Metabolic Urbanity and the Public Bathroom in the BomGay of R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend

This paper considers the ways in which the urban novel is narratively structured by the metabolic life of its characters and the availability of public infrastructures to satisfy their bodily needs. I examine R. Raj Rao’s 2003 novel The Boyfriend and its depiction of how urban metabolic life intersects with the material contingencies of Mumbai’s gay subculture. While descriptions of setting in the novel are often moments of narrative stasis, urban infrastructural description, I argue, proliferates with narrative. I contend that metabolic descriptions of characters’ digestive acts, which make explicit the usually unspoken acts of daily life in the novel, draw our attention to various urban contingencies and the interpellation of characters by the infrastructures that sustain their physical bodies, elaborating human subjectivities through infrastructural description. As I will show, these urban infrastructural subjectivities in Rao’s novel are formed alongside overlapping and interlocking geographies of caste, gender, and sexuality in Mumbai.