The Buddha of Suburbia 685Changez turns out to be a gross, balding, congeni-
tally lazy man with only one good arm. Symboli-
cally, his atrophied arm represents the withering of
Anwar’s paternal dreams, since Jamila will be a wife
in name only.
Returning from America to Eva and Haroon,
Karim realizes that “you never stop feeling like an
eight-year-old in front of your parents.” He takes
a perverse pleasure in revealing his mother’s new
love-life to his father in front of Eva, in revenge for
their betrayal of parenthood. He wants Haroon to
experience the despair he has felt at the inevitabil-
ity of change. At his party to celebrate his new part
in a soap opera, when Eva and Haroon announce
their forthcoming marriage, Karim feels happy and
miserable at the same time. Eva will be his official
new mother at last, and a semblance of parenthood,
upgraded from suburban anonymity to urban celeb-
rity, will be restored to him. But sadly, his obsession
with parents has now changed to a realization of his
own power as an individual.
Divya Saksena
reJection in The Buddha of Suburbia
In Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia
the racially hybrid narrator Karim, or “Creamy,”
born of an Indian Muslim father, Haroon (“Harry”),
and a British Christian mother, Margaret, struggles
with issues of acceptance and rejection in British
society. Similarly, Jamila, the daughter of Haroon’s
old childhood friend Anwar and his Pakistani wife
“Princess” Jeeta; Jamila’s husband Changez; and
Charlie, the punk-rock star son of Haroon’s girl-
friend Eva, all go through rejection of traditional
attitudes and ideals while trying to establish their
own identities in an adult world. When the novel
opens, Karim discovers that Haroon, by day a petty
bureaucrat, has in the evenings and on weekends
established a parallel existence as an Oriental phi-
losopher and spiritual guide to upper-middle-class
dilettantes; this becomes the initiation point for
a series of rejections that establish an important
theme in the novel.
Haroon has begun to image himself as a rein-
carnation of the original Buddha, becoming the
Buddha of the suburbia, a spiritual god-man who
promises upper-middle-class Britishers relief from
all the ills and pressures of modern life. As such, he
feels he must renounce his wife and family. Unlike
the original Buddha, he creates a parallel family
with Eva and Charlie. His wife rejects his idea of
connected parallel homes and turns back to her own
culture, where she can trade on sympathy from her
peers and relatives as the rejected wife of a foreign
immigrant. Although her sister Jean and brother-
in-law Ted lament her original rejection of her own
white society to marry Haroon, they are supportive
of her rejection of Haroon’s foray into spiritualism.
Jean’s negative attitude to Haroon transmits itself
to Karim’s younger brother Allie, so that when the
family breaks up, Allie goes with his mother “cry-
ing and yelling, ‘Bugger off, you Buddhist bastard!’
as he left with Mum and Jean.” Allie’s desire to be
a ballet dancer and attend an expensive school also
signifies his rejecting both the working-class norms
of his mother and the “aristocratic” quasi-intellectual
aspirations of his father. Allie ends up working for
a clothes designer, and tries to convince Karim that
“no one put people like you and me in camps and no
one will. . . . Let’s just make the best of ourselves.”
His rejection of both his cultural polarities has led
him to a new acceptance of his hybridity, an accep-
tance that Karim seeks but finds elusive. As Karim
says, after their childhood rivalry, he is strangely
attracted to the adult Allie: “I liked him now; I
wanted to know him; but the things he was saying
were strange.”
Instead, Karim prefers the relatively straightfor-
ward rejection of all ideals that Jamila undertakes
in her journey through adolescence into adulthood.
Jamila imbibes a quantity of radical ideas from her
old teacher Miss Cutmore, then “started to hate
Miss Cutmore for forgetting that she was Indian.”
She shares with Karim the essential alienation of
second-generation immigrants from the mainstream
society. Both surreptitiously explore alternative iden-
tities while experimenting with ways of rejecting
their ethnicity: “Yeah, sometimes we were French,
Jammie and I, and other times we went black Amer-
ican. The thing was we were supposed to be English,
but to the English we were always wogs and nigs
and Pakis and the rest of it.” Jammie is certain of at
least one fact: While she cannot physically prevent
her parents from running her life, she can devote