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Nikita Lalwani: A winning formula

04.06.07 Benedicte Page

As a child growing up in Cardiff in the 1970s and '80s, Nikita Lalwani didn't aspire towards being a pop star or an air hostess like most of her friends—instead she really wanted to be a child prodigy.

Lalwani was geekily keen on maths—her parents came from maths-mad India, where being good at the subject is regarded, she says, as being "a bit like being good at sports is here—it's seen as having a healthy appetite for life." Lalwani saw playing with numbers as being "good fun, a bit magical", and her party trick was as "the human calculator", where she'd offer to multiply any two three-digit numbers together while family and friends stood by with a real calculator to check the results.

Lalwani remembers seeing Ruth Lawrence [the child prodigy who went to Oxford University at the age of 13] on television and saying to her father: "Do you think I could do that?"

"I had this nerdy aspiration to do my maths O-level really young," she explains. Fortunately, her father, a maritime studies academic at Cardiff University, took a balanced response. "My dad said, 'That's not the best idea, why don't you just do all your subjects and have a great life.'"

Lalwani's début novel Gifted (Viking, 28th June) explores a kind of alternate family story, where the immigrant parents, who like Lalwani's family have come from India to Cardiff following the father's academic career, take a different line with their young daughter.

Little Rumi is only five years old when her teacher tells Mahesh and Shreene that their daughter is mathematically "gifted". The parents are excited by her potential, seeing precocious academic achievement as a guarantee that their child will be able to get ahead in their new home country.

Rumi is encouraged into accelerated learning, but as she frantically studies for her exams, obsessively chewing cumin seeds as an eccentric aid to concentration, she becomes increasingly isolated from her peers at school. As she enters adolescence, just when she is supposed to be buckling down to her studies at Oxford, this leads to a crisis. The story is told with a great deal of humour and charm, and is also full of the comedy of family life, as Mahesh and Shreene struggle to cope with their new home in Cardiff, and with each other.

"I'm quite interested in the absurd and the tragic, and Rumi combines those things—things that are very cute and funny and also have a tragedy about them," explains Lalwani, of her misfit brainbox of a heroine.

She thinks the theme is very much of our time: "It's quite common for kids from ethnic backgrounds to nail an O-level aged 10, and just have it in the background, as a safety deposit. Parents think, then their child has got this definite advantage that no one can take away. I think it's very mixed up with this idea of making some kind of mark in the country where you are living, and that you have to work that much harder than someone who originates from the host nation. That's a story that I don't think has been -properly explored yet."

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