686 Kureishi, Hanif
her energy to finding as many ways as possible to
reject and subvert parental authority and eventually
get her own way.
While Karim admires her militant attitudes, he is
often fearful of her extreme radicalism. Hence, when
she rejects the arranged marriage with Changez, an
unseen groom from India, Karim is torn between
understanding her turbulent emotions and sympa-
thizing with Anwar. Jamila rejects outright her con-
jugal relationship with Changez. Her rejection stems
not from his external repulsiveness or the physical
deformity of his polio-withered arm, but rather she
rejects him largely due to her commitment to her
radical ideology. At the end of the novel, when she
is living in a commune and allowing Changez to
serve as a domestic help and unpaid nanny to her
baby daughter, she also forces him to reject the tradi-
tional patriarchal norms he has cherished all his life.
When Karim puts it to him, “I am asking how you,
Changez, you with your background of prejudice
against practically the whole world, are coping with
being married to a lesbian.” Changez is stupefied
by the realization that he has indeed unwittingly
rejected all the ideals of his Indian upbringing.
Eva’s son, Charlie, is one of the few characters
in the novel who succeeds in his ambition. At the
height of his success as a rock star, he turns his back
on his London fans and moves to a faster, drug-
oriented life in New York. He rescues Karim from a
failing dramatic career and offers him a permanent
place in his home as his assistant. However, after a
while, Karim finds himself rejecting all that Charlie
and his wild lifestyle have to offer. When they argue,
Charlie claims that by embracing New York he is
rejecting the narrow-minded prejudices of life in
England: “So shocked, so self-righteous, and moral,
so loveless and incapable of dancing. They are nar-
row, the English. It is a Kingdom of Prejudice over
there. Don’t be like it!” Ironically, when Charlie and
Karim go out together in New York, they become
“two British boys in America,” identifying them-
selves by the culture they claim to have rejected.
Karim also rejects the excesses of sexual experi-
mentation he observes Charlie undertaking. He
gradually realizes that his time in New York has
helped heal his emotional wounds of being rejected
by the mainstream theater in England because of his
mixed race. He also realizes he shares with his father
the experience of being a social outsider, a minority,
which paradoxically gives them both the strength
to survive against social odds. Thus, he comes to
understand thatDad had always felt superior to the Brit-
ish: this was the legacy of his Indian child-
hood—political anger turning into scorn and
contempt . . . and he’d made me feel that we
couldn’t allow ourselves the shame of failure
in front of these people. You couldn’t let the
ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that
was where they expected you to be.The realization that his father has not rejected his
essential Indian identity even after more than 20
years in England makes Karim understand that he
has “inherited from Dad a strong survival instinct”
(250). It gives him a deeper insight into his father’s
and his own characters and provides him the reso-
lution to reject all the material advantages of being
Charlie’s sidekick. It also completes his emotional
healing. Therefore, he can take the risk of return-
ing to England with only the faint possibility of
a television career ahead of him. Finally rejecting
the idea of a career in theater, he can pursue and
achieve success in the new medium of television,
playing a racially relevant part in a sitcom. He can
also reenter the world he had once turned away
from, and accept not only that his mother has a
white English boyfriend, but also that Eva and
his father are about to be married. In rejecting the
shallowness of materialistic living, Karim feels he
has discovered greater depths for true emotional
life within himself.
Divya SaksenaSpirituality in The Buddha of Suburbia
By its very title, Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha
of Suburbia becomes an investigation of the working
of spirituality in suburban England of the 1970s.
The narrator of the novel, Karim or “Creamy,”
describes his struggle to find acceptance in Brit-
ish society as a hybrid, born of an Indian Muslim
father, Haroon (“Harry”), and a British Christian
mother, Margaret. Their lives are inextricably linked