It’s intriguing fun when you flip open the thing and dial up the first few pages: the language is rough, direct and straight from the mouths of West London desi delinquent youth: "Shudn’t b callin us Pakis, innit u dirrty gora." Growls one Hardjit as he turns a white kid’s face into keema without sullying his new sneakers, "Hear wat my bredren b sayin, sala kutta? Come out wid dat shit again n I’ma knock u so hard u’ll b shittin out yo mouth 4 real..." This semi-text, quasi-Afro-Carib, baghaaroed with Punjabi gaalis and ‘kuddiyaans’ and ‘munde’, is in the narrative too, not just in the dialogue.
So fa so gud, but the plot is a well-worn one: a gang of (desi) violent teens from the burbs, into brutishness and petty crime, meet up with a proper villain who lives well posh; he’s very interested in the fact that the boys deal a lot with stolen cellphones and he shows them a good time and makes them an offer they don’t refuse... and then they get to know what’s really what in life, like. The narrator, Jas, is the weakest, wussest, of the lot, but he knows long words and, natch, he once had a future: if he’d studied hard he could of gone to a uni like Oxford or Cambridge, innit; then there is even a liberal gora teacher who won’t ‘give up’ on this gang of thugs, and then, of course, there is/are the boys’ families, Hindu and Sikh, straight out of Central Casting (South Asian) at Ealing Studios.
But, here’s the bad news—the Bang-4-Bucks ratio on this instrument leaves much to be desired. Sure, it’s kind of readable, (slong as u in’t expectin a deep Joyce Ulysses type multi-level PDA).
