R. Raj Rao
Il mio ragazzo (The Boyfriend)

ISBN 9788896317051
Pages 320
Euro 14,50

After a fulminating start of almost exasperated realism, the author tells us an intense story of homosexual love between a journalist and a Dalit, an untouchable, in a Bombay, which seems as calm and tender as it is sordid and violent. After a brief sexual encounter in a public toilet at the railway station, forty-something journalist Yudi begins a relationship with nineteen-year-old Milind, and invites him to stay in his flat in the weeks when bombs went off on the urban trains, causing hundreds of victims and  making a mark on life in the city. In the period of time that opens up before them, until the city can come to life again, the two try to live together, measuring up the extent to which they belong to their respective social classes. Yudi wants to initiate the young man without a caste to reading, and in his turn Milind tries to undermine the intellectual certainties of the journalist. When Yudi introduces the Dalit into his circle of friends who are media and film professionals, Milind suddenly disappears along with a TV producer, embarking on his own ascent as model and bit actor in the undergrowth of Bollywood at its most corrupt. Looking for the young man all over the city, the journalist, concerned by the fragmentary news which becomes more and more worrying, starts his journey first in the Bombay of cinema and fashion and then, following the traces of Milind’s family, in the community of the untouchables, even taking part in their commemorative march, on the day dedicated to the defence of the rights of the casteless. Will he find his companion who is so similar to him and yet so different?

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Resources

• Cover
• Il mio Ragazzo - Liberazione
• Il mio Ragazzo - Internazionale
• Il mio Ragazzo - Il Manifesto
• Il mio Ragazzo - Pride
• Il mio ragazzo - L'Espresso