The Buddha of Suburbia

“Dad taught me to flirt with everyone I met, girls and boys alike, and I came to see charm, rather than courtesy or honesty, or even decency, as the primary social grace. And I even came to like people who were callous or vicious provided they were interesting.” 

Karim describes his father’s charm and one of his earliest lessons in life. His father’s teachings, whether intentional or not, have formed Karim’s character. In addition, his father’s charm, how he expresses it, and the trouble it gets him into in life, powerfully affect Karim’s life. Despite the trouble that Haroon’s charm brings into his life, Karim models his charm after his father’s example. 

“In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness.”  

Karim comments on his parents’ miserable marriage and the fact that they do not consider divorcing. This is the life that Karim rebels against, choosing instead a life of experiences and adventure. The rest of the novel Karim demonstrates how he chooses happiness, or its possibility, over safety and security.

“I could see my life clearly for the first time: the future and what I wanted to do. I wanted to live always this intensely: mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, cleaver people and drugs. I hadn’t come upon it all like this before, and now I wanted nothing else.” 

Karim defines his future. He knows what he wants and pursues it from this moment in the novel.

“And Charlie? My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.” 

Karim defines his attraction to Charlie, which is mixed with envy and jealousy. Charlie represents everything that Karim believes he is not.

“She reminded me of the real world. I wanted to shout at her: take that world away!” 

Karim expounds on the theme of reality versus the ideal. Karim dwells upon an imaginary ideal consistently in the novel. He tries to escape dullness, adulthood, and the ordinary at every turn. If he cannot create a reality that matches his ideal, he will ignore reality through drugs or psychological manipulations, such as denial. The real problem here is that Karim cannot help himself; he is a natural keen observer, sensitive to people’s foibles. He sees everything in its true form, which is why he spends a considerable amount of time and effort in trying to block out or escape what he sees. However, it just isn’t possible for him to block reality, as much as he tries to. In this specific example, his tired, haggard-looking, middle-aged mother contrasts painfully with the highs of experience and beauty that he yearns to experience.

“‛I don’t care about money. There is always money. I need to understand these secret things.’” 

Haroon Amir attempts to explain to his wife and best friend, Anwar, why he studies Eastern philosophy. Preoccupied with the tasks of survival and daily living, they do not understand his interest in such subjects. To them, he is lazy and ignoring the most important things of life—getting ahead at work and making money to earn status. Haroon simply does not value these things. His decision to value and pursue understanding himself over material success disrupts everyone’s lives and generates all of the change in the novel.

“Jamila thought Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign in her. ‘She spoke to my parents as if they were peasants,’ Jamila said. She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her, but Jamila was the strongest-willed person I’d met: no one could turn her into a colony. Anyway, I hated ungrateful people. Without Miss Cutmore, Jamila wouldn’t have even heard the word ‘colony.’”

Jamila reaps the advantages of Miss Cutmore exposing her to French art, literature, music, and philosophy. This education also makes her aware of larger ideas, including the notion that Miss Cutmore, by teaching Jamila about European culture, is trying to erase Jamila’s Indian heritage. This notion called neo-colonization—of replacing Indian culture with Eurocentric culture—mirrors the British colonization of India’s government and economy. It is a post-modern or post-colonial explanation for how European culture continues to control and stifle Indian culture, even after the official colonial period has ended. Karim knows that without Miss Cutmore’s influence, Jamila wouldn’t have even been exposed to these ideas; she wouldn’t even know what colonialism is. By the time Kureishi writes the novel, in 1990, the term colonialism had been replaced by post-colonialism—and the discussion of the ways in which dominant culture controls discourse continues.

“It was through her that I became interested in life.”

Karim describes his fascination with Eva. Though she isn’t beautiful, she is fully alive and never dull or boring. She is the opposite of his mother in every way, yet Karim feels disloyal for liking her so much. It takes years before Karim can think of Eva without feeling guilty on his mother’s behalf.

“And all this time, like pipes dripping, weakening and preparing to burst in the attic, around the house hearts were slowly breaking while nothing was being said.”

Aptly, Karim chooses a domestic metaphor to describe the destruction of his family. Just as their house symbolizes the family within, he describes the potential destruction of his family as their hearts slowly break, unseen like pipes in the wall that will finally burst.

“’The ugly ones.’ She poked her tongue out. ‘It’s their fault if they’re ugly. They’re to be blamed, not pitied.’

I laughed at this, but it made me think of where Charlie may have inherited some of his cruelty. When Eva had gone and I lay for the first time in the same house as Charlie and Eva and my father, I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people. And how they can’t always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with – their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition.”

Karim contemplates that cruelty can be part of an interesting, exciting person. This is an important insight, because the difference between niceness and cruelty becomes an important distinction for Karim. This thought foreshadows Karim’s pursuits of interesting, but cruel, situations and people for the next several years.

“Then there were the nice people who weren’t interesting, and you didn’t want to know what they thought of anything. Like Mum, they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones, like Eva with her hard, taking edge, who ended up with everything, and in bed with my father.” 

Just as beautiful people get away with things that ugly people cannot, interesting people can, too. Karim contrasts Eva, who is interesting, with his mother, who is not. Though he loves his mother, he moves in with Eva and his father instead. His mother’s pitifulness repels him.

“I’m probably not compassionate or anything, I bet I’m a real bastard inside and don’t care for anyone, but I fucking hated treading up those stairs to Mum, especially with Jean at the bottom watching my every step.”

Karim castigates himself for avoiding his mother. He’s ashamed of his behavior, but he cannot help but want to be with people who are less miserable than she is. Karim’s avoidance of emotional conflict is a defining characteristic. He never confronts his mother; he knows that she cannot handle the type of honest relationship he wants. He also believes his mother to be a good, nice person, but he doesn’t think that he is. He doesn’t want to be reminded that she is the “good” one, while he and his father are the “bad” ones, who left her.

“For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn’t walk and you died. Nothing good could come of things here below.” 

Karim comments ironically, but accurately, about his mother’s negative views on life. In response, he avoided her after his father left. Finally, love and duty move him to go visit her. He tries to cheer her up. She still accuses him of abandoning her; at this point, nothing can reach her inside her depression. This dark view of the world is one of the reasons that Haroon could not stay with her, because he is inherently optimistic. 

“[Guilt] lay on him like water on a tin roof, rusting and rotting and corroding day after day. . . there were looks that escaped all possible policing, looks that made me think he was capable only of a corrupted happiness.”

Again, Kureishi uses images of a house and the destructive power of water to symbolize Haroon’s family. This time, it is Haroon’s family with Eva that is being destroyed.

“The suburbs were over; they were a leaving place.”

Karim shares Eva’s opinion of the suburbs. Since the beginning of the novel, he has been seeking a way to escape South London. Now, Eva is going to help him leave, taking his father with her too.

“After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie’s charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I admired it tremendously.” 

Charlie’s charm is a characteristic that Karim experiences himself—as Charlie uses Karim to his advantage with no qualms. However, Karim also sees Charlie use that charm on others, particularly women, with varying degrees of success. Ultimately, Charlie’s charm is what he uses to achieve success, without having much real talent.

“Ultimately none of this was innocuous. No; Charlie was the cruelest and most lethal type of seducer. He extorted, not only sex, but love and loyalty, kindness and encouragement, before moving on. I too would gladly have exercised these master-skills, but there was one essential ingredient I lacked: Charlie’s strong will and his massively forceful desire to possess whatever it was that took his fancy.” 

Karim outlines Charlie’s methods of success. Though he says he admires Charlie for these qualities, Karim is aware of the negative, destructive side of Charlie’s selfishness and pride. However, when Karim eventually desires to possess things, such as people or acting roles, he draws on Charlie’s lessons. Karim uses his personal charm to smooth over his hurtful behavior throughout the novel, particularly with Jamila.

“I couldn’t face going back to that flat in West Kensington not knowing what to do with my life and having to be pleasant, and not being respected by anyone.”

Here, Karim explains his motivations in complying with Shadwell’s weird requests during his audition. Karim falls into acting due to Eva’s push, and he finally wants something enough to make an effort. He gets his first part, as Mowgli in The Jungle Book.

“I wanted to tell him that the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling. It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them.” 

Terry, Karim’s Marxist friend, tries to raise Karim’s class consciousness and wants him to join the Socialist party. Karim understands that Terry doesn’t know anything about the working class, though he talks a lot about it. After all, Karim has experienced such hatred firsthand.

“Eva’s son was continually being chased by national papers, magazines and semioticians for quotes about the new nihilism, the new hopelessness and the new music which expressed it. Hero was to explain the despair of the young to the baffled but interested, which he did by spitting at journalists or just punching them.” 

Charlie’s pose as a punk turns on the irony that he has taken on a political rage for self-aggrandizing purposes. He gains fame by hating and insulting journalists, other musicians, and anyone in authority. The more insulting and iconoclastic he is, the more famous he becomes. Yet, as Karim well knows, the character of Charlie Hero is a complete fraud. Karim enjoys Charlie’s ruse and takes strength from the idea that if Charlie can pull off a big con, he can too. He does not judge the morality of Charlie’s behavior; he expects Charlie to be a sell-out. After all, Karim is selling out too—wearing a loin cloth and speaking in a fake accent. They are similar cons on a different scale.

“’Bloody half-cocked business,’ he said. ‘That bloody fucker Mr[.] Kipling pretending to whity he knew something about India! And an awful performance by my boy looking like a Black and White Minstrel!’”

Haroon summarizes his thoughts on Karim’s role as Mowgli. He is angry on Karim’s behalf, though he also questions Karim’s choice to participate in such a rigmarole. Haroon aptly compares Karim’s role to performers who wore blackface in American minstrel shows. The irony is doubled because Karim is Indian, but wears brown shoe-polish to appear more “authentically” Indian.

“Women had always looked out for him and he exploited them. I despised him for it now. I began to think that he admiration I’d had for him as a kid was baseless. What could he do? What qualities did he have? Why had he treated Mum as he had? I no longer wanted to be like him.” 

Karim is growing up, and he is beginning to separate his identity and his sense of self as a man from his father. He is choosing to see women differently than his father; he chooses his relationships differently. Unlike his father, he views women as his equal. He sees his father’s weaknesses. This more mature view of his father foreshadows his eventual acceptance of his father and a more adult relationship.

“They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was the piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop in his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, and un-cooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realize that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.” 

Here, Karim mourns Anwar’s death. Karim recognizes that Jamila and Anwar will never be able to make peace with one another and understand each other as grownups. Having recently seen his father’s flaws, Karim’s insights are based in part on his own experience. Only now can he begin to have an adult relationship with his father. He laments that Anwar and Jamila will never have that relationship.