Nostalgic for your turbulent youth? Read this novel and you won’t be

Street art in Brooklyn, New York City - Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Many of us are happy to have left our twenties, and their lurching uncertainties, behind. If you aren’t, and you still have nostalgic pangs, reading Ghost Chilli will cure you once and for all.

As Muskan, its hapless but witty protagonist, struggles to catch a break in 2010s New York, she reflects that she feels like she’s in “a Netflix movie about twenty-something girls trying to navigate life and love”. This is a knowing nod to the sub-genre in which Nikkitha Bakshani’s debut is apt to be seen. In recent years, novelists from Candice Carty-Williams to Madeleine Gray have skewered the indignities of young single life, and into that skewing, Bakshani interweaves family frictions and sharp observations on cultural identity from an Indian-American eye.

Muskan is a writer living in Brooklyn, besieged by insecurities and searching for intimacy on dating apps. “Fake it till you make it,” preach her friends and family, but how is she supposed to radiate confidence when she misreads connections constantly? Meanwhile, her “editor” role at a luxury lifestyle magazine involves zero editing. With its condescending co-workers and ranks of empty desks, it offers a depressing vision of corporate exploitation in a clickbait bubble about to burst.

Bakshani has an MA in creative and life writing from Goldsmiths, and has worked in the New York magazine industry herself. Given the collapse of Vice and Buzzfeed, it’s unsurprising, but no less grim, to read about life aboard a sinking digital-media ship: the pressure to churn out five articles per day, the blurring lines between editorial and marketing, the inexorable death-march of AI. “I joined the industry at a bad time,” Muskan says, deadpan. The same weariness suffuses post-hipster Brooklyn, where street art has corporate sponsorship and you have to queue for everything.

Like Carrie Bradshaw and Hannah Horvath before her, Muskan unburdens herself to her three closest friends, who exhort her to end her three-year “situationship” with “toxic” Noah. Bakshani nicely captures the micro-tensions of female friendship, and has an ear for the rhythms and buzzwords of millennial speech, not least how words such as “entitled” and “narcissist” have been overused to the point of meaninglessness. Fluent in psychotherapy, meanwhile, those friends attribute her insecure attachment style to “mommy issues”.

Nikkitha Bakshani, author of Ghost Chilli

These issues are justifiable and significant. Muskan’s father, a wealthy self-made man, moved the family from Chennai to New Jersey when she was ten, with her mother resentfully relinquishing her career. Today, the latter’s favourite pastime is berating Muskan; their relationship is the novel’s most compelling narrative thread. The family scenes, in which affection mingles with outrage, are comedy gold. And as Muskan attempts to address childhood scars, Bakshani resists trite epiphanies. When her therapist tells her she has complex PTSD, Muskan breezily agrees: she has done the online test, downloaded the app.

Muskan takes impish delight in pinpointing the dissonances of Western cultural appropriation, without ever being sanctimonious. Noah – whom Muskan diagnoses with “brownchitis”, a fetish for brown girls – takes her to an expensive Indian “tasting menu”, which Muskan immediately clocks as a humble thali. (Funny, but it jars that Noah, a food writer, is unaware of this sub-continental mainstay.) “Boundaries are a white privilege,” she tells her therapist, even as the novel traces her efforts to establish some with her mother, a woman who insists on accompanying her daughter to the gynaecologist.

With her vulnerability and humour, Muskan is a loveable protagonist, someone (as they say) you can root for. Yet Bakshani rains so many blows on her that you wonder whether she’s channelling that overbearing parent. In the first half of the book, Muskan’s self-esteem is so pummelled by maternal bullying, romantic humiliation and professional disillusionment that her misfortunes feel almost biblical in their relentlessness. Conflict, too, can feel obviously manufactured, as when Muskan’s friends have an unfeasibly strong reaction to one of her missteps – for, like her protagonist, Bakshani should have more faith in herself: such soap-opera plotting feels overzealous in an already eventful novel propelled by distinctive characters and droll dialogue. Nonetheless, for the most part, Ghost Chilli is enjoyably bittersweet, a black comedy that conjures the turbulent twenties in all their isolation and shame.

Ghost Chilli is published by Fleet at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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