The Buddha of Suburbia

His part secured, Karim goes back to South London to stay with his mother for the summer before rehearsals start. His mother has moved back into their home and gradually comes back to life. She cleans and repaints the house, making it her own. She loses weight and grows her hair. Karim sweats out the time until he can go back to London, though he enjoys seeing his mother.

He returns to London and begins rehearsals. He loves being part of a group, and he makes friends with a Marxist/socialist actor named Terry. However, he clashes with Shadwell over his costume—a loincloth and brown makeup—and Shadwell’s conviction that Mowgli speaks English with an Indian accent. Both the costume and accent are humiliating to Karim, but in order to keep his part, he agrees to the director’s demands.

Eva continues to build her friendships and influence among the London elite. Her parties are a success, and everyone loves Haroon. Haroon enjoys the socializing and entertaining, too.

Eva and Karim attend a show with Charlie’s renamed punk rock band, Condemned. Charlie has remade himself into a punk and now calls himself Charlie Hero.

The band is already a success with an album about to be released called The Bride of Christ. As a spokesman for the new nihilism and lost hope of a generation, Charlie finds his way to success. It’s a complete con-job, but no one seems to care. Everyone, including Charlie, takes this new Charlie seriously.

Karim invites his mother, Aunt Jean and Uncle Ted to his play’s preview. They love it. They laugh at his loincloth, but they think the play is professional and entertaining. His father, Eva, Jamila, and Changez attend the first night. They are considerably less impressed. They understand, as his mother’s family didn’t, what compromises of dignity and politics such a role cost Karim. His father and Jamila tell him the embarrassing truth: Karim has sold out his dignity as an Indian, cheaply playing up to English prejudices and stereotypes of Indians.

Karim continues for the run of the play, enjoying all the attention.

During The Jungle Book’s run, a famous alternative theater director—Matthew Pyke—comes to see the play. After the play, Pyke asks to talk to Karim. He invites Karim to come and audition for him. Karim is amazed, because he is barely an actor at all. He agrees to take a part in Pyke’s next production.

Karim begins rehearsals with Pyke’s company in the spring, after his old play closes. Karim has been in London for about a year. There are two other men and three women in the company and a mix of races, social classes, and sexual orientation. Karim decides that he likes an actress named Eleanor and sets out to seduce her.

The actors, the writer, and Pyke work together every day, getting to know one another. Eventually, they are each asked to come up with a character and to deliver a monologue to the group as that character. Karim is asked to choose a “black” character, which confuses him at first because he doesn’t know anyone from Africa. Pyke clarifies that Karim should choose someone in his family. Karim chooses Anwar.

Karim stops by the shop to see Jeeta and Anwar. Anwar has aged terribly; he is thin and weak. Jeeta tells him that someone threw a pig’s head through the shop window and as a result Anwar walks about the neighborhood with a walking stick, inviting the neighborhood bullies to beat him. Jeeta pleads with Karim to intervene with Anwar and stop him. Jeeta wants to modernize the shop and start selling liquor, but Anwar won’t agree.

Karim cannot let his depression over Anwar keep him down; he’s making progress in his relationship with Eleanor. He’s surprised to find out that Eleanor has hidden her upper-class background: her mother is a famous painter, her father an American banker, and her brother a college professor. As they start dating and hanging around together, he finds that her people are kind, accepting, and welcoming.

Karim’s relationship with Eleanor takes him into another world and makes him realize that he has wasted his chance at an education. For the first time, Karim realizes the value of knowledge about the world through subjects such as astronomy, languages, mathematics, and physics. These things give a person invaluable information about how the world works.

Karim missed all that, and he ignored his father’s advice at the time. Filled with anger and regret at his poor choices, he realizes the meaning of class in his own life for the first time. He understands the divide between middle class and upper class; class is directly associated with education. The upper classes speak a language that he doesn’t, and for the first time in his life, Karim feels cheated. What he thought were virtues—fighting, toughness, and pride in not doing homework—now look like stupidity.

When Karim presents his Anwar character to the troupe, the black woman, Tracey, objects to the negative cultural stereotypes that he presents, such as forcing his daughter to marry a stranger after going on a hunger strike. To Karim’s consternation, Pyke agrees and asks him to start over.

Karim visits Changez and gets his permission to use him as his character for the play. Changez laments his inability to get Jamila to change her mind about having children with him. As he continues to talk about Jamila and his love for her, Changez remembers that Karim had an affair with Jamila. Changez withdraws his permission for Karim to base his character on his life, and he accuses Karim of having no morals.

Karim goes over to Eleanor’s, and while she sleeps off a fit of depression, he contemplates his choices: betray his promise to his friend Changez and use him as a character, or have nothing to present to the group and lose face with his colleagues and maybe his job. For the first time in his life, Karim thinks it through instead of just doing what is best for himself. He wonders what is happening to him. All of a sudden, now in his twenties, he considers his moral behavior.

When Eleanor wakes up, they become lovers. Karim falls deeply in love with Eleanor. He does not like being in love; the intensity of his feelings overwhelm him.

He performs as Changez, now called Tariq, and Pyke approves of his character. As he gets to know Pyke better, Pyke shares all sorts of details of his life, particularly his sexual exploits. Both he and his wife, Marlene, deliberately collect sexual experiences from as wide a variety of people as they can. All of these confessions are a prelude to Pyke asking Karim and Eleanor to come over for dinner and a sex party. Pyke also drops the devastating information on Karim that he told Eleanor to go for Karim and that Eleanor’s last boyfriend killed himself.

Karim goes home, where Haroon sits writing a memoir about his childhood in India, with later plans to go teach a meditation class. Karim wonders at Haroon’s uselessness in practical things. He consults with Eva and Jamila, who give opposite answers about whether he should go to Pyke’s for dinner. Eva thinks it’s a great opportunity, while Jamila dismisses the Pykes as rich snobs.