Books & Poetry

When, late last year, rumours began to circulate that Fourth Estate had spent an estimated £350,000 on a first novel called ‘Londonstani’ by a young Financial Times journalist, Gautam Malkani, there was a frenzy of industry bitching, much of it blatantly racist. (To paraphrase: ‘Haven’t we had enough Zadie Smiths, Monica Alis, Hari Kunzrus etc? Honestly. They come over here, they take our six-figure advances…’) Once it became known that the novel was set among Hounslow’s Asian teen subcultures and written in a mash-up of text-speak, Punjabi and rude-boy patois, the knives really came out. Who in their right mind would want to read an Asian ‘Trainspotting’? And what on earth did this 29-year-old Cambridge graduate know about teen subcultures that wouldn’t fit comfortably on a toenail?

It’s fascinating how much some people want Malkani to be a posh fraud – especially since it wouldn’t matter a jot if he was. (What does it mean, to be ‘authentic’ in this way? Was Nabokov a paedophile?) But unfortunately for Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal – who wrote a nasty, attention-seeking review of ‘Londonstani’ for the Evening Standard, publication of his superficially similar novel ‘Tourism’ having been brought forward to coincide with that of its ‘rival’ – Malkani knows the ‘desi’ (from the Sanskrit for ‘countryman’) world well. He grew up in Hounslow, went to Isleworth & Syon comprehensive and got into Cambridge by being clever and working hard. As part of his SPS (social and political sciences) degree, he wrote a dissertation on rude-boy culture which enabled him to rationalise his frequent visits home to see his mates as ‘field trips’. ‘Londonstani’ grew out of abortive attempts to convert this dissertation into a non-fiction book. Feature continues

‘When I started writing it as a novel,’ Malkani explains, ‘I was trying to do an SE Hinton [US author of ‘The Outsiders’ and ‘Rumblefish’] for Asian teenagers: a book anyone into urban youth culture, where you don’t read books, might want to read. So to have all these people who do read books suddenly interested in it was kind of surprising. That said, I was trying to draw serious conclusions. In my dissertation I’d been trying to work out the extent to which these kids’ ethnic identity was a proxy for their masculinity. I had tapes and tapes of interviews. These guys were trying to be hard, but they were reaching for ethnic paraphernalia rather than, say, football paraphernalia. They were trying to be men in households that were dominated by women. And when that happens you end up with hypermasculinity because they’re defining themselves in opposition to their mothers, rather than in relation to their fathers, who are either emotionally detached or absent because they spend all their time at the office.

‘I was never a rude-boy,’ he admits, ‘but I was interested in that whole anti-assimilation thing – that sudden switch from Asian boys being untroubling, conscientious members of civil society to the facial hair, the aggro, the body-building.’

Our window into the world of ‘Londonstani’ is narrator Jas, a former nerd who’s been adopted by a trio of wannabe gangsters. Their leader, Hardjit, is a violent Sikh whose obsession with his bulked-up body is thoroughly (and intentionally) queeny; Ravi and Amit just tag along lumpenly. Together they terrorise locals, especially ‘coconuts’ – Asians they deem to have betrayed their roots – administering random beatings and staging fights at a disused BMX track. Their involvement in a minor-league phone-stealing scam leads them, via a well-meaning teacher at their old school, to Sanjay, a former banker based in Knightsbridge, who recruits them into a major-league phone-stealing scam that has predictably terrible consequences, especially for Jas, who’s more deeply in debt to Sanjay than his friends are. Unbeknown to them, Sanjay has been schooling Jas in seduction so that he can win the girl of his dreams, Muslim Samira.

‘Londonstani’ isn’t flawless: Jas’s craven eagerness to belong can make him irritating company, and some of Sanjay’s lectures (especially a fascinating one on ‘bling-bling economics’) feel like they’ve wandered in from Prospect. But it’s still a thrilling piece of writing, on a purely linguistic level, and in terms of plot, which had this reader burning the midnight oil to discover Jas’s fate.

‘The language was crucial because if I’d got it wrong it would have been seen as naff,’ Malkani explains. ‘But you know, I grew up there so I know what words we used 15 years ago. I studied it so I know what words we used ten years ago. I tried to create a timeless version of the language, because words come in and go out within a few months, while others stand the test of time.’

Writing ‘Londonstani’ took Malkani over three years. He wrote in the evenings after work and at weekends, eschewing contact with friends and family. Sometimes he would forget to sleep, stumbling into work the next day drained and bleary.