Award-winning writer and poet Jerry Pinto started penning his recently launched book, The Education of Yuri, some five years ago. The idea struck him when he was passing by Mumbai’s Elphinstone College where he studied liberal arts for three years from 1981 onwards. “I was afraid that they would be the best days of my life and that was why I closed the door firmly on the college and did not return until 20 years had elapsed,” he says. This is not a novel about him though. It is a work of fiction that traverses a varied spectrum of themes — from love and loss to adolescence and politics, as Jerry describes it.
The novel has earned rave reviews, some of which define it as ‘India’s first, coming-of-age novel on existentialism’. That, however, wasn’t Jerry’s intention when he set out to write it. “I wrote it inward-out, with the hope of understanding the processes of becoming. The idea of the bildungsroman has always been a source of fascination and terror; I guess the only way to exorcise it was to do it. Therefore, I worked with exteriors — he said, he did, they said — and then with thought and then with the internal dialogue with which the self-aware are plagued,” he says.
The novel engages with Bombay of the ‘80s through the eyes of a 15-year-old boy Yuri Fonseca of downmarket Mahim, who is described as ‘sometimes awkward, sometimes lonely’, and how he ‘struggles to write poetry, worries if he will ever get and hold a job, and flirts briefly with Naxalism’.
