The Boyfriend

R Raj Rao

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One Saturday morning in late 1992, Yuri, a forty something gay journalist, picks up a nineteen-year-old Dalit boy in the Church gate loo. After hurried sex, he gets rid of the boy, afraid that he may be a hustler. There is nothing to set this brief encounter apart from numerous others, and Yuri returns to his bachelor’s flat and sex with strangers. Months pass. But when riots break out in Mumbai, Yuri finds himself worrying about the boy from Church gate station. He is in love.

Chance brings the two together again, and this time they spend a week as a married couple in Yuri’s flat, take a holiday, and meet for beer every Friday, till the boy, Milind Mahadeo, disappears (he has been hired by a modeling-cum-call-boy agency owned by the Bollywood star Ajay Kapoor, a closet bisexual). Desolate, Yuri finds solace in the company of the middle-aged painter Gauri, a highly-strung woman madly in love with him, whose advances he has consistently rejected.

When Milind resurfaces, it is only to marry a girl chosen by his parents, for he has had it with Yuri and his kind. Yuri is heartbroken. But all is not lost: in straitened circumstances after marriage, Milind pays his gentleman friend a visit and stays the night. Henceforth, mutual need—Yuri’s for love and Milind’s for money—will keep bringing them together.

In the final analysis, as Yuri tells Gauri—now the mistress of an ageing businessman—everything works out, and ‘life is beautiful’. Full of irreverent, dry humor and devoid of sentimentality, The Boyfriend brings us a tragi-comic love story from the jumbled up heart of Mumbai. In the process, it also examines with unsparing irony the realities of caste, class, religion, masculinity and the gay subculture in India.

Language English
ISBN-10 0-14-302874-X
ISBN-13 9780143028741
No of pages 232
Font Size Medium
Book Publisher Penguin India
Published Date 25 Oct 2010

About Author

Author : R Raj Rao

2 Books

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