HOUNSLOW IN LOVE WITH CENTRAL LONDON OR HOW A FEW DESI RUDEBOYS HAVE BECOME ENAMOURED OF THE METROPOLIS

London has attracted assiduous attention from the world of belles-lettres for centuries. Poets and novelists praised its beauty or bemoaned its evil ways. Like any large city, the UK’s capital may be approached and portrayed in terms of antithesis: a site of opportunity and promise or, conversely, a Babylonian-like scene of violence, decline and depravity. In a myriad of narratives, London arises as a living organism, a metonym for power and threat, a hub of human relations and a space of transformation; an encounter zone whose palpable manifestation may shock, enchant or surprise. Published in 2006, Londonstani is the only work of fiction of Gautam Malkani, a British Indian journalist and the editor of business pages of The Financial Times. The novel is a story of a search for identity and teenage bonding mechanisms, of adolescent visions of adult masculinity and of parental control, of the lure of conspicuous consumption and of a desperate wish to find one’s rightful place in a group, to be like others and gain respect as a loyal member of a team. The heightened importance given to Hounslow as a local area and a well-defined space occupied by a community accounts for the ambivalent position that London holds in Malkani’s novel. Technically, both the city centre and Hounslow belong to London, but the characters’ attempts to be equally at ease in their little locality and in the West End reveal their lack of belonging to the flashy urban scene.