In a world of its own. Review on Boyfriend, The - R. Raj Rao

R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend is a usual tale of unusual happenings – a love triangle between two men and a mongrel Mumbai. Mixing facts, fiction and face, Raj Rao coconts a blend that relies on shocks, rude jolts and abrupt awakening for the reader.

The Boyrfiend is a tale without apologies; a tale with misplaced arrogance and a wit that borrows indiscriminately from vulgar slapstick and subtle palpable humour, told in a tone that is as endearing as the smell of freshly minted books and glue. Doing what he does best – laugh mercilessly at the self and the world around, till it bleeds in patterns that are strange, bizarre, familiar, Rao tells the story of a middle aged gay Americanised Yudhisthir (Yudi to friends) from Mumai, who picks up the love of his life- a lower caste dark skinned Milind – in the loo of a local train station, and his struggle to see the relationship through the miasma of life, or something like it. The love that Yudi and Milind share is intriguing and as fascinating as any account of people immersed in sex, lies and Veneral Diseases can be. Caste, class, language, sexuality, cultures, religion and straight women out to reform gay men – all make their presence felt in the usually dark and often cheap thrills that Rao so effortlessly weaves in the telling of his tale Milind and Yudi’s closet love affair gives us a view of the margins from the inside.

The novel is eventful – separation, fights, promiscuous urges, efforts at disawoving the world that was not tailor made for them, and the hair raising unfairy tale like wedding of two ‘fairies’ around a make shift fire in a cramped apartment keep the reader flipping pages for the first half of the novel. Raj Rao gives an insider’s view of the mix-and-match gay world in Mumbai, giving a guided tour of spaces, places and lingo that the gay sub-culture in India is embedded in. Instead of giving the straight-gay binaries, Rao manages to talk about the margins within the margin and the attempts at hegemonic understanding of gay people and their relationships in a city that is still frighteningly straight laced, rigidly Victorian and deliberately hostile to anybody who is not ready to become an invisible man .

Reading The Boyfriend is like looking at a persona family album where every picture, probably because of the angle that frames it, presents familiar strangers. The world that Yudi and Milind romance is like a rubbish pile on a Mumbai Municipal common where the refuses from many different flavours of politics, cinema, caste, class, religion and a city being submerged in riot, all converge unhealthily. The novel is as much about the living, breathing, collapsing city of Mumbai as it is about two men and their romance. Irreverent and thoughtful, unexpected and predictable, formulaic and fantastic, The Boyfriend is like, to use an analogy more keeping in tone with Rao’s own dry humour, an electric shock up the as s – it jolts us up and pulls us down, forcing us to visit the neverlands we keep safely shelved under plastic covers on the bed-stand.

In a world that is easily divided into simple binaries, Rao’s novel is the second coming (puns intended) that puts things into a perspective we did not even know existed.