My Article on R. Raj Rao's Boyfriend

Unheard Minorities: The Portrayal of Homosexuality in a Post-modern Metropolitan in R. Raj Rao’s Boyfriend.

Unheard Minorities: The Portrayal of Homosexuality in a Post-modern Metropolitan in R. Raj Rao’s Boyfriend.

Ye dil hai mushkil jina yeha
Zara hatke, zara bach ke,
Ye hai Bombay meri jaan.[C.I.D –1956]

Probably these lines of the famous song of the 1956 Bollywood superhit, directed by Raj Khosla, frame an idea about the life in a metropolitan especially Bombay or Mumbai. If the lines are probed into, one can know the real struggle of a metropolitan, a struggle encompasses several phases of life –from identity crises to sexual roles, from gender roles to a masculine shift of domesticity, from religious categorizations prevalent in the country to a class structure prevalent in the urban space. Every phase of life seems to be descending from a small to a smaller unit, which ultimately becomes unheard, unvoiced and closeted. People in the metropolitan seems to be very busy in their respective jobs that they have no time for anyone –for the family, for the friends and, very ironically, not even for themselves. What remains visible is only their mere physical existence in an innate, incessant rat race. Despite the rat race and the madding crowd, there is an unspoken magnetic fascination of these metropolitans in India. This attraction of unveiled plethora of opportunities has drawn multitudes throughout the country. The magnificent world of intelligentsia has tried to unveil this fascination and get into the vicious circle of life of the metropolitans. Different genres and several forms through the innumerable writers have penned down the lives very descriptively and in miniscule illustrations. R. Raj Rao’s Boyfriend is one such example which gives a detailed elaboration of the life of one such metropolitan of India –Bombay.
Yudhisthir, the protagonist in the novel, is a forty something gay journalist. His sexual urge leads him to several hook ups with innumerable number of people of his sex. And one such encounter leads him to come across Milind Mahadik, another important character of the novel and their confrontation leads to unfold a colossal suppressed realities. These unspoken suppressed realities circumscribe from class to religion, from historical facts of incidents to fictionalized schematic structure, from sexual innuendoes to gender identity, from discrepant linguistics to usage of Hindi words in a genre of English. Raj Rao very skillfully marvels and threads them with coincidences and the closeted world of Bombay. The story of Boyfriend circles around these two individuals most of the time, but a female character of significance has been introduced with a perfect purpose to portray the heterosexist attitude and homophobic trait of most of the people of Indian metropolitan.
The protagonist of Raj Rao’s Boyfriend, Yudhisthir abbreviated as Yudi, seems so hectic that he needs an outcome of his mere existence. What he takes refuge of, is sexual exploration of the entire other world which is never talked about. Such closeted identity is neither prevailed with legal acceptance, nor with social recognition, nor even psychological approval of the majority of the post-independent India. This dispossession of homoeroticism has constrained the lifestyles in all metropolitans. Everything diffused into such a disintegrated disseminated structure that people purposely started performing everyday life in two schemes –the professional and familial identity which the whole world sees as and the closeted and concealed sexual identity which the whole world doesn’t discuss ever.
Homosexuality has such historical truths that they tremendously shake the saturated and accepted traditional norms and conventional beliefs. Prejudices and biases relate from religious practices to superstitious innuendoes, from social legitimacy to familial acceptability. These all lead to such utter confusion that individuals start forgetting about their conceptual sexual identity. Yudi also becomes a victim of such dissidence that he moves out of his Mom’s home of New Marine Lines, from the posh South Bombay to an utter chaotic world of Nalla Sopara. He wanted his own world of sexual fantasy be real and true than a diabolic and ambiguous world that he had to lead in his mom’s place. Probably every individual who comes to Bombay for job opportunities or those who already belong to Bombay feel at the deep core of heart that they should have such liberty of expressing their sexual fantasies. And this leads to the mode of lifestyle very individualistic and self-oriented. With compulsions of several tremendous pressures ranging from family to friends, from monetary to professional, the people in the metropolitan than sacrifice their world of sexual fantasy. The fantasy remains as they are and this suppression of sexual desires lead the people perform an ambiguous lifestyle. Speculative measures and restrictive computations begin first at the step of a concealment of real facts of oneself. The ability of fantasy to re-imagine oneself emerges the displacements of ideological conflicts and discursive transformations and this helps to consolidate the very concept of an“essential” identity. This identity obtains in fantasy and based on the fulfillment of desire.1 Fantasies construct a seamless continuum between wish-fulfillments of young age to the present sexual desires of a man of forty plus and a utopian future.
Raj Rao uses this trope in his novel. When for the first time Yudi and Milind come across each other in a toilet of Churchgate Railway Station, Milind a guy of 19 years uses his intelligent mind skillfully and proclaims his name as Kishore, although such proclamation leads Yudi to wonder world about the name. It has been acceptability in the metropolitan lifestyle that no one unveils his real name to the world of strangers. Everyone seems to be engulfed in a pool of several fears together. Fear of truth, fear of discovery, and fear of recognition are some of them which lead individuals in the metropolitans to be concealed and closeted. These fears lead them to an ambiguous schematic patterns that begin with simple unfolding of lies and with passage of time, lies take such enormous shape that they start suffering psychologically. It might begin with simple lies of names where each individual feel afraid that if they tell the truth then their families will excommunicate and disown them because their sexual self portrayals lack a legitimacy and dynamic exigencies of non-acceptability. Henceforth a small lie begins and to accomplish his sexual fantasy and gradually this urge leads the individual carry the lies from outer world to the inner world of family or home. When it enters the domain of home the falsehood victimizes individuals and takes such a shape that the poor individual has no option but either to let his sexual truth be concealed forever and continue the pseudo heterosexual lifestyles or to live on his own. Yudi had accepted the latter more efficiently. What he believed was another form of self-pride for him telling lies about names is an immature way of acceptability of such sexual self. He thought that to hide one’s own name was always very adolescent when most of them are sexually exploring themselves and as he was a man of forty plus he believed he must overcome that immature concealment of names.
Another confounded truth about the age difference of these two lovers –Yudi and Milind –is the assertive consensus of age of marriage. The subjective continuum of past, present and future about portrayals of the world of fantasy and reality, constructs an idealized erotic satisfaction of young age of Milind and a carnal love made in reality of Yudi. The huge age gap between the lovers ridicules the conceptualizations of heterosexual traditional marriage where the groom and the bride also have such huge age gap. The powerful structuring of such heterosexual masculine projection leads to gender biases where women have suffered in oppressed and suppressed domesticity. Similarly when masculine roles started diffusing into dissidence and feminine performances began rebelling into transformations, homosexuality constructed a logic designated identity and posited a revolt against the psycho-cultural structure of prejudices.
As urban spaces of metropolitans lead to a perfect social reality for such revolts, homosexuality also regulated a desire of breaking the shackles of repressed and concealed symbolic discourse. Yudi as a journalist and living alone in Nalla Sopara did that with perfect persuasion. His sexual fantasies revolved around a particular “type” of men, whose odor of sweat and the young working-class body made his head spin.2 Lacanian psycho-cultural structures represented this attraction towards particular symbolic projections. These symbolic structures do enhance the obsessive eruption of sexual fantasies.3 The attraction becomes so strong that gradually once experimentation of sexual pleasure leads to obsessive enjoyment to that particular “type” of symbolic structures. For Yudi, Milind fits into the perfect obsessive sexual attraction and thus he accomplishes the fulfillment of the sexual desire he always involves in. It is not only Milind, the rickshaw pullers, barbers, motor mechanics, delivery boys and all those young working class men sexually attracted him a lot. Raj Rao were magnanimously portrayed the attraction of the other. The entrapment of pressures in the urban metropolitan lifestyle compels each individual to explore oneself through the sexual parameters to class domain. Here may not be the previous sexual exploration but penetration of different classes into one homogeneous unit becomes obvious.

“What I am saying is that homosexuals have no caste or religion.” [Rao: p.81]

Such homogeneity diffuses the subjective division and social construction of class. De-frangmentation of social classes is another transcendence of homosexuality as portrayed in Raj Rao’s Boyfriend.
The most fascinating part of a gay life in urban metropolitan space is its exploration of the world where the accomplishment of sexual desires and fantasies can be real. In this story, Rao very scrupulously exposes the toilet of Churchgate and the pub, Testosterone, as such places were gays of Bombay meet to self explore about one’s sexual world. Such subculture of homosexuality in metropolitan life is very common and in their world known as cruising areas. In his book Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere, Eric Clarke elucidates about the cruising areas. He says:

“Interactions in public spheres become necessary to encourage such lifestyle. It enhances the spirit of a community who although closeted comes across each other in the most masculine places.” [Clarke: p. 77]

As Yudi has fascination for working class young men, he believes that toilets and public loos are the best places to get them. He thinks that such places are helpful facilitator to have a glance of the genitals of the other people. Raj Rao satirically comments on the male gaze of the society. For the masculine world of heterosexists, gaze is one such interactive measure through which the heterosexual men expose his innate desire of fantasies. Most of the men derive pleasure out of this voyeuristic attribute which they display with conscious intellectual performance.
In India, social conventions and traditional taboos are staunchly orthodox. This utter orthodoxy leads all men at some stage of their life to undergo such sufferings of voyeurisms. A teenage boy who leads a metropolitan life always masturbates thinking about his sexual fantastic human being he came across or the snapshot of his idolized perfection in a newspaper or in a page of a magazine. And for such sexual gratifications he uses the washroom in most cases. This phenomenal usage of washroom for sexual acts is projected as masculine structure in the homosexual world. The public toilets help them to display their pride possession with enormous dignity and honor, which they cannot effectively circulate in a heterosexual world. William Naphy in his histriographic text, Born to be Gay: A History of Homosexuality, explains the sense of self-satisfaction and subjective fragmentation of the profound practice of masturbation, which leads to significant narcissist tendencies of obsessions for genital size. The urban lifestyle in the metropolitan leads the men to display and comparison of their penile size with their same sex friends, whatever sexual orientation they may be of. Clarke very descriptively explains that public loos are the most important “corner of the city”4 where any homosexual can very lucratively present the display of his pride possessions whereas the heterosexual males only perform this act when they are curious unexplored teenagers and adolescents. Raj Rao also uses this innate fascination of male genitals in his novel through the explicit explanation and comparison of penile size with vegetables like “chilli, lady’s finger, carrot, radish” and“cucumber”.5 The voyeuristic gaze at huge sizes like that of a cucumber fascinates Yudi a lot.
Beyond the world of sizes, there is an overt description about roles being adapted and adopted in the sexual performances in Raj Rao’s Boyfriend. This cultural inherited adaptation of sexual roles lead the homosexual perform the role they like. As there is no participation of the opposite sex, the homosexual males themselves take part to complete the sexual acts that is one plays the role of a man the other as a woman. Evelyn Blackwood, through her psychological understanding in her anthropological text, Anthropology and Homosexual Behaviour, says:

“Sexual expression and self-description is the recognizable characteristics of a homosexual male to definite the complete portrayal of love. There is a localized urban terms for each of these roles performed by the homosexual males.” [Blackwood: p 72-77]

The subjectivities and objectivities of a homosexual male relationship depend upon these sexual performances. Rao, therefore, very tactfully draws that picture where his lovers play these roles. Yudi plays the role of woman and Milind completes himself with being the man in his sexual performance. Furthermore, Rao also defines them with a typical homosexual male linguistic jargon about these two characteristics of sexual performances the man in the role is called plug or more Indianized term is panthi, and the feminine sexual performance is always socket or koti. This analytical characterization draws a schematic heterosexist structure where engagement of two homosexual males detrimentally exposes their subservient sexual existences. Such concealed closeted world is a synecdoche of reconfigurations of limited sexual space in the world of urban homosexuality. Positioning into a role that portrays their lifestyle speaks unmincingly about the assimilation into the hegemonic cultural world of the mainstream.
The novel also focuses on the most articulated danger displayed by homosexual males is their susceptibility of sexually transmitted diseases. Their sexual performances especially with penetrative anal sex risk their vulnerability of diseases. Rao doesn’t forget to mention about this vulnerable sexual performances that might lead to diseased life if there is no protection. During the time of plague that broke out in September, Milind developed warts around the tip of the shaft of his penis, which was detected as a sexually transmitted disease. Later Yudi also discovers that he also develops similar warts around his anal region. The unprotective measure taken for sexual pleasure led to such a disease establishes the fact of vulnerability and susceptibility of the homosexual males who engage themselves into anal penetrative sex.
Beyond the sexual role and transmission of diseases, Raj Rao also portrays another heterosexual concept of an orthodox societal convention –marriage. This bond of relationship between two individuals has been an assumption of social recognition, which aesthetically portrayed always marriage between two individuals of opposite sexes. William Naphy’s Born to be Gay: A History of Homosexuality, depicts a gruesome fact about the pre-Vedic period where he mentions that the worship of the Hermaphrodite idol of Lord Shiva, Ardhanarishwar. This transformed form of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati has a mythological history. But what Naphy explains is the rigidity that occurred through the preaching of Brahmans in the Vedic period that drew lines of domain for all sexes through the text of Manushastra. After 60 years of independence in this country, people still concealed their sexual world from the world of exposition with a fear of discovery. Raj Rao doesn’t so staunchly criticizes this heterosexual bond of marriage but very skillfully portrays a homosexual marriage as a right for exhibiting the true love existing between two lovers, Yudi and Milind. The lovers very secretively performs this Hindu right in the house of Nalla Sopara. In fact the commitment between two lovers is at sublimity where recognition in the social world may not be that necessity but to their own private world becomes utmost essentially important convention to be unfolded and portray with perfection. Henceforth the lovers do the act with sheer motive of articulated establishment of a definition to a relationship. The negotiation with the psychological closeted world and the real heterosexual world has an innate phobia about being recognized and discovered. Both the world suffers from a phobia confessed to their own circumstances –the hetero-world also undergoes a phobia of the homosexual confrontation and encounters.
Homophobia is subjective accuracy of the heterosexual world where lots of the individuals undergo this tremendous pressure of homosexual encounters. The female protagonist of the novel, Gauri, shows her prejudices about the homosexual world. Her envious hatred towards the world of homosexuality is portrayed very magnanimously when she considers Milind as her counterpart in her world of love for Yudi. At several instances she considers Milind as a hindrance to the fulfillment of her proliferated fruitful relationship with Yudi. Gauri undergoes a fear all the time regarding their uncommitted relationship. The fear does at no place been mentioned about the homosexual world, but it has a structured schemes and patterns related to Yudi’s world of homosexuality. Even the trainee policeman, Dnyaneshwar, and Sadiq, the Iranian running a recruiting agency for the Arab countries, have been portrayed an angst out of an innate fear that the mainstream undergoes. Young-Bruehl finds a projection of this unwanted fear as a typical outcome of prejudices. She comments in her book, The Anatomy of Prejudice:

“When they are prejudiced … they have projected their desires onto the objects of prejudice, [and] the others have become the image of their forbidden or frustrated desires. But this means that, while classified as forbidden, are also alluring.” [Young- Bruehl: p. 229]

In a structural world of several sexual projections each becomes the alluring for the other and this emerges the significant world of another sexual world which confuses both the heterosexual and the homosexual world and that is the bi-sexual world.
According to Freud, any human being is born a bi-sexual. For the world of female sexuality he explains how clitoris exhibits an innate natural exhibition as a penile form in their body, but for the male sexuality he illustrates how a man converts himself the pleasure of anal insertion during his growth from a nascent world. He gives examples of when a mother or nurse cleanses the anal region after secretion of excreta, the mother or nurse unknowingly activates the region with insertion of fingers. This leads the nascent boy to the world of insertion when grown up such fascination of insertion converts into reality with penetration. And for the rest of the males Freud blatantly factualizes that all male love to insert his genital into a region of the body which activates his sexual desire into reality. This quintessential act of insertion and penetration are the prominent examples of the fact of bi-sexual world. Raj Rao uses this attribute of bisexuality in his novel Boyfriend. Milind Mahadik is portrayed as a subservient closeted bi-sexual. His relationship with Yudi shows his homosexual phase and gets him involved into the act through the act of penetrating homosexual partner. He plays the role of man in that relationship. And his marriage to Leela, conforms his act of penetration as a masculine role of a traditional heterosexual world. Jonathan Dollimore re-establishes the Freudian philosophy about bi-sexuality. He says in his dissident text, Sex, Literature and Censorship:

“Homosexual identities are diffusively authentic when the so-called heterosexual or straight person performs sex in a closeted world with a same-sex partner. In the attraction of exploration, this man confirms his sexuality as a bi-sexual. But the most interesting fact is he prefers to insert more on a tight anus than to a loose vagina. A closeted bisexual portrays the true homosexual as a person to have sex with for he prejudiced with his conceptual world that homosexuals are nymphomaniacs.” [Dollimore: p. 23-25]

Raj Rao at certain incidents in his novel paraphrases these facts about bisexuality through the character of Milind. And the comic twist comes over at the end of the novel when Gauri confesses her liking for women.
Beyond the schematic parameters of homosexuality, Raj Rao very meticulously paints the world of class structure very prominent in the urban metropolitans. This class structure is based on both the parameters –the Vedic categorizations of class as castes and the Marxist divisions on the basis of economics. According to the Vedic categorizations, the topmost is a Brahman and the lowest in the category was the Shudras. Raj Rao very perfectly portrays the novel with the homosexual in a woman’s role to be a Brahman, in the character of Yudhisthir, and the homosexual in a man’s role to be a Shudra, in the character of Milind Mahadik. Rao at an instance comments very gruesomely that “homos are no different from Bhangis. Both are Untouchables.” Giving it a touch of satiric irony, Milind is made to penetrate his Shudra semen into the body of a Brahman. The religious structure of categorizations diffuses into one another very emphatically through sexual performances. At the end when Milind returns to Yudi for financial aids, the satire becomes very staunchly pungent. Yudi is shown as Lord Krishna and Milind as Sudama, the mythological figurines perform the rites of washing the feet. Here again Yudi washes Milind’s feet. Raj Rao very scrupulously does create a situation where religion becomes nothing but a stuff of mockery on the pseudo heterosexist social traditions. In the post-modern India where struggle for existence of the untouchable Shudras were very harsh, they gradually converted themselves into Buddhism with the role of their Prophet being performed by Babasaheb Ambedkar. Most of the Dalits in the country converted became a follower of Lord Buddha, who believed the homogenous structure of society. Somehow gradually with lapse of time, this hardly matter in an urban metropolitan lifestyle, where struggle for life has more gruesome facts for existence and survival.
In the city of Bombay, life is like a vicious circle where only one thing mattered and became significant and that is money. Karl Marx said in his famous The Communist Manifesto, that society will be framed on structures of economic existence. The post-modern India experiences that with the urban struggle for life, where living a life according to one’s standard became tremendously tough. Pressures to meet such parameters become so important that each and every individual began to lead a hasty and racing life. They got gradually entrapped into the rat race and kept running all the time. Money became a dream for the unskilled working class as well as for the skilled class. Very soon the religious structures diffused into structures of low class, middle class and high class on the basis of their input into the financial structure of the city. Raj Rao shows this structure very skillfully in his novel. Yudi belongs to a middle class as being a freelance journalist and earning enough to maintain his lifestyle. Milind is shown as a low class for he earns sufficient to sustain his life in that city of Bombay. Gauri is shown as a high class for she is a painter and the only daughter of a retired army personnel. Several characters are portrayed belonging to all the classes of an urban society.
For metropolitans, the space where one lives frames the class to some extent. The image one carries depends entirely on the space that one possesses. Beyond the world of struggling middle class, the urban space is divided into posh and slum areas and Bombay is the best example of such a compartmentalization of space. Yudi’s mother lived in a posh area, New Marine Lines, and Gauri lived in Bandra, another posh locality of Bombay; but Yudi as a struggling middle class owned a flat in Nalla Sopara for himself, Milind lived in Dagdi Chawl, a very lower class area where survival existed in a single room conglomerated for all purpose of life –from kitchen to washroom to living room. In fact, Raj Rao very schematically structured his characters at different parts of Bombay according to their classes. Furthermore, he continues to describe the lifestyles suitable perfectly to his characters. Yudi, as he earns quite a sufficient amount being a freelance and a bachelor, goes to pubs like Testosterone, where fees for admission is Rs. 100/-, quiet often visits with his lover at Café Volga, where food is expensive but drinks are reasonable whereas Gauri loves to go to all expensive restaurants, like The Wayside Inn. She throws parties at the Press Club exhibiting her living standard. The poor Milind was once thrown out of the Taj Palace, where Yudi came to meet his U.S.-settled cousin, because of his clothes. So he was in search of money more than love. Yudi use to give him pocket-money. Later on he also developed himself as a homosexual prostitute, through the A. K. Modelling Agency, for he thought that is the easiest way to earn money and become richer in the urban life of Bombay.
The projection of social inequality through the categorization of money adds several colors to the story. One such color is the conception of homosexuality among different classes. Milind thinks that it’s only high class people who practice such alternative sexual lifestyles. And minor characters, like Parmeshwar, the owner of Medium Advertising Agency, where Milind worked as a clerk, Ashish Shah, who owns a coaching class called College of Knowledge and has NRI uncles in London and New York, where Milind went for a job, and Sadiq –all have considered that homosexuality is a culture practiced by lower illiterate class.
Beyond the tender gender bender, Boyfriend also gives us the portrayal of historical evidences to taint his novel a characteristics of reality. Factual details and evidences are used with perfection to draw the reader’s attention to the ground realities around this city life of Bombay. The historical instances of the demolition of Babri Masjid, the Plague of 1994, and even the reference to Stonewall are mentioned. The aftermath of Babri Masjid demolition that occurred in December, 1992, in Ayodha, the birthplace of the Hindu-god Lord Rama, is shown with excellent portrayal. In the atmosphere of angst vengeance against the religious beliefs –Hindus and Muslims –the country broke out into several communal riots. Yudi and Milind were also affected by this. When they met each other at the toilet of Churchgate Railway Station, they parted of without ever expecting and anticipating for a future confrontation with each other. But Yudi was so touched by Milind that in the anticipation to see him again he usually visited the place repeatedly. Meanwhile when a communal riot broke out in Bombay as a repercussion of the demolition of Babri Masjid, Yudi presumed that the poor guy must have been killed somewhere. Again in September 1994, Bombay was affected by the plague. It came from the city of Surat in Gujarat, 260 kilometers away from Bombay; panic broke out throughout the country. A local newspaper, Mid-Day, had a headline reading as ‘Half of Bombay to die of plague’.6 With a fear of contamination and possessive love, Yudi made Milind wear masks to protect himself and gave him some of the Tetracycline capsules he had bought for himself and his mother. Furthermore, the incident of Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, New York, were a series of violent conflicts between the homosexual people and New York City police officers that began during a 28 June 1969 police raid, and lasted several days; is also referred to when the trainee policeman, Dnyaneshwar, was attacked by the queen friends of Yudi because the cop was behaving as an extortionist to exploit him.
Nevertheless the importance of true historical facts became subsided when city life came into prominence. While the whole country in undermined by the prevalence of a patriarchal set-up, where domestic performaces of household chores are fixed to the woman’s world, the post-modern urban metropolitan lifestyle changed this domestic role. The world of single males compelled to bind themselves with household chores. Yudi is also shown in such a framework where he prepares tea for himself. Raj Rao very tactfully breaks the framework of domesticity which according to patriarchal setup is a feminine domain changes to a masculine world under the compulsion of struggling urban life.
Apart from all these, Raj Rao very meticulously portrays linguistic blend of localized and vernacular words in a genre of English with par excellence. He uses lots of Hindi words and Marathi sentences commonly used in Bombay. Innumerable localized Hindi words are used very artistically from all spheres of life. He begins with the traditional mode of conduct like the greetings in India with the word Namaste, marriage of one’s own choice, Swayamwar, etc. The Hindi localized words are used in context to the cultural exposition of food in lots of words like tava, pakoras, puranpolis, pickles, papads, carrot halwa, kulfi, khichdi, chapatti, etc. Rao also focuses on the localized usage to portray the world of love through a localized flavor in words like, jaaneman, humsafar, deewana, pati parmeshwar, etc. The parameters of focus also have the cultural context of adorning and decorating oneself of femininity like kajal, bindi, sindoor, etc. Even the everyday life, Rao focus of the daily usage of small sentences of localized Hindi, like nazar lag gaya, isi waqt, jaldi karo, saab, kya hai, zaroori kaam, paisa vasool, hat-teri-ki, kaun chahiye, etc. Beside these, the usage of Hindi abusive words like, bewda, chhakka, chutiya, ghulam, bhav-khav, marad, chaprasi, randi baazi, joru ka ghulam, taporis, harami, sala gandu,etc. Beyond these localized Hindi words, Raj Rao also uses Marathi sentences to draw the flavor of Bombay life into his novel like Deva re deva, Pune la gela, Nahi ho, etc. This purpose usage of vernacular words, not only draws a flavor of localized context, but also brings the cultural conglomeration of a metropolitan life of Bombay, where one comes across Marathi, Andhraite, Malayalis, Parsis, Iranians, and many others.
R. Raj Rao has portrayed with finesse the busy urban life of the metropolitan, Bombay, in his novel Boyfriend. The protagonist, Yudhisthir, has been shown in a hectic rat race for which he needed an outcome of his mere existence. What he takes refuge of, is sexual exploration of the entire other world which is never talked about. Such closeted identity is neither prevailed with legal acceptance, nor with social recognition, nor even psychological approval of the majority of the post-independent India. R. Raj Rao very magnificently portrayed the numerous encounters of Yudhisthir with the other people of the busy city of Bombay. Although there is a devoid of sentimentality, but R. Raj Rao very successfully created an irreverent work through the interpretation of class, religion, masculinity amidst the niche of a metropolitan in post-modern circumstances. The transcendence and transition of sexual identity is discussed openly or voiced with pride through the portrayed creative world of Rao. Along with the description of a post-modern scenario of Bombay as a metropolitan, the categories of how class, religion and gender still played a pivotal role today as sub-culture of the post-independent metropolitan of India. Henceforth Rao’s novel Boyfriend establishes and unveils the closeted and concealed world of homosexuality with par excellence.

End-notes:
1) Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 226.
2) R. Raj Rao, Boyfriend p. 81
3) Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, p. 193-196.
4) Eric Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere, p. 172.
5) R. Raj Rao, Boyfriend, p. 7.
6) R. Raj Rao, Boyfriend, p. 150.

References:
1) Blackwood, Evelyn, Anthropology and Homosexual Behaviour [New York and London: Haworth, 1986]
2) Clarke, Eric O., Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000]
3) Dollimore, Jonathan, Sex, Literature and Censorship [Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2001]
4) Khosla, Raj, C.I.D [Bombay: Guru Dutt Films Pvt. Ltd., 1956]
5) Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966]
6) Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [New York: Norton, 1973]
7) Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto [New York: Penguin group, 1998]
8) Naphy, William, Born to be Gay: A History of Homosexuality[Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004]
9) Rao, R. Raj, Boyfriend [New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003]
10) Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, The Anatomy of Prejudice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996].