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 gautam malkani 'londonstani' interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Author Gautam Malkani’s controversial debut hits paperback. The first thing that strikes you about Londonstani is the lyrical prose. First-time novelist Gautam Malkani blazes into the West London desi rudeboy scene using the lingo of his protagonists, a combo of patois with some Punjabi thrown in for good measure.  Inspired by first-person narratives - most notably JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – Malkani picks on desi wannabe Jas to guide us through this world of pendhus, mobile thieves, and the utterly ruthless Asian mamas and aunties. Not so long ago Jas was a pariah sitting up front with the geeks in the class. Then Hardjit, Ravi and Amit accepted him into their group and he stopped acting like a coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside) desperately trying to be accepted into mainstream white society. Twenty-nine-year-old Gautam Malkani says he wanted to tap into the ethos of author SE Hinton (The Outsiders) in telling Londonstani. And the alienation of the youths definitely lives up to their billing, as does Hardjit’s enjoyment of fighting, which is where the book starts. Their crime of choice is ripping mobile phones, a subject Malkani knows a lot about as his day job at The Financial Times involves reporting the many scams involving mobiles.  The tough call for the author was trying to work out which slang words to keep and which to jettison. Malkani proffers, “You have to try and work out what will still have currency in 10 or 20 years from now.” He says some kids come up to him trying to correct the terms currently in vogue. However, his real battle for authenticity has come from the Asian literati. “It’s bizarre that I’ll get criticisms about not being authentic because I went to Cambridge. Of course I’m not like one of my characters.” It’s a book that in its ideas and execution is very similar to the African-American characters which populate the world of Percival Everett, and much of the criticism is probably just jealousy. With Londonstani, Gautam Malkani has written one of the most vibrant and fresh first novels in years, innit.
Kaleem Aftab
Londonstani by Gautam Malkani is out now in paperback, published by HarperPerennial.
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