On Being Brown: An Interview with Nikesh Shukla
Nikesh Shukla, acclaimed author of Coconut Unlimited, chats to Iman Qureshi about his Comedy Lab sit-com Kabaddasses, his upcoming novel, and the trials and tribulations of being brown
Naturally, my first question for Nikesh Shukla is: so what’s it like being brown?
“Well,” he replies shaking his head mock-morosely, “I wake up, my melanin’s playing up – I feel lighter one day, darker another.
“Sometimes I have cereal for breakfast,” he continues. “I usually shower… mostly shower. You know what, here’s an exclusive – I always shower.
“That’s what it’s like being Asian,” he shrugs coolly.
Usually? Mostly? Do you mean brown people don’t always shower? I ask in feigned wide-eyed wonder. Is that why they’re brown?
“Judging by the amount of times I’ve been asked that question, I appear to be one of the few Asians who shower in the world,” he nods solemnly.
It’s no secret that Nikesh is sick of being pigeon-holed as an ‘Asian writer’, and although I’ve promised to take the interview in a different direction, I simply can’t resist the ironic jibes.
Nikesh’s hugely successful debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, is about an Asian British teenager in the 1990s, doing outrageously ‘non-Asian’ things like listening to hip hop and chasing after girls. For anyone with a penchant for relentlessly mirthful teen angst and a modicum of 90’s nostalgia, this book is a must.
Coconut Unlimited is a testament to the writer’s love affair with the 90s. Nikesh – whose teenage style icon was Zack Morris of Saved by the Bell, complete with high tops and lilac shirt rolled up to his elbows – claims it’s because the 90s was when he started to “imbibe”; he means culture, not booze (though there may very well have been some of that too). As a result, he claims, “I started out the decade a child and ended it a man.”
So can we expect more of the same from his next book, currently a work in progress? Nope – Nikesh is far from a one trick pony. A brown protagonist is where the similarities stop.
Although many writers tend to be as cagey about their unpublished work as mothers are of the gender of an unborn child, Nikesh is refreshingly forthcoming.
His new protagonist is “mourning a parent, chasing a mysterious figure around London, and trying to get into a girl’s pants – not necessarily what brown people do, but what white people do too,” he adds with the slightest eye-roll.
“I wanted to do something about bereavement and a father-son relationship,” he explains. “So I started writing about losing a parent, and then I lost a parent halfway through writing this book.”
I’m reluctant to vulgarly push further into this very personal territory, but Nikesh waves away any awkwardness on my part, reassuring me that it’s “kind of therapeutic to talk about it now, because it’s been a while.
“It was a very weird six months for me,” he reflects. “Everything happened at the same time. I had a two-page spread in the Metro and my Mum’s funeral on the same day. How well stuff was going one way made me feel sadder the other.
“This is the first time I’ve talked about it properly in public,” he says almost surprised at himself. “When you use things like social media, it’s very hard to not go, ‘wahhh my mum’s dead and I don’t want to try and be funny for everyone.’ The public side of you has to try and keep that in check.”
How did all this inform his new novel, I ask tentatively, still worried I’m transgressing.
“It was all very raw. But I kind of decided to distance myself from what I was going through in my personal life and just get back to writing a book, rather than a version of therapy for me.”
Much as this methodology suggests, Nikesh is an inordinately disciplined writer, as well as being a ‘funny guy’.
“Who needs sleep?” he responds when I question him about how he manages to write on top of a full-time job. To my horror, he is only half joking. “I don’t need to sleep more than 4-5 hours a night. I wake up early and work, and I also work late. If I don’t write then it doesn’t get done,” he shrugs.
And he is as prolific as his crazy working hours imply, having just finished writing a sitcom pilot called Kabaddasses for Channel 4’s Comedy Lab. “It’s shooting as we speak!” he says excitedly.
The premise is supremely fun: “It’s about a bunch of losers in East End London who put together the first all-white England kabaddi team to try and win the East End Kabaddi League – one of the main guys is an angry racist and another one of them is brown.”
Fun and simple it may be on the surface, but it cuts deep into the core of a culturally fraught Britain. “It’s playing with things to do with integration – what makes you British and what makes you Asian,” he explains. “And that thing of, ‘This is our thing, and this is your thing.’”
“I feel quite hungry – I’ve got so many ideas,” he tells me passionately. “I’m very excited about writing books and writing sitcoms – and that requires actually writing! If I don’t write a lot, it means I don’t develop – I’m not a naturally gifted or brilliant writer.”
If you’ve read his book, you’re bound to disagree with him here, but the humble self-deprecation is nonetheless immensely endearing.
“Really,” he insists. “My mate Evie Wyld is a naturally gifted writer. Anjali Joseph is also brilliant. When I read her book, I thought, ‘shit, I wish mine wasn’t coming out in the same year!’ Mine is just froth and hers is espresso!”
So, in your opinion women can write, I ask him with faux incredulity, referring to VS Naipaul’s recent gaff.
Nikesh is instantly inflamed. “Naipaul hasn’t written anything interesting in about 50 million years,” he exclaims. “Laura Dockrill, Salena Godden, Sabrina Mahfouz – they would destroy VS Naipaul’s soul! Sorry, Naipaul, you’re boring!”
“But,” he adds, returning to his modus operandi of good-humoured self-deprecation, “I’ve spent the last six months taking the piss out of what constitutes a stereotypical Asian novel – a mangrove swamp, an oppressive mum, an arranged marriage and a struggle for identity. My novel has at least three of them, so it’s very rich of me to take the piss out of other people!”
But his cautious self-deprecation is superfluous. Of the top five million adjectives to describe Nikesh, ‘boring’ is definitely not one. And nor, for that matter, is ‘stereotypical’.
“It’s important to discuss stereotypes, but ultimately we want to break through that.” According to Nikesh, the onus for this lies with publishers. “The types of books that get published are ones that perpetuate the stereotype – so the change needs to come from publishers in what gets published and how they sell them.
“We’re all striving to break out of the mould where we’re considered Asian writers. We all just want to be writers,” he argues simply. “I’ll still be tearing off the roti with one hand in an Indian restaurant, though” he assures me with impish smirk. “If you forget that, you’ve forgotten who you are!”
Coconut Unlimited is published by Quartet Books and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010
Share this article
