Yuri and the dishes of delectable Bombayness

Yuri Fonseca of Mahim, raised without family but for his uncle, has grown up lonely. Now, he struggles with making friends. As the story opens on him joining senior college, his sense of awkwardness stings him. Called padri ka bachcha at school and culturally different from his peers, he has grown up hurt. In college, he longs for friendship without knowing how to keep friends close. He also seeks purpose and a firm idea of his values. You find yourself not pitying or idealising his struggle, but you feel for him.

This story of growing up is nostalgic, compassionate and frequently hilarious, and exceptional for its main character and its evocation of its setting and time, the Bombay of the 1980s.

How vividly Yuri puts you in the shoes of this middle-class youth studying for a Bachelor’s degree in artsy Kala Ghoda, and helps you see through his eyes as a huge array of relationships and neighbourhoods unspools before him. A Bombay is evoked which had just put behind itself the defilements of freedoms during the Emergency, and was roiled by the great millworkers’ strike that transformed it forever, and was shocked by the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi in Delhi followed by massacres of Sikhs.

In that period, Communism had lost ground in Bombay 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.

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.

EVOKING THE OLD CITY

HT ARCHIVES Back when CST was still Victoria Terminus.