Londonstani

By Aaron Jacobs

hen the first line of a book is "Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck'd, shudn't be callin me a Paki, innit" you know you're in for a rocky ride. Londonstani - which begins with that chapter-long beating - is certainly going for a head-on collision of a tone, and author Gautam Malkani continues throughout, doling out a solid dose of violence, pseudo-gangster posturing and mobile phone-worship.

Malkani's inventive first novel is written in an authentic urban slang, as Asian street slang, text-speak and bastardised Punjabi that supposedly reflects the patois of young Hindu, Sikh and Muslim men living in the Hounslow area in southwestern London.

Malkani, who is also the Creative Business editor at the Financial Times, seems to have captured the talk. The novel thankfully comes with a glossary of terms – covering everything from goras (whites), coconuts (someone with brown skin who acts like they're white), pendhus (fools) and spods (boring inferiors).

Londonstani – the title refers to a label used by London South Asian kids - is a wild exploration of the contradictions of youth culture in London, taking us into the lives of an Asian gang. Our narrator, Jas, comments several times on what is acceptable to say, and what will lead to branding as a "coconut." His stomping ground is “the London Borough a Hounslow, car park capital a the world.” He and his three best friends, Amit, Sikh street thug Hardjit and Lothario Ravi cruise aimlessly in a modified BMW M3 (actually Ravi's mom's car), calling out to girls and picking fights.

They are part of "the informal economy," but their main stream of income comes from reprogramming stolen cel phones. They eventually get pulled into a scam involving mobile phones that takes the rudeboys to a higher level of gangsterhood than they're capable of handling.

What makes Malkani's novel engrossingly inventive is that, for all their petty criminal bona fides, these characters are mama’s boys deep down. Though it may seem hard to read that through their pompous jargon: “People are always trying to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a fuckin’ scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin’ Indobrits. These days we try an’ use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis."

But Londonstani is something special and it is very funny. There is comedy in Jas’s narration, comprised of English, Punjabi and urban slang: "I jus mouthin off cos I got me a high sex drive, dat's all, man. I can't help it if I is a wild fuckin beast."

Through the pages of advice on how to get into London's hottest clubs and restaurants and even an endorsement to get an MBA (in order to amass that collection of Prada and Bang, Hugo Boss and Diesel & Olufsen, no doubt) the underlying tone is found in the final pages, wherein the author deploys a shattering twist that demands a re-read.