‘Desis’ chasing the bling

WHEN my son was a bit younger than he is now, he was looked after by a Salvadoran nanny, whose young daughter attended school with our boy.

In the late afternoon, the two children would sit in the kitchen doing their homework together. When the nanny spoke to them it was invariably in Spanish, and they would reply in the normative form of that language. If I happened by and said something to them, it usually was in English, and they’d answer similarly. When they spoke to each other, however, it was in a language neither the nanny nor I could readily -- or even entirely -- understand.

They were speaking Spanglish, the American patois now common enough among the children of Latino immigrants to have provided the title for a recent film comedy. So many young Cuban Americans speak its Miami dialect that Spanglish has made its way onto radio and television there.

This sort of linguistic and, more important, cultural convergence is the real hallmark of the great south-to-north migration that has reshaped the developed world over the last couple of decades. What prevails in Los Angeles is now found just as often in the suburbs of Paris or Berlin. The current struggle with Islamic extremists has made it fashionable in the resurgent “decline of the West” crowd to speak of a “clash of civilizations.” In fact, Islamic fundamentalism -- like the various Christian and Jewish fundamentalisms that have risen simultaneously -- is mostly a reaction to the staggering success of consumerism, the cutting-edge sensibility that is grinding the meat and bone of everyone’s tradition into a new brand of chunky but homogenized global sausage.

Gautam Malkani serves up a particularly savory version of this dish in “Londonstani,” his artful, thought-provoking and strikingly inventive first novel about the lives of young Hindu, Sikh and Muslim men living in the Hounslow area around the sprawling Heathrow Airport in southwestern London. Their particular youth culture is a free-form amalgam of their parents’ traditions, contemporary urban British street life and -- what else -- American hip-hop. What they want from life is pretty much what everybody else seems to want from life these days -- as much blingy brand-name stuff as they can accumulate, from Porsche to Prada.

What makes Malkani’s novel engrossingly inventive and, at the beginning at least, rather demanding is his decision to cast the narrative in the patois of these young desis -- that’s the Indian diaspora’s equivalent of the term “Latino.” The language is a mixture of English street slang, Punjabi, text message shorthand and expressions from gangsta rap. It’s slightly daunting reading at first, but Malkani has provided a judicious six-page glossary, and one of the book’s shrewd revelations is how quickly a reasonably engaged reader picks up the dialect. (It’s a sly lesson in just how readily cultural conversion occurs among the motivated.)

“Londonstani’s” narrator is Jas, who describes his set’s version of what Angelenos would recognize as the gangbangers’ vida loca this way: “People always tryin to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a ... scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, brit-asians ... Indobrits. These days most a us try an use our own word for homeboys an so we just call ourselves desis but I still remember when we were happy with the word rudeboy.”

What’s basically rude about these boys is they’ve decided to pursue the Hounslow dream by dealing in stolen cellphones, which turns out to be a fairly lucrative, if intermittently violent, line of endeavor.

The use of dialect narration is, by now, a rather familiar formal convention. Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” and Peter Matthiessen’s “Far Tortuga” are “Londonstani’s” progenitors, as are, more recently, Roddy Doyle’s novels of working-class north Dublin and the Glaswegian “How Late It Was, How Late” by James Kelman. Malkani is able to discreetly leaven his use of the device because Jas is a former “coconut,” an assimilated Indobriton dismissed as brown on the outside but white within. His thoughts, therefore, are recounted in the standard English he acquired before neglecting school for the streets and what some in Britain have come to call “gangsta Sikh” life.

The author is himself a 30-year-old native of West London, educated at Cambridge and now working as an editor at the Financial Times. He’s particularly adept at unobtrusively weaving insight into his characters’ economic motivation throughout his narrative. Sanjay, the local gangsta kingpin, for example, watches DVDs of “The Sopranos” and has developed his own theory of bling bling economics in which his criminality essentially is justified by the need to keep up with inflation. As Sanjay sees it, the official inflation numbers are wildly off the mark because they’re calculated according to the price of a basket of staples, “like underwear and cheese.” Bling bling economics computes the rate of inflation by taking into account the price of urban necessities, like Starbucks coffee and designer clothes.

Staying in shape is a critical part of the desi rudeboys’ style, and Jas persuades four of his mates to abandon their down-market local gym and spend some of their new income on memberships in a glitzy London health club. Its manager, skeptical of the new applicants, requests that the heavily muscled Hardjit, who runs their set, sign a statement that he does not use anabolic steroids. The gang leader showers the prissy bureaucrat with obscene abuse and the whole transaction almost falls through until the older and cooler Arun steps in:

“Hardjit, you really need to chill. Anway, us desis don’t need steroids anyway, we got enough anger and aggression from our families, innit [isn’t it].”

For his part, Arun is tormented -- and, ultimately, undone -- by his family’s obsessive preparations for his upcoming wedding to a surgeon. His mother is making his fiancee’s family miserable by insisting that the “English suit” the dowry agreement requires that the bride’s family buy for the groom be from Versace. Both the traditionalist parents and their culturally malleable children share a dream of economic advancement, but the tension between their conflicting paths toward its realization is one of this novel’s subtexts.

Meanwhile, Jas gets into this tony gym, then ruminates on how much he really hates working out, recalling a former friend’s declaration that having to work out “was all the girls’ fault for only going for well-built blokes. It din’t matter that the flyest guys in the world, guys like Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams an even white boy Eminem, were actually pretty pie-cleanerish. Take Priya. She’s the kind a girl who’d knock back Johnny Depp just cos he in’t got big pecs.”

Pop culture and high-style brand names stud the thoughts and conversation of Jas and his friends. Here he is dressing for a night out clubbing:

“The white Calvin Klein chuds (underwear) come on first, then the high-collar Reiss shirt, the Reiss trousers, an then I’m back sitting on the bed to pull up the socks again. The other guys’ll be wearin their best garms for tonite. But I was wearin my second-best garms, save my best garms (my chunky black DKNY top and grey Prada slacks) for tomorrow’s date with Samira.

“Even before I put my Patrick Cox loafers on an stand up, I get this fellin I’m still gonna look like a pehndu [fool].”

Samira happens to be a Muslim, and Jas’ infatuation with her not only violates a traditional taboo but also resonates through his gangsta life with tragic consequences -- first for his “bredren,” then for his uncomprehending parents.

This is an impressive, in some respects brilliant, first novel. It is intelligent, keenly observed and, though never didactic, concerned in a moral sense with its characters’ lives. Its specificity opens a window to a compelling view of things widely significant. “Londonstani” deserves a wide audience because it is one of those rare books that repays its reader with an engaging literary experience and thoughts about things that matter to us all.

*

Londonstani

A Novel

Gautam Malkani

Penguin Press: 352 pp., $24.95