Londonstani by Gautam Malkani
(2006)
Recommended by Malcolm
When you’re in the back seat a some pimped-up Beemer
it’s basically your job to be cool. To just chill, listen to the tunes an stare
out the window like some big dumb dog with a big slobbery tongue. DMX pumpin so
loud out the sound system you can hardly hear what the other guys’re sayin up
front.
I don’t have a Beemer
(much less one with a spoiler or whatever constitutes ‘pimped-up’ these days),
and you can replace DMX with Shirley Collins, but this pretty much nails what
I’ve been feeling this week. Indestructible. Obviously there’s a risk of
outrageously poor decisions as a result (just ask King Canute), but when it
gleams like this, who gives a shit?
The teenagers of Londonstani certainly don’t give a shit.
Soaked in young urban Asian culture, Hardjit, Ravi, Amit, and our narrator, Jas
(the Wil-Wheaton-in-Stand-By-Me of the group) cruise around Hounslow avoiding
college, lusting on girls, picking on ‘coconuts’ (Asian outside, white inside –
i.e. ‘listening to fuckin Radiohead’), making pin money by unblocking stolen
mobile phones, and commenting on the key issues of the day.
Now that we cleaned these streets a saps, coconuts an
Paki-bashing skinheads, we gotta do something bout all these buses. Even with a
special slip road for them outside Hounslow West tube station, they always
managed to cause chaos there. It was the same near Hounslow East tube, Hounslow
Central tube, Hounslow railway station an Hounslow bus station (though I in’t
sure it’s fair for us to have beef with buses hangin round that last one).
In an effort to replicate
the lives of the group, the language of Londonstani
is half A Clockwork Orange and half
Trainspotting. This works well as
dramatic irony – evoking how streetwise these teens think they are (compared
with how naïve they actually are).
But, at other points, Malkani over-eggs his prose and it’s like wading through a
five-hour Prodigy video transcript.
Jas and the boys are happy
just to piss about until they meet an older, successful businessman. Sanjay has
women, wealth, a Porsche, and confidence popping out his collar. They’re
impressed and he becomes their mentor (in a sense), providing direction to
their small-time lives. The character of Sanjay is also a vehicle for Malkani
(a journalist at the Financial Times, where he seems to explore some similar topics)
to consider a theory of ‘bling-bling economics’.
Urban people have a very different shopping basket than
the rest of the economy and therefore they operate at a much higher level of
inflation […] This isn’t about society becoming more affluent, this is about a
subculture that worships affluence becoming mainstream culture.
I found this all very
interesting. I’ve still not shaken the effect that the 2011 UK Riots had on me.
Emotionally, the Riots directly
affected me because it was heartbreaking to see a place I used to live two
minutes from, Mare Street in Hackney, turn into that violent, unhappy broth for
those few nights. But, intellectually too, the Riots held a ghoulish
fascination for me. I struggled, and struggle, to understand them. While the
media played up the acquisitive aspect of the Riots, it didn’t quite tally with
some of the footage I saw: looters grabbing laptops then smashing them the
moment they were out of the store. I sensed hot rage at consumerism itself by
some Rioters, who felt conned into idolizing stuff by a system that despised them. Just because this protest
wasn’t pithily expressed on a placard, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Sanjay’s theory offered me
a further insight into this. Societies are notoriously precarious at a time of
hyper-inflation; if the urban cultures involved in the riots felt beset by a
type of inflation largely hidden from mainstream narratives, then this will
have helped fuel the Rioters’ hatred and blind vengeance (yet be
incomprehensible to anyone not directly affected by it).
Overall, although it investigates
some very interesting tensions, I’m not convinced that Londonstani is quite as deep as it thinks it is. A problem for me
was the ‘complicated family-related shit’ that all the characters, especially Amit,
go through. This spills over into pure melodrama on occasion, and Malkani seems
far less surefooted in writing this than the street-level escapades. It felt tacked-on,
as if the author felt he couldn’t write about Asian lives without a
handwringing over marital traditions and their fallout. Much more successful
(and a far subtler part of the book) is the status of homophobia as an accepted
and even endemic part of the boys’ ‘culture’. Jas has philosophical problems
with the prejudice but indulges in it anyway; Hardjit, the most virulent in his
anti-gay remarks, is also the only one with posters of bodybuilders rather than
Bollywood women on his bedroom wall. Finally, and the aspect I liked best of
all, was the universal sense of growing into one’s body and emotions. I do, after all, have
a very soft spot for books about teenagers.
Daydreamin
is good for you. Better than wankin even.
I wish I could say I first
met Malcolm when we were teens, because that would have been a perfect segue;
but it was when he and I were in our early twenties. Malcolm was the best
friend of my boyfriend, and when I met him I was way impressed – sharp and
funny, with a real hedonistic streak. Now Malcolm is a doctor, and he has
become sharper and funnier as he’s matured. He even had a reality TV moment on
Channel 4’s 24 Hours In A&E.
I love the gallows humour
so often present in medical professionals. If you’re dealing with the thin line
between heaven and here every day, a head can’t be crammed with ponderous memento mori. Literally, it’s do or die.
And that brings me back to indestructibility.
For me, indestructibility comes not from hiding yourself behind ramparts. It stems
from being entirely vulnerable. If someone takes your coat, well, let him have
your cloak, too.
