Buddha Of Suburbia Analysis

Chapter – Two The Search for the Self in “The Buddha of Suburbia”

With great expectations I change all my clothes mustn’t grumble at silver and gold

Screaming above Central London

Never bored, so I'll never get old

So I'll wait until we're sane

Wait until we're blessed and all the same

Full of blood, loving life and all it's got to give

Englishmen going insane -David Bowie (Title song of “The Buddha of Suburbia” TV Series)

Karim Amir, the 17 year old anti-hero of “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990) is mostly loved among all other characters created by the iconoclastic novelist, playwright and screen play writer,

He goes-

“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care-Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. Or perhaps it was being brought up in the suburbs that did it”.

Karim’s awkwardness results from his being born of an inter-racial marriage. His father, Haroon, was from an affluent Indian family in Bombay, India who came to Britain to study and later, settled down with a job as a clerk in the Pakistani Embassy. He met Karim’s mother Margaret in the South of London suburb of Orpington and after marriage settled there. Having raised in the suburb with people of a lighter skin tone, Karim feels conspicuously visible to his peers. Though his parents had a love-marriage, yet their love goes away as he grows up. Haroon is engaged in an extra-marital relationship with an ambitious woman, Eva Kay from a slightly upper social stratum of the suburb of Beckenham and leaves his wife to marry her. Karim’s parent’s divorce had its affects on him in two ways- first

She is enthusiastic about life and is very active; it is this characteristic of her that attracts Haroon. It is in Eva that Karim finds comfort of having someone to depend upon whereas he wanted to hate her for being the reason for the family break-up: “The only person I knew who’d be helpful and objective and on my side was Eva. But I wasn’t supposed to like her because her love for my father was buggering up my entire family” (The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990, p.63). Nonetheless, Karim is focussed enough to transgress to the next level of the social class away from the suburbs and accepted Eva’s guidance, “I longed to know what Eva made of things, what she thought of Jamila, say, and the marriage to Changez. I wanted her opinion. Eva could be snobby, that was obvious, but if I saw something, or heard a piece of music, or visited a place, I wouldn’t be content if Eva had made me see it in a certain way. She came at things from an angle; she made connections” (93). To Karim “Eva was unfolding the world for him. It was through her that he became interested in life” (Italics my