Yuri and the dishes of delectable Bombayness
Yfrequently hilarious, and exceptional for its main character and its evocation of its setting and time, the Bombay of the 1980s. uri Fonseca of Mahim, How vividly Yuri puts you in raised without family the shoes of this middle-class but for his uncle, has youth studying for a Bachelor’s grown up lonely. Now, degree in artsy Kala Ghoda, and he struggles with making helps you see through his eyes friends. As the story opens on as a huge array of relationships him joining senior college, his and neighbourhoods unspools sense of awkwardness stings before him. A Bombay is evoked him. Called padri ka bachcha at which had just put behind itself school and culturally different the defilements of freedoms from his peers, he has grown up during the Emergency, and was hurt. In college, he longs for roiled by the great millworkers’ friendship without knowing strike that transformed it forever, how to keep friends close. He and was shocked by the also seeks purpose and a firm assassination of prime minister idea of his values. You find yourself Indira Gandhi in Delhi followed not pitying or idealising his by massacres of Sikhs. struggle, but you feel for him. In that period, Communism
This story of growing up is had lost ground in Bombay and nostalgic, compassionate and Marathi nativism was yet to become dominant.
These momentous events colour Yuri’s life in Elphinstone College (which is one of the real places mentioned). For the most part, look out for Yuri’s college life with hilarious classroom interactions, his jokey banter with friends, intense conversations with the girl whom he is seeing, and one mind-bending, amnesiac evening filled with transgression and adventure.
Yuri’s Bombay is years away from morphing into Mumbai. Yuri’s Bombay is
(since it’s overkill to use the phrase “more democratic”) an open place, which creates circumstances where the richie-riches and the scraping-bys (Yuri) shoot the breeze in the same public spaces.
Here, even awkward Yuri finds friendships and other intimacies. His first real friend, the endearingly kooky Muzammil, is from Pedder Road no less. Were Yuri set in today’s Mumbai, Yuri-Muzammil’s bromance might or might not happen. Their paths might not cross.
The Education of Yuri Jerry Pinto 408pp, ~599 Speaking Tiger
Friendships might look very different today. And so you cherish the scene where Arif takes Yuri to eat an omelette, and the smell of onion and garlic, says Arif, “means no kisses” from his girlfriend, who is Jain. Arif gladly orders an omelette without these ingredients.
Yuri too is having what today one might call a “situationship”, with a girl of Hindu heritage named Bhavna. In Yuri’s words, “They (he and Bhavna) both knew it wasn’t love, and neither of them was sad about this. Which was a good thing, he supposed.” Bhavna is a government official’s daughter who asks questions of her own privilege and of Yuri’s sensibilities as a man, and negotiates her internal conflicts.
Another classmate, Bimli, eventually joins a Naxalite group in Chandrapur.
Even the minor characters, whom one might affectionately or not-so-affectionately call Bombay namoonas, are memorable: the hefty, lachrymose and fabulously named Tehmtan Bodybuilder, who, in one scene, melodramatically invokes khodaai; the harried commuters of Churchgate and Mahim, who exhibit a variant of road rage one might call “walker’s wrath”; the bookseller on the footpath, Premadasa, who scans a customer’s clothes or manner to recommend intriguing titles as cannily as his real-life counterparts do; the sassy waiter at Milk Bar who serves up oily, tasty dishes of “delectable Bombayness” with a side of Bambaiya Hindi.
Real-life folk iconically identified with the city, too, make cameo appearances. Yuri meets, in two poetry circles at Kala Ghoda, the poet-pitamahs Nissim Ezekiel and Adil Jussawala.
The Education of Yuri eschews a romanticising of the past. While dwelling on the
city’s cosmopolitanism, it also holds it to the light so one can see the gaps. Still, 1980s Bombay is evoked so vividly, it gets under your skin, and you might just mistake it for memory.