’ I think she was trying to protect me from a life of strife she had lived, and believed an education could change my fortunes,” he says.

He watched her do her riyaaz in the mornings, singing with an ustad, rehearsing Kathak. The evening mujra was forbidden territory. He could not watch, not even through a curtain or peephole. “She would say it is not for kids. That seemed fair. We did not have the money to pay for it anyway. And sometimes it went on for hours, which bored me, waiting outside for it to end so that I could eat or watch TV,” he laughs. “But somehow, that mahaul seeped into my bones. It shaped my writing. If my sentence isn’t singing and dancing, I step away and wait for the muses to return.” 

Now that the stories have been told: ironies exposed, contradictions acknowledged, embarrassments exposed—does writing Nautch Boy bring closure? Regarding death, Gaekwad writes that he knows his mother will not die without him beside her. She is too stubborn to let that happen. But the deaths of those she loves unsettle her deeply. When Mohammed Ra? died, he remembers her going to the Bombay Hospital, where he had been admitted, and sobbing like a child. Yet death is too minor a blip for both of them now. 

The book, at least for Gaekwad, has settled all scores. “It is a goodbye letter to childhood. I do not have any demons to fight, and I do not feel a need to change anything. It is all done and dusted, and now I am moving forward. Can’t live like a relic.”

Lead image: Manish Gaekwad; Inside images: Manish Gaekwad, Amazon India

This article first appeared in the December 2025 print edition of Harper's Bazaar India
 

Also read: Homebound's Oscar shortlist underscores a growing appetite for nuance in Indian cinema

Also read: A look at the 'guilt gene' and why we struggle to choose ourselves