Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla

There`s been a lot of buzz around this word in the UK, especially since it was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. Sadly it just lost the award, but I view it was a great little book and very, very orange!

What first drew my concern was that Coconut Unlimited was set in Harrow and the principal character Amit and his two friends Nishant and Anand are the only three Asians in a public boys` school.

[N.B. In the UK, Asian denotes someone of South Asian lineage and is considered politically correct to use. And a public school is a posh private school. Yup, confusing.] I went to a girls` boarding school near Harrow so felt rather nostalgic reading about it.

Amit, Nishant and Anand are into their hip-hop and busy assuming the ethnic identity of Black American hip-hop community to describe themselves from their white classmates and their brown family friends. They are set aside because they go to a public school and not the local comprehensive where most of their Gujarati peers are studying. Their parents work difficult to give the fees and hold high expectations that they leave one day become a member of the 3 main occupations which all South Asian parents dream of: doctor, lawyer or engineer. However all the boys want to do is talk in their band, Coconut Unlimited, and be the hip-hop way. As if that isn`t strong enough, they must wrangle their way through hormones, racism, the local drug dealer who is a family acquaintance and neighbour and fragile friendships.

Nikesh Shukla has written a darkly comic tale of identity, following your dreams and dealings with racism in a primarily sheltered part of new Britain. It`s not exactly inner city London. Yet it`s not exactly paradise either.

There were bits that made me laugh out aloud and bits that made me uncomfortable. Shukla deftly captures the early warm friendships that will always remain a piece of you. Yet there was something about Amit that left me feeling slightly perplexed. Even though it is his story, I didn`t quite `get` him. But then, I suppose at fifteen, none of us knows what we are doing, right? The only other quibble is the number of lyrics that were in the text which I thought could have been edited a little more. The best bits were the family scenes with Amit`s mum which were hysterical. It reminded me so often of all the tales I`d heard from my school friends who grew up in Harrow. And the rudeboy dialect`s just crackin`.

Coconut Unlimited is a suspect and bittersweet debut. Shukla knows his mass and he knows how to give them to a multiplication of Asians who are caught between the country they rise up in and the land their parents dream of.

I would wish to thank Quartet Books for kindly sending me this word to review.

This is my first offering for the South Asian Challenge 2011.