A Life in Search of Fulfilment
Kalpana Kannabiran
THE LAST COURTESAN: WRITING MY MOTHER’S MEMOIR by By Manish Gaekwad HarperCollins Publishers, New Delhi, 2023, 185 pp., INR 599.00
October 2024, volume 48, No 10

I was the last courtesan to leave Bandook Gully. By the time I had to leave, everything was over…The kotha was in a shamble…I found myself again living alone on the first floor, with all other rooms shut…I looked after a few stray cats…They were the only friends I had left. I wore Dilip sir’s gifted nose pin and looked into the mirror, counting the creases and wrinkles that time had strewn on my face. The diamond glinted like a humbling, sacred truth (p. 176).

An extraordinary story of a life pieced together, precariously poised on the precipice (of bare life, survival, and violence)—accepted ‘like a warrior’, lived with compassion, dignity, love, detachment, and wry humour, and narrated as it was lived, with brutal honesty. This is the texture of Manish Gaekwad’s Introduction and Afterword as well—and his writing of his mother’s memoir.

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