Pump Up The Street Cred

(2 of 2)

Identity is important to Malkani, even though it never led him to a life of gang violence and pastel-hued luxury cars. "One of the things people always ask me is whether I was a rudeboy," he says during a lunchtime lull at London's Financial Times, which is letting him work part-time at his job editing business feature stories while he promotes the book. (A U.S. tour is scheduled for the summer.) "Not at all. At school I was a swot, into books." But Malkani did grow up firmly in the middle of desi culture, despite his mother's insistence that he speak English at home instead of Urdu or his father's ancestral Sindhi. "At Cambridge I did a social sciences degree, and when it came time for my dissertation, I said I wanted to write about rudeboys. Suddenly there was this whole phenomenon in the early 1990s of young men who'd had enough of pandering to the system. They wanted to go create their own society and not hang out with white kids anymore."

To his surprise, the topic was approved, and he spent months hanging with the Hounslow homeboys, jotting down their thoughts and folkways. His tutor, the late Susan Benson, shrewdly asked him to consider the subculture in terms of gender, not race. "Asserting their ethnicity is actually a way of asserting their masculinity," says Malkani, noting that his subjects' disgust for "coconuts" actually masks a fear that they themselves might be considered soft, bookish, effeminate. After getting his degree, Malkani spent years trying to turn his dissertation into a nonfiction book. "But my job made it tough, and every time I started to work on the book, it all seemed dull and boring," he says. "I found it easier to write fiction. In fact, it was fun."

What he found especially satisfying was that, in the decade since his dissertation, the desi rudeboy culture had grown less threatening, more universal. "I started going to desi nights at London clubs and found that white kids were now welcome," he says. "The beauty of the desi scene is that you don't have to have brown skin to be part of it." The growing acceptance of desi culture may widen Londonstani's audience, but Malkani chafes at comparisons with Monica Ali and Zadie Smith. "They're great writers," he says. "I was just trying to do a coming-of-age novel similar to the ones I read when I was growing up. You know, S.E. Hinton books like Rumble Fish and The Outsiders."

Malkani is in search of a topic for his second novel. "I want to focus on stuff I'm currently obsessed with. It won't necessarily be race or gender. One thing that bothers me now is that kids don't read anymore, they don't follow the news, they don't read books." Even if that concern doesn't end up as the subject of Malkani's next novel, it's likely that Londonstani — with all its bling, gore, graphic language and expensive promotion — will get the kids' attention. In a language they understand, innit.