Londonistan Calling (Page 2)

From the outset it's clear that Jas is an outsider, tormented by the gang that keeps itself in bling with the help of a small-scale mobile phone racket. The only thing Jas wants more than to belong is to have a date with a much-desired Muslim girl, Samira. But his Sikh and Hindu friends warn him against looking for lust across the religious divide. Yet for all their machismo this is a tame, if not lame, bunch. Ravi's lady magnet of a BMW actually belongs to his mum, and the gang's mothers interrupt their underworld cellphone business to bring up samosas and drinks.

While Jas persists in his romantic endeavors, his gang hits pay dirt when they're introduced to Sanjay, a former stockbroker who offers to buy as many mobile phones as they can pilfer. With Sanjay's help, Jas successfully woos Samira before he finds himself out of his depth and in serious trouble over his involvement in the caper. The book ends with a twist, as corny as it is clever, which it would be churlish to divulge here.

Such a rich tale of London life is vulnerable to miscategorization. Written by a young, smart, Cambridge-educated nonwhite Briton (Malkani's day job is editing the Financial Times's Creative Business section), Londonstani appears on paper to belong on the same shelf as the work of a new wave of British talent that has traveled from the racial and ethnic margins to the cultural mainstream in a single generation. The success of books by Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Monica Ali has created the impression that a version of the Harlem Renaissance has taken root in the British capital, of which Londonstani is just the latest expression. In crude demographic terms that conclusion makes sense. In literary terms it would just be plain crude.

Londonstani has little in common with Smith's social mimicry or Ali's slow-paced nineteenth-century realist narratives, and it occupies an altogether darker and less absurd terrain than Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia. The novel's rough urban argot and moral ambiguity owe far more to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Jas has a moral compass, but his friends are driven by a mix of priapic nihilism, materialism and criminality that he imbibes in order to fit in. Like Welsh's layabouts from Leith, Malkani's characters make up in bravado and, when necessary, violence what they lack in principle.

The book opens with Hardjit giving a white boy a beating for calling him a "Paki" (which the boy denies):

"Why didn't you tell them I didn't say anything?" asks the boy.
 "OK, Daniel, swear on your mothers's life you din't call us Pakis," says Jas.
 "For fuck's sake, Jas, you know my mother's dead...you came to the funeral."
 Jas just turns around and jogs back to the car.

Also like Welsh in Trainspotting, Malkani writes dialogue in local vernacular--a London-street patois informed by youth, ethnic hybridity, hip-hop and new technology. Much is in cellphone English: "I also told'chyu we had 2 call Davinder b4 we left dis place, innit, so any a u chiefs know his mobile?" asks the gang leader Hardjit at one point. Jas hangs out with "Desis" (the self-description of choice for many Anglo-Asians), who all keep their distance from "khotas" (idiots) and maintain a wry indifference toward "goras" (whites). But they also act like "rudeboys," hang out with their "bredren" and call gay people "battys"--all words of Jamaican derivation. At moments they are saying "innit" as though they are East End cockneys; at others they are calling each other "blud" and "homeboy" as though they are straight out of Compton.

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