An Entwined Trajectory of Bombay and a Boy
Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri (2022) is an atmospherically saturated, layered accordion, sounding an adventure in scale that simultaneously encompasses the chronicle of a young boy’s coming of age, and a time capsule of Bombay of a bygone era.
Five years in the life of a college-goer spent circling the familiar map of a single city seems a humble, even claustrophobic ambit for a 500-page novel. This novel—from its title at least—seems to place itself within the long and ambitious tradition of a bildungsroman. Yet, in The Education of Yuri (Speaking Tiger, 2022), we are in the seasoned hands of Jerry Pinto, whose deeply empathetic and widely eclectic sensibility has given us the likes of Em and the Big Hoom (2014) and Murder in Mahim (2017). These two inches of ivory expand into a contextually rich, atmospherically saturated, layered accordion, sounding an adventure in scale that simultaneously encompasses the chronicle of a young boy’s coming of age, and a time capsule of Bombay of a bygone era.
At once a psychogeographic exploration of the interconnected nature of subjectivity and space, and a kunstlerroman– a narrative of artistic maturation—the kernel of The Education of Yuri is the entwined trajectory of boy and city. In prose that is both sensuous and surrealistic without compromising a firm hold on the pulse of verisimilitude, Yuri Fonseca’s transformation—from a sheltered, introverted orphan to an independent young man who learns through much trial and introspection to articulate and act upon his convictions—is refracted through his association with the city, through the shocking, troubling, exhilarating encounters, with all its spatial and social nuances.
The literal education of Yuri takes place as much within institutional and social structures as outside their pedagogic borders. True to the tradition of the bildung, Yuri’s is an experiential learning, mediated by the unpredictable and unexpected exchanges across differences that urban geographies foster. Thus, the arc of the protagonist’s interior trajectory is mapped via the ways in which the city morphs as the narrative progresses, Pinto’s graduated revelation of the varied aspects of Bombay’s history and culture, serving as a barometer for Yuri’s own shifting social, cultural, and moral radius.
In prose that is both sensuous and surrealistic without compromising a firm hold on the pulse of verisimilitude, Yuri Fonseca’s transformation is refracted through his association with the city, through the shocking, troubling, exhilarating encounters, with all its spatial and social nuances.
The city is not the only pedagogic site. Yuri’s education takes place through multiple sources, formative influences ranging from an unconventional upbringing by his uncle and an unlikely friendship with a boy from the other side of the proverbial tracks, to a fraught alliance with Naxalite revolutionaries and intimate relationships with women who make him aware of his bodily and psychological vulnerability. In fleshing out this rich, relational canvas, it is Yuri’s interior landscape that remains at the forefront, mediating with a translucent veil of evolving self-awareness, the complexities of the self’s enmeshment with others, without allowing the scope of biographical subjectivity to ventriloquize or cannibalize the uniqueness of these voices.
Expertly, the novel does both. It makes space for the protagonist’s unsparingly rigorous and probingly honest self-consciousness often translated into poetic fragments or conveyed through streams of free indirect discourse nested within the third-person narration. It also presents to us with depth and nuance, a world of plurality and difference that transcends the singular perspective, often unraveling the latter’s borders and exposing the limits of the individual’s assumptions and capacities, including the capacity to fully grasp the other. This unfinished quality and inconclusivity built into the peculiar nature of Yuri’s subjectivity—where everything that is thought and experienced—is felt with heightened sensitivity and engaged with an almost voracious curiosity, and yet held at a distance to be tentatively explored.
This double consciousness preserves the narrative of selfhood from the dangers of solipsistic navel-gazing, by staging—in near-cinematic fashion—splits and fissures within the mechanism of interiority.
Pinto gives to Yuri the ability to stand witness to his own life and imbues his subjectivity with an amphibiousness capable of occupying multiple roles and inhabiting diverse contexts. It’s a Keatsian negative capability as a key component of an artistic sensibility, which also—in keeping with the book’s main orientation—makes Yuri a perpetual learner. His education continues apace his developing susceptibility beyond the confines of formal schooling.
Though mobilized by a biographical focus, Pinto’s narrative is not overwhelmed by the narcissism or grandiosity of the individual point of view. His subject is a lowercase ‘I’, and the narrative an attempt at biography in a minor key. The protagonist is being self-effacing, unsure of his place in the world, and wary of resolving this crisis of confidence by subscribing to a monolithic definition of the self, all the while remaining—like the city itself—patently cosmopolitan.
When we first encounter him, Yuri lives in his head, in an echo-chamber of overthinking, fantasy, and anxious projection. The novel opens with him as a fifteen-year-old college aspirant growing up in a suburban campus colony in Mahim. The loneliness of his childhood–suspended between the philosophical idealism of his uncle—himself a self-fashioned exile from both formal religious life and dominant social mores—and aggressive adolescent masculinity of boys his age, is captured in the poignancy of his solitary prayer to have a single friend.
There is extreme empathy here, to the point of dissolution of the self, and extreme self-absorption to the point of estrangement from others. Pinto charts this theatre of contradictions with expert control, making The Education arguably one of the most sophisticated and capacious expositions of young-adult subjectivity in contemporary writing.
But Yuri is also the product of his unique circumstances, of the absence of formal familial structure, or exposure to conventional modes socialization. His uncle, Tio Julio’s pedagogic style, in which the meditative intensity of lay contemplative life amalgamated with liberation theology and Gandhian socialism, create a fertile ground for the seeds of a non-conformist independence in Yuri. He remains tasked with this independence for the length of the book to claim, channel and creatively deploy. In order to do so, the amorphousness of the socially uninitiated subjectivity must dismiss or reconfigure those institutional and social matrices– of family, romance, sexuality, friendship, community, art, and politics– through which the very concept of identity gets cemented.
Education in the novel’s worldview thus entails a combing of these sites of identity formation and a recalibration of the sources of personhood—free will, autonomy, and choice—which delimit one’s existential and creative horizons. Idioms of resistance and rebellion, protest and divergence, agency, and freedom, if adopted uncritically, might reify into oppressive conditions, or worse stultify into irrelevant shibboleths, preventing unmediated access to one’s inner life or motivations, even as the possibility of such unmediated self-knowledge is shown to be only partially-realizable, with attempts to encode it in poetic language and produce mawkish or incoherent art.
Yuri encounters different iterations of resistance: Tio Julio’s rejection of commodity culture, the revolutionary praxes of organized Naxalism, and the aesthetic and moral subversions of high art. He is unable to align with the logic of any, compelled instead to gravitate beyond existing models of artistic and moral agency towards solidarities based on empathy and respect.
The prayer for a friend made in earnest is matched by only one other decisive choice that he makes for himself in college, almost on a whim, of switching over from the dissection lab where he passes out to a sociology classroom, where he finds textbook rhetoric far behind his schooling in the lived experience of Julio’s socialist principles. For the most part of the novel however, Yuri oscillates between a willing suspension of disbelief, crippling indecisiveness and intense, even obsessive analysis of everything and everyone. His relationships are undergird with the curiosity and susceptibility of an unsocialized, emotionally deracinated subjectivity, which is both beset by craving for validation and recognition, as well as skeptical of such sources of validation. His social experiences show him to be both perceptive and impressionable, unguarded and reticent, at once capable of criticality and vulnerable to misconceptions that are often hastily drawn and uninformed.
There is extreme empathy here, to the point of dissolution of the self, and extreme self-absorption to the point of estrangement from others. Pinto charts this theatre of contradictions—as they jostle for space—with expert control, making The Education arguably one of the most sophisticated and capacious expositions of young-adult subjectivity in contemporary writing.
The arc of Yuri’s maturation, as the novel sees it, is not a neat progression from one stage to the other, transcending adolescent puerility for adult wisdom. In Blakean fashion, it’s a synthesis and a stabilizing of contraries. Strangely, but unsurprisingly, much of this stabilizing impetus comes out of a reconciliation with the minor and mundane tasks that constitute daily living: learning to pay the bills, shop for groceries, handle paperwork after an emergency, maintain a flat, and make lesson plans for his students. This apprenticeship in the ordinary is both Tio Julio’s legacy as well as the juncture at which Yuri departs from his uncle’s idealized code of austerity.
The fabric of quotidian life might strike as a compromise in relation to the possibilities toyed with by Yuri during his formal education, and the jobs of a private tutor or journalist for a popular magazine might appear too bourgeois a settlement for the Dostoevsky reading, volunteering, social-justice-advocating-communist raised on mandatory khadi and grassroots activism. But it is also one that enables him to arrive at a threshold of self-determination on his own, unaided by social and moral prostheses. In the manner of Virginia Woolf’s “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” (and indeed the novel is imbued with a recognizably modernist sensibility), the “great revelation” never comes, especially not via the routes of political revolution or poetical genius. Rather, it is the minor subversion of whisky warming the gullet that marks a goalpost in a perennial assaying of independence.
Some of the book’s most memorable pages are ones dealing with Bombay. This is an autobiographically inflected pre-Mumbai, pre-real estate boom, pre-digitization Bombay. Public libraries and archives are still a thing, and a strategically positioned thing at that. At the Prabhat Circulating Library, Yuri gets his first taste of “the forbidden fruit of British and American pop culture”. The college library and Xerox hub are not only primary sources of knowledge beyond the curriculum; they are also near-sacred spaces generative of articulations of interiority, and where new registers of privacy, solitude, and secrecy are reclaimed, as well as alliances and camaraderie secured outside the scope of regular social circles. The young watch television, listen to analog music, and write lecture notes and college debates in long hand. Premadasa’s pedestrian second-hand book stall is a much sought out gateway to international paperbacks and bestsellers for cash-strapped bibliophiles, and aspiring bards are avuncularly encouraged by the likes of Nissim Ezekiel and Adil Jussawala.
But Pinto’s metropolis of the 80’s is not a nostalgia-drenched, sepia-tinted utopia. It is gritty and literally grimy with grotesque inequalities of class, caste, and gender, urban poverty and squalor are a normalized part of daily life, shaping the experience of inhabiting public infrastructure, the exploitation of sex workers, including underage boys is rampant and unquestioned, the traumatic memories and discontent left in the wake of the 1976 Emergency are still fresh, seething under a seemingly sanguine socioeconomic veneer in new configurations of dissent and protest. Pinto delineates the pockmarked visage of the city in precise, cinematically vivid strokes combining a journalistic eye for detail with the more lyrical overtones of subjective experience.
We see this superimposition deftly executed during Yuri’s train journeys, part of his daily commute to college and during an aborted underground mission. Seen through Yuri’s simultaneously repulsed and fascinated eyes, the expanse of Bombay “[L]ike a big cat… feral, predatory” where he suffers from claustrophobia and anxiety but also loses himself—or rather his sense of being oppressed by the need to conform to a certain identity—to a newfound liberation in temporary abandon and reverie. Likewise, the packed compartment of a train to Bombay immediately after he abandons a Naxalite mission, offers the agitated and disgruntled Yuri the respite of anonymous commingling, from which he emerges with an acute sense of the redemptive power and resilience of the common way of life.
In a sensorially charged episode reminiscent of Joycean psychogeography, rendered with a distinctly vernacular character, an angst-ridden and infatuated Yuri finds himself adrift on the roads of Bombay, his romantic passion and the terrors of self-consciousness accompanying it deflected into a trance-like longitudinal sojourn through the city, where external and internal landscapes merge to create a stunning palimpsest of emotion and space.
The novel feels like an ode to the old city, to the evanescent zeitgeist of “delectable Bombayness”: the Bombay of Irani Cafes and mill strikes, the soundscape of Favre Leuba alarm clocks and Vicco toothpaste advertising jingles with which the book opens whisking the reader to an era that is distant yet palpable.
Tio Julio makes a prophetic sentiment: “[Y]ou have been given a self Yuri. You have been given time and space to get to know that self. It’s called education”. The changing atmosphere of the self serves as the most reliable navigational compass for allegiance and action. It is necessary thus within this scheme of education by trial and error to sustain the doubleness of the narrative perspective. Beginning with a self-image formed early that “loneliness seemed to be his natural habitat”, Yuri encounters the social context made available to him by the city through the filters offered to him by his classmates, friends and political comrades. This includes a glimpse into the moneyed environs of Peddar Road, and the stiff upper-lipped antiquarian eccentricities of his closest friend Muzammil Merchant’s Wodehousian home, replete with “An old retainer in a white coat” and “three bottles of jam”. It encompasses the contradictory environs of the artsy Kala Ghoda, auteur cinema, and jazz that his friends haunt, and the NGO run refugee colony set up to rehabilitate riot survivors and where Yuri encounters a world gut wrenchingly opposed to the posh niches of his friends.
Most memorably, Pinto’s city houses the incubatory space of Elphinstone College where the cliques and clubs of school give way to a robust cosmopolitanism of indulgent disciplinarians, bureaucratic wisecracks, and a smorgasbord of students cutting across social strata. Here in the manner of a pointillist painting, the groupings and patterns that appear on the surface to create the illusion of social coherence are reassembled on close inspection into other alliances, affinities, fractures, and tensions. For this reason, the shared space of semantic playfulness, intellectual sparring and verbal parlay can bring two individuals widely separated by cultural, economic, and geographical divides with greater authenticity, and even open up avenues for common concord.
Yet, as the narrative progresses, we also witness the protagonist’s withdrawal from most of these environments. This break is not staged as something violent or arbitrary, but one that ensues organically through the very dialectic of interior reflection on the one hand, and exposure to the shocks and discrepancies of the external world, on the other. A chance encounter with a child sex worker leads Yuri to a journalistic assignment through which he hopes to rehabilitate the boy, only to realize that his own view of justice and equity, victimhood and exploitation might not correspond with that of another, including the subject of his advocacy. The book seems to suggest that the harboring of any fantasy regarding the other (or even the self) needs to measure its mettle in relation to the contingencies of time and circumstance and the irreducibility of the other to the logic of one’s own thinking. Delusions of messianic grandeur or aspirations for social justice through intervention are valuable in another equally ethical sense: the epistemic humility that acknowledges its own location in class or gendered privilege. The Education of Yuri advocates this humility as an important source of personal and artistic maturation.
This is not the principled humility of Tio Julio’s contemplative life, or the ideologically mediated masochistic self-abnegation of Naxalism and organized religion. Rather it is the humility that emerges from accepting the limitations of one’s worldview and knowledge as products of historical and social conditioning, and not universal truths that can be imposed without attention to context.
This becomes a third, more credible site of education—or an un-education and unlearning. Like Yuri’s response to the contrast between his Malabar Hill students going to an elite private school and his students from Mahim attending a less endowed state sponsored public one, by creating lesson plans to bridge the differences in their social positions, it is this pedagogic labor, at once lapidary and labile, that the novel chooses as a model for an alternative. It is a mode of engaging with the world that uses attention, intellectual nuance. and ethical agility to subject what is given as incontrovertible, to the rigor of critique and the standard of pluralism. Pinto’s prose embodies this agility in its unsentimental, humorous, and conversational approach to the past.
The edgy and cosmopolitan Bombay of the 80’s is animated through the evocative charm of details etched to their atmospheric exactitude; indeed the novel feels like an ode to the old city, to the evanescent zeitgeist of “delectable Bombayness”: the Bombay of Irani Cafes and mill strikes, the soundscape of Favre Leuba alarm clocks and Vicco toothpaste advertising jingles with which the book opens whisking the reader to an era that is distant yet palpable.
The city, like Yuri’s mind. can at times seem lurid and psychedelic, but it remains fallible, deeply human, viscerally ordinary—and yet, even in retrospect, resistant to being pinned down.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
