Cruel Britannia
In Londonstani!, loyalties extend to bling and "bredren" By Gail Tanner
The young and the restless: novelist Gautam Malkani gets down with Indo-Brit bad boys
Image credit: Lefteris Pitarakis/CP
From its opening scene—in which a Sikh teenager bloodies a white classmate for a racial slur—Gautam Malkani’s debut novel, Londonstani, seethes with testosterone-driven hostility. The 29-year-old Indo-Brit author, a Cambridge-educated journalist for the Financial Times, trains his sights on a quartet of South Asian boys (“desis”) living in Hounslow. (Malkani knows whereof he writes: raised in the London suburb, he has an intimate familiarity with his “bredren.”) Nineteen-year-old Jas and his friends are shaped as much by consumer culture and hip hop as by parental tradition and inherited prejudices against BMWs (blacks, Muslims, whites—or “goras”). Although middle-class in origin, they cultivate street-thug personas and a mongrel dialect. “Look at us,” Jas’s friend Amit yells out of his Beemer to a brown-skinned motorist stopped at a light. “We’s b havin a nice car, nice tunes, nuff nice designer gear, nuff bling mobile. But no, you wanna b some gora-lovin, dirrty hippie wid fuckin Radiohead playin in your car.” Soon enough, Malkani’s wannabe gangstas graduate to the real thing, joining a cellphone theft ring headed by a cunning desi named Sanjay; meanwhile, the Hindu-raised Jas jeopardizes much more than his virginity when he starts dating a Muslim girl. Reviewers have rightly fêted Malkani for his audacity: every page of Londonstani crackles with menace. Taken whole, it’s a portrait of maleness at its most volatile.
Gautam Malkani reads at the International Festival of Authors, Oct. 21. $15–$25. He also participates in a round table discussion with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kiran Desai and Jonathan Safran Foer. Oct. 22. $15–$25.
TEST Originally published October 2006
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