Books & Poetry

The most exciting London writing is rooted in the city’s fringes. Gautam Malkani’s new novel, ‘Londostani’ is set in Hounslow, while Naomi Alderman’s ‘Disobedience’ centres on the Orthodox Jews of Hendon.

Gautam Malkani
With a plane roaring overhead every 60 seconds, it’s probably a good thing I decided to set ‘Londonstani’ in Hounslow rather than write it there.

While it’s easy to exaggerate the effect of having Heathrow Airport in your borough’s back yard, most locals learn to press a kind of instinctive pause button during conversation and thought. Combine that with the fact that ethnic minorities make up more than 60 per cent of the population in some wards and the area soon gives new meaning to the phrase ‘broken English’.

With its acres of plastic airport and concrete car parks, Hounslow was never going to inspire the same gritty romanticism as other urban jungles. I’m not even sure whether novels necessarily need a strong sense of locality. (The book is called ‘Londonstani’, after all, not ‘Londonstan’.) But with its characters constantly negotiating their emotional place in society – how they might co-exist with white mainstream society rather than in opposition to it – the question of physical place was unavoidable. And all roads led back to Hounslow. This was not simply because I grew up (and researched the novel) there. Hounslow is arguably the hub of the ‘desi’ subculture to which the characters belong, just as Heathrow acts as a more obvious hub for temporary diasporas.

For most of us, the airport represented one of two things: a gateway to India conveniently located just down the Great West Road, or the prospect of a shitty job loading other people’s luggage on to a rotating conveyor belt. To make the escapism even more oppressive, for some people it was the cheap flights granted to airport employees and their relatives that made possible trips to far-flung corners of the globe such as Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore.

Somewhere along the line, the aircraft engines were drowned out by the sound of local kids mixing up bhangra, hip hop, R&B, Bollywood and UK garage to create a subculture as quintessentially British as punk rock or Britpop. Hounslow evolved into a kind of bridge between parallel movements in the Midlands and the British ‘mainstream’ represented by central London.

‘Hounslow’s very important because the local history of this scene goes so far back,’ says Parv Bancil, the screenwriter and playwright who has been penning tales about local rudeboys for 20 years – first with the pioneering Hounslow Arts Co-operative and then as co-founder of the One Nation Under A Groove, Innit theatre company. ‘It was a hotbed of creativity in terms of theatre, comedy and also music with the first Asian soundsystem culture. And today’s big names in the mainstream stem from that.’ (Names including Sanjeev Bhaskar, Jay Sean, Bobby Friction, and Markie Mark from the Panjabi Hit Squad. It’s also no coincidence that Gurinder Chadha set ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ there.)

While it suits the machismo of the scene for kids to fashion Hounslow as a Bronx-style ’hood – and the borough does have its fair share of ghettoised estates and hardcore gang culture – the airport and the businesses it attracts also make for a comparatively healthy local economy. The characters in ‘Londonstani’ are therefore deliberately drawn as middle-class wannabe-hoodlums who drive around in BMWs and stop off at their private maths tutors on the way home.

Heathrow is also important because if it weren’t for the airport’s retail space, there’d be no local bookshops in which to buy the book.

‘Londonstani’ is published by Fourth Estate in May.

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Naomi Alderman
So much of Jewish Hendon is hidden, intentionally half-submerged so as to be almost invisible to outsiders. The synagogues are concealed behind high fences, walls or screens of trees. The bakeries and restaurants only identify themselves as kosher by the tiny certificate of rabbinical approval pinned to the wall. The estate agents are brasher, with signs in the window saying ‘We speak Hebrew here’. But the signs themselves are in Hebrew. Jewish life here is obvious, as long as you know exactly what you’re looking for. As Maimonides said: ‘Only the one who understands will understand.’

This sense of negotiating two spaces at once is, for me, part of the delicious pleasure of Hendon. I step into NatWest or Tesco and I’m in secular space, with all the comforting anonymity of modern British life. A few yards along the road, in Torah Treasures or Nissim Butchers, I’m in Jewish space. Here, the people behind the till know my parents, and even if they didn’t, they could tell if I belonged here or not by a single wrongly placed inflection in the word ‘Gemarah’ or ‘chulent’.

The duality of Hendon has always fascinated me. I grew up here, went to an Orthodox Jewish primary school and a secular secondary school, learned how to move from one world to another smoothly, changing vocabulary and opinions as I went. In one context I say ‘gevalt’ and keep my support for gay marriage to myself; whereas in the other I say ‘oh dear’ and don’t mention my views on Israel. Most Hendon residents seem to find this constant flickering between states untroubling, even uninteresting. Not me. The liminality led me slowly to consider the big questions: how much am I a function of where I come from, or of where I happen to be? And if I am only a result of a set of influences, what am I?

It’s through writing my novel, ‘Disobedience’, that I’ve come to understand what Hendon represents for me. It’s an unprepossessing place. The streets are leafy, but not a patch on Highgate. The houses are fairly well-maintained, but Hampstead’s a lot prettier. No, what Hendon has going for it is confusion, the sense that it doesn’t know whether it wants to be Bow or Bnei Brak, Tottenham or Tel Aviv, with the London School of Jewish Studies rubbing shoulders with Middlesex University and the Hendon Bagel Bakery opposite the Halal chicken takeout. A place that exists between two worlds seems constantly in danger of collapsing into one of them. Hendon could lose its Jewish community, become just another London suburb. Or it could go the way of Stamford Hill, fold in on itself and start denying the existence of the outside world. But it doesn’t. Somehow, Hendon remains poised between the two. It’s inspiring. At least, it is to me, because this is the way I live my life too.

George Eliot writes about place in ‘The Mill on the Floss’ – the importance of having a place that habit and custom have made beloved. ‘That sweet monotony,’ she calls it, ‘where everything is known, and loved because it is known.’ Although, of course, Eliot had English country scenes in mind rather than the grey streets of Hendon, I think she was on to something. Hendon has become part of me whether I like it or not, and its themes – silence and speech, outsiders and insiders, visibility and invisibility – have become the themes I return to in my writing again and again. In Hendon I learned to be always something of an outsider. And so, although the people of Hendon might not like the way my novel throws open this hidden world, I suppose it’s Hendon that taught me to become a writer.

‘Disobedience’ is published by Viking in March.

Read our related book features:
Book special: The Night Watch
Books to watch out for this spring