The Education of Yuri | Growing up with Bombay – India Today

Yuri Fonseca, the unsocialised, precocious 15-year-old at the heart of Jerry Pinto’s coming-of-age novel The Education of Yuri, nurses a secret ambition to write poetry. His evolution as a writer is charted throughout the novel, in the form of diary entries where he writes sophomoric, clever-by-half passages only to strike them out and offer shards of self-criticism. In one of these recurring passages, Pinto writes: “In a story he began, then abandoned after three pages when he was in the ninth standard, he had written about himself: ‘We are born alone and we die alone. In between, we reach out to other people. But loneliness seemed to be his natural habitat.’ He was pleased with the lines, they reminded him of something he’d read in a Camus or a Carver. But the words sounded so false on re-reading, he scored them out thrice and wrote in the margin: ‘Glib glib glib. Awkward, yes, but not alone.’”

During a telephonic interview, Pinto says, “Most of us go through that quiet existential crisis, at least young, middle-class people. I’ve had this self-critical voice inside my head for basically my whole adult life. Of course, you also need to have a certain minimum amount of privilege to ask ‘Why am I here?’; you don’t ask that question if you’re scrabbling for existence.” That last bit is a reference to a different passage in the book where Yuri asks himself “Why am I here? Why am I anywhere?”, a classic existential query.

Because of passages like these, The Education of Yuri seems a kind of collapsing of two genres: existentialism and the coming-of-age novel (in the Acknowledgment, Pinto notes that Adil Jussawalla read the book and called it ‘India’s first existential novel’). Yuri, orphaned in infancy and raised by his Tio (uncle) Julio in Mahim, learns to develop a sense of self and negotiate the vagaries of growing up at Elphinstone College (referred to as ‘goblin in the rock’ by Yuri at one point, one of the novel’s many delightful puns).

The ensemble cast of friends and lovers in Yuri’s life all help him on this journey, in one way or another: the sensitive rich kid Muzammil-from-Pedder Road, his first and best friend; Bhavna, budding poet and the girl he loses his virginity to; Arif, who introduces him to some of the cruder aspects of Indian masculinity; the nearly-naxalite Bimli, who rolls joints out of a mango-shaped metal box. Each of these characters is memorable and adds something unique to the narrative.

“English is a language that lives in irony and once Yuri starts developing his literary interests, he also starts talking to others who read books and watch English movies. The Indian sensibility encounters irony at first as a terrible surprise, as a jolt. It’s not very comfortable, but you quickly realise that to be ironic is to be sophisticated and therefore one must be ironic,” Pinto says.

Yuri and his friends are frequently acerbic with one another, and at times they cross the line into something like animus, because of which their friendships (and with Yuri and Bhavna, their relationship) suffer. In fact, the erosion of un-ironic sincerity from language and from the entirety of pop culture, really, is a major theme in the novel. During a moment when Yuri is wondering why he and Muzammil are so reluctant to praise each other, Pinto writes, “Was it that they were too ashamed to say nice things about each other because only girls did that sort of thing? Or was it easier to be clever than to be sincere?”

The book also overflows with references to both classics and relatively obscure books. Yuri immerses himself in books by Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Stevie Smith, Jean Rhys—and, of course, the stalwarts of Indian poetry: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla et al (the last three have cameos at various points in the novel). Yuri, one must understand, is a deeply nerdy character, so much so that after he has sex for the first time, his mind immediately starts ‘re-reading’ racy passages from classic literature, convinced that he now understands them as one is supposed to.

A particularly brilliant chapter towards the end of the book sees Yuri and Co. sign up for a poetry workshop by Ezekiel. To write this segment, Pinto wound the clock back to the time he, as a 20-something poet, attended a workshop by the poet. “Inside every 56-year-old writer, there’s a 20-year-old who just wants to breathe on paper,” Pinto says. “You want to say terrible things, you just want to let go, basically. Because we put so many filters on ourselves, right? We’re constantly correcting and editing ourselves. But at age 20, you have so much courage, you can be whatever, whoever you want. You’re an amoeba, you’re formless, that’s what attending a poetry workshop is like at that age. I remember the workshop with Ezekiel quite well, although the poems I wrote there aren’t the ones used in the novel.”

I, for one, wanted to spend more time with Yuri and Bhavna and Muzammil and Bimli and Luigi and Arif by the time I’d finished The Education of Yuri. Bursting at the seams with linguistic joie de vivre, this is easily one of the best novels of the year, and alongside Em and the Big Hoom, represents Pinto at his absolute best.

Read India Today magazine by downloading the latest issue: https://www.indiatoday.com/emag