8 hours ago
From the memoir: How a boy born in a courtesan's quarters became a writer
My mother entertained the thought of killing me. A few hours before I was born. In the hierarchy of noble thoughts, I ranked second in priority. Her own life claimed the top spot – and with good reason: She had to survive before any of this, whether my story or even hers, was possible.
Bachcha jaane do, mujhe bachaao, she cried. Let go of the baby, save me.
To her credit, she did not use the more actionable words bachcha maar do. Kill the (damn) baby. She could not have possibly said that. Was her God testing her? Let go, as in let it slip away. Jaane do. A first-time mother – but a murderess? Oh no, she was incapable of that. No gestating mother wants to be a baby killer. But what if it involves a deliver-and-die scenario?
Mujhe bachcha nahi chahiye, she frantically repeated, trying to make herself heard loud and clear to the nurses treating her. I don't want the baby.
She was pleading mercy to the surgeon gods. She did not mean to kill the foetus. But in this dire situation, she did not want it, especially if saving it meant her own life would be exterminated.
She was being wheeled into the operation theatre for a messy delivery. She had overheard the lady doctor Bohra confide to a nurse that they would have to do a Caesarean. Cut her stomach into two and piece her back again, like an illusionist's trick. A normal delivery was ruled out. There was a high probability of losing one of us. Her pelvis was too fragile to push the baby out, her vagina too small to yawn or regurgitate it like a food disagreeable with her sensitive stomach. I had turtled and turned my face away inside her womb, unwilling to leave the comfort of the warm amniotic fluid I was floating in. She was in great pain – a scrawny young woman who was in the hospital for six months, carrying a foetus her body could not bear the weight of.
My najayaz, illegitimate, father, Rehmat Khan, used to visit her infrequently. His chamchas, sycophant friends, visited my mother, filling her ears with gossip about how he frequented the kothas of other tawaifs in her long absence. Woh Meena ke kothe pe hain. Woh Geeta ke kothe pe hain. Woh Malka ke kothe pe hain. Rehmat Khan had quite the appetite for entertainment. Mother had not married him. Khan Saab, as she called him, was her patron in the kotha where she worked as a tawaif, performing mujras. They had quarrelled about the baby. She wanted it. He agreed for her to have it. But he wanted no other responsibility. He was already a family man with a wife in purdah and three happy children. They were clueless about his secret life in the kothas, or helpless, as most Indian households are when they discover their hostile dependency on a serial adulterer. Main apna naam nahi de sakta, he said. How could he give his name to a tawaif's child? La haul bila kuat! Ironic for a man whose name, Rehmat, means compassion, kindness, mercy.
His double standards aggravated her labour pain to a dirge she was singing at her own funeral.
My mother had conceived a baby because she wanted to get back at the sniggering tawaifs in the kotha who mocked her, calling her baanjh, infertile – a woman who would have no legacy. So she demanded a child when my father was courting her.
Mujhe bachcha chahiye, she tempestuously said to him one day.
It was an order, not a request.
She knew he was married. She had spent enough time in her profession to understand that no bachelor was going to arrive at her kotha with a colourful, noisily musical baraat. That is a rather early plug for the funereal but hopeful climax of Pakeezah, where Allama Iqbal's sher is aptly read aloud:
Hazāroñ saal nargis apnī be-nūrī pe rotī hai
Baḍī mushkil se hotā hai chaman meñ dīda-var paidā.
Unadmired, the narcissus weeps a thousand years
For an aesthete to cherish its inimitable beauty
Miles from being an aesthete, my illegitimate father was only too happy to serve a challenge and perhaps prove his own worth. Patrons love flaunting their virility in a kotha where only a few get the opportunity of intimacy with a tawaif. It is unlike a brothel, where they can pay and have a limitless choice of sex workers to pick from.
A kotha is for entertainment. And to tawaifs, sex work is not entertaining. It is never part of their performance. Their mujra of song and dance is conducted in a mehfil, a gathering of several patrons. The patrons go back home to their wife and children, after kite-flying crisp currency notes for the tawaif's special attention – where they get a thenga, a wiggly thumb, for nothing in return. The tawaif chooses a patron she likes. Flashing money will not get her attention – as they say, tawaifs see more money falling at their feet each night than they see morals in the eyes of men truly valuing them. The lucky patron she picks can be her only one for as long as she wishes him to be – for a night, a week, months, years or even a lifetime, in some cases. Who am I fooling? No patron returns the loyalty as favourably.
The tawaif can choose to have a child or not with her favoured patron. She is fortunate if that child is a girl, who can carry forward her name in the trade. But what about a boy? Turn him into a tabalchi, a tabla player, or any other musician—a baajawala or a sarangiwala. What use would such a child be in the world, my mother thought, if the foetus could not have its father's name in the likely event that its mother died in childbirth? Was there a more cursed life than to be born an orphan? She knew perfectly well how difficult it would be for me. She had seen a worse fate – as a child, she had been used to pay off a debt to a Bedia family, dressed as a child bride, raped by her husband and then sold to a kotha. When a family offered no guarantees, could one be better off without it?
No mother wants to give birth to an orphan.
The Caesarean was a success.
Dr Bohra dangled me by an ankle after cutting the bloody umbilical cord of uncertainty and said to my mother, Dekho Rekha, ladka hua hai! See, Rekha, you have a boy! My mother looked at me and fainted. She could not believe I was stubbornly alive. Like her. She had no energy left in her to remain conscious. She had prayed for a girl. Maybe the disappointment made her collapse. I was immediately put into an incubator.
When she woke up after two days, she asked the daiyya, midwife Pushpa, Mera bachcha kahaan hai? Where is my child?
Pushpa told her that I, a premature baby, was weak and had been kept under watch. A week passed. I was not shown to my mother. She panicked. She had a vision in her dream. The Sufi saint of Ajmer, Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, and Goddess Kali instructed her to take her child away, or Yamraj, the God of Death, would do so. Yep, that sounds like the dance-off of the thunder-clapping gods.
Apparently, according to my mother, the morning I was born, there was a violent hurricane in Calcutta. Bahut badaa toofan aaya tha, she said with astounded eyes. As it so happens in every thunder and lightning oral story, which sounds as hokey as a Hindi-film flashback. Achanak se kaale badal hatey aur tu subah ki pehli kiran jaise nikla. You shot out like the first ray of dawn as the sun emerged from the dark clouds. Her ignoble thoughts may have been those nebulous clouds. Her sentiments, however, sweeten the comical.
Mother fought with the hospital staff, signed a patient's risk form and dashed out of the compound, hailing a taxi to take me home. She was an emotional heroine on the run from her well-wishers. The hospital staff was almost certain she was going to kill her baby. Her mother, Gullo, the tobacco-chewing hard nut of a woman who carried a sarota, a nutcracker, in her ghagra, which doubled as a self-defence weapon, was waiting for her at the kotha. The staff had informed Gullo that Rekha would recover soon, but that the child's future was uncertain. Rekha would now have to dodge and survive the weaponised sarota flying through the kotha doors, risking even the newborn.
She pressed her infant tightly to her chest. Both of us breathless.
A Tawaif Smothers Her Newborn with Love. Killer headline in The Telegraph. I can rewrite my beginning as my end.
As thrilling as all of this sounds, I would have preferred to remain incubated in the hospital. She acted rashly in blind faith – no, actually, blinded by faith. I could have died. She almost killed me.
Twice.
But she gave me life instead. Twice as much. Hers and mine. Our resilient lives.
How did she intuit? Probably grasped from her own early experiences when life pushed her off the cliff. She found the courage and the derring-do to endure its twists and turns, like a fledgling songbird falling from its nest learns to soar before it touches the ground. No training, no practice, just killer instinct.
