Sexual Experimentation In The Buddha Of Suburbia

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

As I sat there I began to recognise that this was one of the first times in my life I'd been aware of having a moral dilemma. Before, I'd done exactly what I wanted; desire was my guide and I was inhibited by nothing but fear. But now, at the beginning of my twenties, something was growing in me […] Now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed restrictions (The Buddha of Suburbia 186-187).

With The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), a contemporary socio-cultural reference on human relations and sexuality in 1970s Britain, Kureishi continued to inscribe hybridity and multiplicity in seemingly homogeneous spaces such as the British society in the 1980s, subverting at the same time traditional understandings of nation and history. Kureishi takes many of the themes he examined in his previous scripts and revisits them in a novelistic form full of colourful characters and sexual encounters, as these works seem to share a common breadth of sexual codes. Within this context, I propose that even though The Buddha of Suburbia follows the same thematology as his previous work, in that the sexual experimentation of the characters seems to point to new ways of examining the politics of representation, culture and identity, like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (1987), Kureishi revisits through comic irony the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the hopes it has created, in that the novel ends as Margaret Thatcher rises to power. The novel offers a retrospective view of what happened in the years leading to the Thatcher era, examining the fetishisation of the cultural commodification of the sexual experimentations of the 1960s which, subsequently, lost its political power, and led to the creation of a new symbolic order in the 1980s. Kureishi himself labelled The Buddha of Suburbia as a critique of the notion of limitless pleasure of the 60s as well as a re-examination of the sexual revolution:

Is this what we thought we would be in the ’60s when we were dancing around with flowers in our hair wanting a more erotic and a more sexual life?...If the society doesn’t install the values anymore, your happiness and your pleasure is entirely up to you; you have to work and earn it and install your own moral values (Donadio).

This is a moment of realisation for Kureishi, as he critiques self-indulgent pleasure, hinting to a more mature sense of desire. Even though he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and he was immersed in the sexual revolution of the time, he seems to be revaluating the impact this revolution had on social change. On the other hand, through the examination of the various performativities of the characters in the novel which, in effect, are based on the assuming of various identities by each of them, the deconstructive presence of the aesthetic pleasures in the text ironically points to the challenging of the symbolic order. What is more, The Buddha of Suburbia hints at the author’s change in thematology in his later work, as the re-imagining of desire and sexuality pertains to a shift towards more mature and introvert expressions, evident in the psychological growth of the protagonist, Karim, both as a social actor and as a staged one, which also reflects the development of Kureishi as an author. This change marks the end of Kureishi’s early work and the beginning of the second part of his career, in which his interest and thematology, as well as the sense of desire, change.

This change was also facilitated by the fact that with The Buddha of Suburbia Kureishi reached its literary peak. It is his most critically acclaimed and successful novel, having won the Whitbread Award for best first novel, having been translated into 20 languages and filmed for TV in 1993 by the BBC, with music by David Bowie, a persona that inspired many characters in Kureishi’s later work. Moore-Gilbert has argued that there is continuity between Kureishi’s novel and his earlier work, as gender-role and sexual experimentation remain important avenues of liberation from the often "coercive effects of traditional discourses of gender and sexuality" (Hanif Kureishi 112-113). Indeed in The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi explores the interconnections of race, class and sexuality, in a comic satire that nevertheless has a serious agenda: to challenge national, racial, and sexual boundaries in order to re-imagine the meaning of each. In that, The Buddha of Suburbia is a very funny satire of the political situation and especially race relations in Britain, which enables us to re-think desire and sexuality.

The Buddha of Suburbia is first and foremost a Bildungsroman novel, as it narrates the psychological and moral growth of Karim as an artist and a person from youth to adulthood, and from obscurity to fame, focusing as it does on change. This growth is more often than not painful, taking the protagonist through a range of "conflicts and dilemmas, social, sexual and political" (Moore-Gilbert 113). Kureishi is able to incorporate the dilemmas faced by the protagonist into a multifaceted identity by infusing socio-political anxieties with sexual experimentation and by changing the workings of desire, offering in the process a new way of "belonging" in Britain. Nahem Yousaf argues that Kureishi himself perceives his work as located firmly within a British context, where establishing a conceptually British identity that incorporates ethnic and cultural differences is an ultimate aim ("The Brown Man’s Burden" 21). Indeed, Kureishi draws attention to very serious social problems such as racism and issues of belonging, while "strategically deploy[ing] writerly and cinematographic techniques that consider multiple issues simultaneously that help to deconstruct hegemonic codes around subject positions through the content" (Yousaf 22). Kureishi offers a comic satire of those aspects of postcolonial British society which negatively influence sexuality, ethnicity and identity. With London as the background, and the sexual, drug and music subcultures as a leitmotiv, The Buddha of Suburbia functions as a multicultural account of how various forms of the affective disrupt the symbolid order of the time, while underlining the implications behind what shapes one’s identity in a postcolonial environment. Kureishi says: "If contemporary writing which emerges from oppressed groups ignores the central concerns and major conflicts of the larger society, it will automatically designate itself as minor, as a sub-genre. And it must not allow itself to be rendered invisible and marginalised in this way" ("Dirty Washing" 36).

Karim and Hanif: A Sexual Autobiography

Despite the fact that the novel is set in the 1970s and its plot ends as the Thatcher era was beginning, it was written in the 1980s, under its direct influence, and published in 1990, the year when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as Prime Minister. So reading the novel and knowing the political context that came after the events portrayed in it, we can clearly see the first traces of conservative, neoliberal agenda and the ensuing problems. Moore-Gilbert argues that "Kureishi’s films endorse the politics of…social movements which had their origins in the 1960s ‘counter-culture’, especially feminism, gay-rights activism and new forms of mobilisation around the issue of race" (Hanif Kureishi 90). The Buddha of Suburbia, written in the early aftermath of the Thatcher era then, offers an insightful look into what led to such changes as well as how the next decade influenced all the topics that Kureishi deals with, creating thus the context to look into the interplay and the influence of the affective and the political.

As a second generation immigrant who lives in suburban London, Karim, known as Creamy to his friends in a playful nickname regarding his mixed-race, embarks alongside his father Haroon on a sexual and spatial quest from the suburbs to London, in an attempt for Karim to find himself through sexual experimentations and for Haroon to re-discover his own self; both of them employ desire and sexuality to reach their "full potential as human beings" (The Buddha of Suburbia 13). In the process of this self-realisation quest, Karim engages in interracial and bisexual relations as he tries to defy prohibitions and limitations set by the socio-political milieu. The first lines of the novel sum up the character’s uneasiness about the impossible situation of either being totally identified with the nation or being totally excluded from it; and this is a theme we come across throughout the novel:

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 (The Buddha of Suburbia 3).

In this opening paragraph, Karim tries to define himself three times as "almost English", "a new breed" and "Englishman… (though) not proud of it". This statement is the only part of the novel narrated in the first person, whereas the narration turns to the third person by the end of it. This distance put between narration and narrator is a first hint of the deconstructive qualities of the novel, as it alludes to a breaking down of boundaries on a textual level. Doyle argues that this distance between "enonce and enunciation provides much of the novel’s reflection about ethnicity and identity" (110). Indeed, Karim’s inability –or unwillingness– to define himself provides the context of the novel, where he and the other characters of the novel fluctuate between identities and performativities. The matter of the fact is that Kureishi challenges fixed identities in the novel, in that the sexual experimentation of his characters, their mobility and their oscillation between identities enables identity and otherness, centre and periphery to be engaged in an interplay that constitutes a challenge to the symbolic order as well as a deconstruction of fixed boundaries, in that a space is created in which pleasure is fundamental. It is precisely through this temporary space that characters acquire a seductive charm, stemming from their undecipherability, which allows them to play out their desires and derive pleasure through them.

What is more, Karim seems to be a young Kureishi with an English mother, a Pakistani father, and an aversion to being defined by others. In that, and given that Hanif and Karim are both artists, the novel is a portrait of the artist as a young man, narrating the discontents of identity and addressing the issue of belonging. Karim, like Kureishi, embarks on a quest to discover his own self through his played out desires; I argue that by the end of the novel, Karim’s self-realisation reflects Kureishi’s own change as an author, which will be evident in his next pieces of work. As it has been argued in the first chapter, this thesis is also interested in reading Kureishi’s texts alongside his personal development as a postcolonial subject performing his racialised identity in the post-imperial space of London. The Buddha of Suburbia is highly autobiographical and, as Kureishi says, "the fact is, the place writers and artists hold in the public imagination exists beyond their work" ("My Ear at his Heart" 20). The shifts in the protagonist’s sexuality allow him to transgress any sort of social and political boundaries which also points to a solution to Kureishi’s own difficulty in associating himself entirely with Britain and its colonialist history, ideas of nationhood and hegemonic discourse. So Karim’s sexual indecisiveness may be read as a carrier of possibilities as it allows him to avoid choosing between cultures, sexualities and countries. It is Karim’s pursuit of desires and the re-imagining of desire that allow him to transgress social and political boundaries as he is not bound by any sort of sexual categorisation, in that he does not claim a resolutely homosexual or heterosexual identity any more that he claims a Pakistani or a British identity. His escaping of categorisation helps Karim frustrate issues such as race, sexual orientation and nationality. This is not an easy process, by no means, as Karim is constantly put in a position to choose between binaries. He is, however, able to escape without taking an either/or position. His sense of not belonging anywhere, his sense of being part of England and at the same time remaining outside of it, will change by the end of the text and, the way in which this change comes about, is worthy of exploration.

The first moment of realisation for Karim, echoing the previously mentioned Kureishi’s frustration about the 1960s notion of limitless pleasure, comes very early in the novel. On his way back from work Haroon, Karim’s father, tells Margaret, his British wife to come to an event at the house of Eva Kay, as he has been invited to give a speech on Oriental philosophy. She declines and Karim goes with him instead. Eva greets Haroon very warmly, a sign that something is going on or will go on between them. Charlie (Eva’s son), and Karim, bored by Haroon’s lesson, go up to Charlie’s room where they do drugs. While doing so, Karim sees his father and Eva, having sex in the garden:

As I crawled closer there was enough moonlight for me to see that Eva was on the bench? She was pulling her kaftan up over her head. If I strained my eyes I could see her chest…Eva had only one breast. Where the other traditionally was, there was nothing, so far as I could see…Eva released her hand from his mouth. He started to laugh. The happy fucker laughed and laughed. It was the exhilaration of someone I didn’t know, full of greedy pleasure and self. It brought me all the way down (The Buddha of Suburbia 15-16).

With that feeling of sexual desire, he returns to the room where he masturbates Charlie, feeling great for providing pleasure to someone else: "My flags flew, my trumpets blew" (The Buddha of Suburbia 17). This kind of metaphysical experience and the feelings it creates to Karim establishes new norms of sexual behaviour and even though such a homosexual relationship would be frowned upon by society, it appears to be not only a basic step to Karim’s sexual coming of age, but also a valuable process of cognition. This is a very important scene as it marks the beginning of the character’s change in character. The fact that he has felt great because he pleasured someone else points to a revelatory moment where the character understands that desire can be fulfilling, even if it is not directed to the self. This realisation marks the beginning of the psychological growth of the protagonist, which will lead to an open-ended subjectivity by the end of the novel.

This process of psychological growth is what will allow him to differentiate himself from his father by the end of the novel. Undoubtedly, Karim and Haroon have an initial connection, as what triggers Karim’s first sexual encounter with Charlie, is the sight of his father cheating on his mother. Moreover, Haroon says to Karim that "we’re growing up together, we are" (The Buddha of Suburbia 22). Karim also says that his dad has taught him 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" (The Buddha of Suburbia 7). This is something that points to a seductive charm, as he accommodates the needs of others. He performs different identities to fulfil his desires and becomes, consequently, difficult to pin down, which is something that entails attractiveness. Thus, the pleasure Karim derives from his interaction with the people he experiments with, is inextricably linked to his ever-changing identities, which allow him to adapt to each situation and move freely from persona to persona, increasing his chances to fulfil his desires. This interplay of desire and identity is a leitmotiv throughout the novel, as the characters seem to derive pleasure not despite of but because of their changing subjectivities which opens up a space where anything is possible. What is more, Doyle argues that Karim is seductive not only to other characters but to us as readers as well, as "our desire to know his identity can never be fully satisfied" (111).

Not only is Karim’s first sexual experimentation with Charlie triggered by watching his father having sex, but he also becomes an accomplice in his father’s sexual escapades as he keeps it secret from his mother. This is something that drew criticism against Kureishi who was deemed misogynist as his male characters are engaged in an alliance that seems to be directed against women. However, the different outcome of Karim’s coming of age, given his performed identities, as oppose to that of his father, which will become evident by the end of the novel as Karim distances himself from his father, subverts this criticism:

I felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and as if I’d been colluding with my enemies. . . [Dad] was always honest about this: he preferred England in every way. Things worked; it wasn’t hot; you didn’t see terrible things on the street that you could do nothing about. He wasn’t proud of his past, but he wasn’t unproud of it either; it just existed, and there wasn’t any point in fetishing it, as some liberals and Asian radicals liked to do (The Buddha of Suburbia 212)

Haroon thinks that he is certain about his identity, whereas Karim’s indecisiveness and attraction coming from his various assumed identities through desire as he flirts with everyone, lead him down a different path. Karim’s growth and his self-realisation which will be clear by the end of the novel, also reflects the development of the author himself as Kureishi believed that he created his own identity just like his characters in the novel created theirs. Looking at how the characters function in the novel, the way in which they assume identities, the way in which their sexual experimentation affect their identities, as well as how the cultural space of the 1960s was relentlessly commodified, is paramount to the argument put forward, namely that the growth of the protagonist reflects a deeper understanding of desire which transgresses the idea of "pleasure for pleasure’s sake".

Cultural Commodification and Identity Disorder

Kureishi’s protagonists such as Karim and Haroon employ and commodify Eastern spirituality to construct and shape the diasporic subject. Eva is fascinated by Karim and Haroon alike, as not only does she have an affair with Haroon, but when she first sees Karim she treats him as something exotic: "Then, holding me at arm’s length as if I were a coat she was about to try on, she looked me all over and said, ‘Karim Amir, you are so exotic, so original! It’s such a contribution! It’s so you’" (The Buddha of Suburbia 9). This appeal illustrates the way in which Karim is realised into the imagination of the British, being driven and transformed according to Eva’s desires. Haroon is transformed by pretending to be a Buddhist, even though he is a Muslim, selling a false Eastern spirituality to groups of "accounting executives" (The Buddha of Suburbia 18), who are drawn to the alluring nature of eastern spirituality and long for an "original" exoticism and mysticism. Such an identity disorder underlines the fact that Haroon strives to imitate, to be someone else, after spending "years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous" (The Buddha of Suburbia 21), he begins to find a new, "Oriental" identity, an Oriental "Other", in order to escape boring Suburbia. Haroon’s assumed identities range from trying to be an Englishman, to his childhood identity as a Muslim immigrant, to the newfound, albeit false identity of being an Oriental guru. He is, at the same time, a fraud but also compassionate, Buddha-like and wise (Doyle 112), as his connection with Karim, enables the latter to look beyond Haroon’s behaviour: "Beneath all the Chinese bluster was Dad’s loneliness and desire for internal advancement […] He wanted to talk of obtaining a quiet mind, of being true to yourself, of self-understanding" (The Buddha of Suburbia 28)

The fact that Haroon is a Muslim who pretends to be a Buddhist, is indicative of the comic irony employed by Kureishi to critique this trend in 1970s England, which pointed to a western fascination with oriental remnants. The white audience is so captivated by Haroon in the first gathering at Eva’s house that he "seemed to know he had their attention and that they’d do as he asked" (The Buddha of Suburbia 13). So in a sense, Haroon has power over these people, and becomes the coloniser of bored, depressed, white people, who long for an escape from their life’s difficulties. Such kind of "reversed colonialism" of the mind is indicative of Kureishi’s ironic disposition towards the fascination of the time with the "exotic Orient" which seemed to be returning to the British imaginary. Bart-Moore Gilbert also commented on such a reversal of power relations, arguing that Kureishi "parodies the narrative of Empire […] and reverses the power relations embodied in colonial proselytism. Instead of Indian natives compliantly absorbing the religious wisdom of the West, the native British seek deliverance from their ersatz immigrant guru" (Hanif Kureishi 123). This ironic reversal of power relations is indicative of Kureishi, who seems to be critiquing not only the colonial mentality of "bringing knowledge" to a naïve East, but also the reversed situation where the naïve Western white audiences are ready to believe anything, within the spirit of the times. Such a reversal of roles is also evident in the character of Eleanor, who lives in London and is culturally cultivated and sophisticated. She is in the same play as Karim, who feels awed in her presence due to her upper middle class background in contrast to his suburban upbringing, evident in his accent. Karim, as any other male colonised subject, wants to posses the female representative of the colonisers, explaining why women such as Eleanor are attracted to him and his Asian friends: "we pursued English roses as we pursued England; by possessing these prizes, this kindness and beauty, we stared defiantly into the eye of the Empire and all its self-regard…We became part of England and yet proudly stood outside it" (The Buddha of Suburbia 227). So through sexual possession, the transfer of identity can be accomplished, as since the marginalised cannot be members of the elite, they want to possess someone who is (Childs 104). Haroon’s object of desire, Eva, is an interior designer who longs to climb the social ladder being surrounded by artists and intellectuals: "Eva was planning her assault on London... [and] was climbing ever higher, day by day" (The Buddha of Suburbia 23). Eva is immersed in the culture of the time as her life is filled with "mysticism, sexual promise, clever people and drugs" (The Buddha of Suburbia 15), which points to a void she is trying to fill. She plays an important role in Haroon’s various performativities, as she persuaded him to wear his "Nehru jacket, collarless and buttoned up to the throat, like a Beatle jacket" (The Buddha of Suburbia 282).

Jamila is Karim’s friend, a political activist and the victim of an arranged marriage. She, too, enjoys a life of fulfilled desire, as she casually has sex not only with Karim but with other men and women too. Her behaviour marks a change in the social ethos of the time as she is not bound by any boundaries; she even manages to steer through her arranged marriage with Changez, refusing to consummate their marriage. So in this case, the lack of sex is equally as empowering as the practice of it. Changez, her arranged husband, who is also physically disabled, starts visiting a Japanese prostitute and does not press Jamila anymore for sex, thus adapting to the situation. Her self-awareness journey is torn between following the strict traditions of her conservative Muslim family and being an educated, radical feminist, very much carrying the spirit of the time. Jamila juggles various identities in the novel as well, as she is an activist, a mother, a lover, and at some point we are told she wants to be Simone de Beauvoir. By the end of the novel and despite, or because of her seemingly free nature, Jamila ends up with a baby, sharing a house with many people, and in a lesbian relationship. Her complex situation makes it difficult for the reader to decide whether she is where she wants to be.

Of course, it is not only the female characters that are in search of identity in the novel. Indeed, just like Haroon and Karim, Charlie also transforms to someone else, in an attempt to appeal, and harvest both sexual and material success (Doyle 112). As characters transform into "Others" in the novel, they create a space of possibilities as they include what fixed notions of identity by definition excludes, namely, "Otherness". This inclusion of the repressed element is what enables the seductive charm of these characters which leads to pleasure and accomplishment, each in his own way: Charlie becomes a punk superstar, Haroon a successful guru and Karim an actor. The most important sexual experience of Karim, is the one with Charlie, his wannabe rock-star friend. It is through this relationship that Karim’s transformation begins. Charlie also experiments with his identity, first by becoming a singer at school and then by becoming a punk musician, wearing slashed leather jacket and trousers with pins and needles. His music begins to gain popularity and he eventually changes his name to Charlie Zero and moves to New York as he becomes a punk superstar. Charlie is the object of Karim’s desire for most of the book although for a period this fixation is transferred to Eleanor, another actor, as both represent an ideal for Karim, as both are quintessentially English. Charlie is mesmerised by punk music, as after attending a concert, he is excited and argues in favour of a change:

"That’s it, that’s it," he said as we strolled. … "They’re the fucking future."

"Yeah, maybe, but we can’t follow them," I said casually.

"Why not?"

"Obviously we can’t wear rubber and safety-pins and all that. What would we look like?"

"Sure, Charlie".

"Why not, Karim? Why not, man?"

"It’s not us".

"We got to change. What are you saying? We shouldn’t keep up? That suburban boys like us always know where it’s at?"

"It would be artificial," I said, "We’re not like them. We don’t hate the way they do. We’ve got no reason to. We’re not from the estates. We haven’t been through what they have"

He turned on me with one of his nastiest looks.

"You are not going anywhere, Karim" (The Buddha of Suburbia 131).

Charlie seems to have grasped the power of movement and transformation in the road for success, starting from the change of names. Of course, it has to be argued that Charlie’s fixation on success underlines the seductive nature of money and fame. The irony is evident as Charlie says to Karim: "You are not going anywhere, Karim. You’re not doing anything with your life because as usual you’re facing in the wrong direction and going the wrong way" (The Buddha of Suburbia 132).

Ironically, the course of the novel will prove Charlie wrong. After Charlie moves to New York and Karim briefly joins him, he returns to England as Charlie is absorbed in the vortex of celebrity life. Charlie sells himself for fame, "selling Englishness" (The Buddha of Suburbia 245). Charlie’s "selling of" of himself, hints at the beginning of an era, the 1980s, where Englishness became a commodity, more so on the other side of the Atlantic where Americans were drawn to the glorious, colonial past of Britain, a trend that would boost the Raj Revival series of films a few years later. Charlie sells his Englishness on the other side of the Atlantic, in the belief that "it’s only by pushing ourselves, the limits that we learn about ourselves. That’s where I’m going, to the edge. Look at Kerouac and all those guys" (The Buddha of Suburbia 252). The irony lies in the fact that Charlie is commodifying an aspect of himself which he tried very hard to get rid of in high school: "I walked down the street, laughing, amused that here in America Charlie had acquired his Cockney accent when my first memory of him at school was that he’d cried after being mocked by the stinking Gypsy kids for talking so posh…He was selling Englishness, and getting a lot of money for it" (The Buddha of Suburbia 247). Thus it seems that identities can be commodified very easily, as characters such as Charlie seem to be doing everything in their power to rise to fame, while Karim has also learnt to speak with an Indian accent for his play. But Charlie needs Karim to reflect his own success: "He liked having me there as a witness, I suspected…It was as if, without me to celebrate it all, Charlie’s progress had little meaning. In other words, I was a full-length mirror, but a mirror that could remember" (The Buddha of Suburbia 250-251). Despising his idol for turning his identity into a commodity, this comes as another moment of realisation for Karim in New York, who returns to London. Karim is disgusted by Charlie’s behaviour and extreme experimentation with sadomasochism and drugs, which goes too far: "It wasn’t Charlie: It was a body with a sack over its head, half of humanity gone, ready for execution" (The Buddha of Suburbia 254).

Prior to this realisation and in order to interact with all these characters, Karim’s quest involves movement between the suburbs and London. Such movements on the one hand enable Karim’s interaction with the characters and on the other hand reflect the movements and changes in his identity. Such a spatial and cultural mobility that reflects Karim’s growth is not at all an easy one. The range of social, sexual and political conflicts he goes through are reflected not only in his interaction with the characters and the aftermath of these dialectical processes, but also in his uneasiness and unwillingness to settle to one cultural space, be it the suburbs or the city. It is precisely through this constant movement between spaces and the simultaneous sexual escapades with the characters inhabiting such spaces that Karim’s growth comes about, as out of chaos comes order.

Sex and the city: Mobility of Characters

By the end of novel, as I will argue later on, Karim realises his impossible position as an artist and acquires a fragmented identity that can be nevertheless read in a positive light, in that it entails multiplicity and undecidedness, unravelling the problematic nature of monolithic identities. What leads to such a sense of identity, is the displacement and mobility of Karim to and from the cultural landscapes that are the suburbs and the city. His physical mobility, from the suburbs to the city as well as his mobility in assuming identities, creates a gap that must be filled by the subject through desire. It is precisely amidst the clashes and disorder of this gap that Kureishi draws his comic irony in the spaces of the social world he evokes. It seems that such a fragmented void is no longer "abnormal", nor does it carry a negative meaning but it has become a kind of cultural norm, entailing multiplicity of meaning and possibilities. Such a fragmented space is evident in the movement of the characters in The Buddha of Suburbia through the cultural spaces that are the suburbs and the city and the cultural connections they entail. Karim’s longing for movement is clear from the beginning of the novel, as he states that he was asking for trouble, "any kind of movement, action and sexual interest I could find, perhaps because things were so gloomy, so slow and heavy, in our family, I don’t know why" (The Buddha of Suburbia 3). But, such movement is not limited to Karim. Many characters in the novel change houses (like Charlie), accents (Charlie, the characters in Pyke’s play) and appearances, all of which challenge a fixed identity of Englishness, and of class, and point to a social and sexual mobility, based on the fluidity of desire. The novel thus participated in discussions of what it means to be British. Jamel Oubechou argues that "these constant changes point to the volatile nature of the British urban and modern identity in the 60s" (102). Adding to this point is of course Karim’s fluid sexuality, as even though he sexually engages with both men and women, he does not define himself as homosexual, bisexual or anything else, any more that he defines himself as British or Indian. And this indecisiveness is clearly connected with sexuality as it is a part, according to Waddick Doyle, of the seductive charm of the narrator, who plays with his identity to seduce others. Karim’s identity is more about the indeterminacy of promise and possibility than about definition. It is precisely the readers’ inability to pin him down as "homosexual or heterosexual, as English or Indian, as true or false that creates the pleasure, attractiveness and enticement of both the novel and the character […] Karim is not only seductive to various characters…but also to the reader as our desire to know his identity can never be fully satisfied" (Doyle 111). Indeed, there is a constant movement of desire in the space created when the characters move between identity and "Otherness" which is used to seduce people into sexual adventures, both in the city and in the suburbs.

The novel is divided in two parts entitled "In the Suburbs" and "In the City". At the beginning, the reader feels for Karim in that staying in the suburbs means to succumb to imposed limits whereas leaving them to live a (sexual) dream in London seems to be liberating. Even Haroon is boring when in the suburbs, and exotic when in the city. Leaving though, is not at all an easy task hence the painfulness seen in the various sexual disappointments of the characters and even sexual violence. Karim’s idealised view of London comes out in his thoughts when pondering to leave suburbia:

In bed before I went to sleep I fantasised about London and what I’d do there when the city belonged to me. There was a sound that London had. It was, I’m afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors’s ‘Light My Fire’. There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn’t feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn’t know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn’t ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted. I was twenty. I was ready for anything (The Buddha of Suburbia 121).

The cultural landscape here becomes sonically and visually vivid, while the comment on language used in magazines is a direct critique of the system, portrayed in a sort of "oppressive grammar" and its unbending rules.

And, it is Karim’s sexual connections with the characters that allow him to start enjoying London: "So this was London at last, and nothing gave me more pleasure than strolling around my new possession all day" (The Buddha of Suburbia 126). Karim believes that the sexual metropolis of London enables him to do anything he wants: "The city blew the windows of my brain wide open…London seemed like a house with five thousand rooms, all different" (The Buddha of Suburbia 126). This view about London is also articulated by Kureishi in Some Time with Stephen, where he wrote about his love and fascination for London: "here there is fluidity and possibilities unlimited" (23). Similarly, Karim echoes the author when he expresses his views on the city: "London, where life [is] bottomless in its temptations" (The Buddha of Suburbia 8). The thing that reflects his own identity is the seemingly fragmented suburbs which initially seem as limiting to his potentials:

As we loafed around I saw how derelict and poor this end of the city - South London - really was, compared with the London I was living in. Here the unemployed were walking the streets with nowhere else to go, the men in dirty coats and the women in old shoes without stockings. [...] The housing estates looked like makeshift prison camps; dogs ran around; rubbish blew about; there was graffiti. Small trees had been planted with protective wire netting around them, but they’d all been snapped off away. The shops sold only inadequate and badly made clothes. Everything looked cheap and shabby (The Buddha of Suburbia 68).

However, despite his initial rejection of the suburbs, Karim’s identity will include them once again, as London and the suburbs come together, informing the protagonist’s growth and marking his identity as multiple-layered, uneven and open-ended. On closer reflection, Kureishi’s suburbs (and Karim’s identity) do not necessarily seem as appalling as the beginning, as they entail variety and multiplicity, which is reflected in the heterogeneity of the inhabitants:

All the houses have been "done up". One had a new porch, another double-glazing, "Georgian" windows or a new door with brass fittings. Kitchens have been extended, lofts converted, walls removed, garages inserted […] Here lived Mr Whitman, the policeman, and his young wife, Noleen; next door were a retired couple, Mr and Mrs Holub. They were socialists in exile from Czechoslovakia ... Opposite them were another retired couple, a teacher and his wife, the Gothards. An East End family of birdseed dealers, the Lovelaces, were next to them ... Further up the street lived a Fleet Street reporter, Mr Nokes, his wife and their overweight kids, with the Scoffields – Mrs Scoffield was an architect, next door to them (The Buddha of Suburbia 74-75).

Karim becomes aware of such multiplicity and heterogeneity, regardless of his initial attempt to reject the suburbs as dull and boring. The remodelling of the houses reflects the "piecing together" of Karim’s identity which builds up towards the end of the novel. In that, The Buddha of Suburbia presents itself as a (sub)urban novel where the streets are not only dangerous but also the site of sexual possibility, emphasising thus the element of heterogeneity that permeates everything, from the social to the political. Such a reading also reflects Karim’s self-realisation by the end of the novel, as his diverse identity, as I will argue, resembles the coming together of the cultural spaces that enable Karim’s mobility and inform his character.

Moore-Gilbert has argued that such a space is "a site in which new forms of both individual and community identity can be worked out and a space in which the dispiriting realitues of ‘domestic colonialism’ together with the breakdown of traditional notions of national community, are all too manifest" (Hanif Kureishi 115). Karim’s indecisiveness goes hand in hand with Kureishi’s view of his work as located in a British context where "establishing a conceptually British identity that incorporates ethnic and cultural differences is an ultimate aim" (Yousaf 36). Moore-Gilbert, discussing the optimism that The Buddha of Suburbia celebrates, said that it "provides a sobering perspective on the optimism expressed both in Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Bhabha’s Location of Culture about the possibilities of a new, non-conflictual and non-hierarchical inter- and intra-cultural dispensation" (Hanif Kureishi 205). Even though the suburbs seem to come into direct opposition with the city and the clash between them is more than evident, in the end, I argue, they come together in Karim’s consciousness and reflect his growth. The constant movement in the novel which entails possibilities and informs the protagonist’s psychological growth is also a kind of performativity, as a culturally heterogeneous phenomenon, which informs the new space that is created in Karim’s mind. Indeed, the artistic production at the time and especially theatre and music was largely informed by a spirit of resistance to the oppressive political agenda, and informs Karim’s artistic identity to a great extent, revealing the way in which such cultural resistance intervened in the dialectic between past and present, pertaining to issues of violence and performativity. The Buddha of Suburbia thus engages in an exploration of the role and possibilities of popular culture.

Performativity: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

One of the leitmotivs in the novel is the issue of performativity which goes on to highlight the problem of "colonised false identities, of longing for borrowed selves in a post-colonial context where recovering a dignified and authentic identity requires a constant battle with wrong perceptions, racial clichés, and imitate behaviour" (Carey 121). As an actor and as a diasporic subject, Karim performs different identities, risking commodification as he is drawn by the superficial allure of becoming famous. He is fluid and limited at the same time, but his acquired, multifaceted identity by the end of the novel, empowers him to evade such limits. The issue of performativity goes hand in hand with the theme of identity disorder, evident in all the characters as it reflects the desire to be, or act as, someone else. Naturally, being someone else involves mimicry which, as Fanon has argued, leads to violence, more often than not of sexual nature in a colonial environment, as dominance and exploitation as tropes of the colonial are transformed into rape or brutality. It is my belief though that in The Buddha of Suburbia Kureishi explores the issue of violence through a re-imagining of desire, so that traditional systems of colonial mentality are destroyed. For instance, Anwar, Haroon’s brother, is one of the characters that defend tradition. He forces his daughter to marry Changez by going on a hunger strike, a move that could be read as an allusion to Gandhi’s anti-violence fasting practices, except that in the family these practices turn into sheer manipulation and passive aggression. When Jamila tries to persuade her uncle Haroon to change her father’s mind, he says: "We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India" (The Buddha of Suburbia 122), in a sentence that seems to be blaming the old generation of immigrants for sticking to the past. Anwar clearly represents the old India, tradition and familial ties: he says that Haroon has been mesmerised by the West (The Buddha of Suburbia 221). These traditional views function as an opposing force to the sexually charged youth, such as Karim, marking a tension between new and old generations. In the end, Anwar is one of the characters that remain rigid and unchanged, showing the rigidity of tradition and the past, as opposed to the fluidity of Karim’s new, multiple-layered identity. Cynthia Carey argues that The Buddha of Suburbia is a "rich, profane, carnivalesque novel which relentlessly challenges orthodoxy on every level" (120). Indeed, Karim’s sexual experimentation enables him to challenge boundaries, more often than not referring to vulgar sexual acts:

It was unusual, I knew, the way I wanted to sleep with boys as well as girls. I liked strong bodies and the backs of boys’ necks. I liked being handled by men, their fists pulling me; and I liked objects – the ends of brushed, pens, fingers – up my arse. But I liked cunts and breasts, all of women’s softness, long smooth legs and the way women dressed. I felt it would be heart-breaking to have to choose one or the other, like having to decide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (The Buddha of Suburbia 55).

Such unconventional sexual acts threaten the symbolic order and violate bourgeois notions of decency, as their extravagant comic appeal overturn normative orders, which points to the pleasure of the unsettled and unsettling subjectivities. It is this carnivalesque physicality that entails a liberating force. For Karim, this experimentation points to his sexual undecidedness which is something that by the end of the novel will help him attain self-realisation. What is more, one the ways in which Kureishi manages to comically exploit the use of violence and "iconoclastically destroy old systems of orthodoxy" (Carey 121) is evident in a very funny scene with Anwar in the novel where past and present come together through sexuality which coexists with violence. After an argument, Anwar throws a bunch of bananas at his son-in-law who in turn throws a carrot and hits him on the head with a vibrator. Changez has bought the sex toy for his encounters with the Japanese prostitute Shinko but when he fights with his father-in-law in the street, he uses it as a sexual weapon:

As Anwar smacked downwards with his stick, Changez lumbered to one side…withdrew the knobbly dildo…and with a Muslim warrior shout…whacked my uncle smartly over the head with it. Uncle Anwar, who’d come from India to the Old Kent Road…could never have guessed…that…he would be knocked unconscious by a sex-aid (The Buddha of Suburbia 210-211).

This mixture of sexuality and violence here is extremely interesting, as it is a complete and utter reversal of family ties and normative sexualities, within the context of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. The Eastern and Western world come into contact through the sex toy, which is a marker for sexual desire which was repressed in the past; so it is as if the younger generation is literally using sexuality to kill off the older one, in a battle of past and present. Within these sexual encounters in The Buddha of Suburbia, the question that rises is to what extent the members of the Diaspora relate to both the colonial past, as well as to the contemporary situation of Britain. Since the autobiographical nature of The Buddha of Suburbia is very strong, it can be argued that Kureishi’s own persona permeates the novel, evoking and challenging at the same time the imperial heritage. This battle of past and present, evident in the Anwar-Changez scene, point to the fact that The Buddha of Suburbia is located amidst a site of clashes and struggles of heritages, traditions and sexualities, where the performativity of characters is a vital element to their development.

The issues of performativity and identity confusion are closely connected to the persona of David Bowie, a constant in Kureishi’s work. Indeed, Kureishi was fascinated by Bowie and his lifestyle, and he thought that his music was,

very sophisticated, and knowing - it somehow encapsulated the history of music within it…I worked with him when he did the soundtrack to The Buddha of Suburbia TV series. He’s really fantastic and very hard-working – he’d be in the studio all through the night[...]We had lunch once and passed a building site, and all of the builders ran to the front of the site and stood there, screaming and shouting. A very strange life ("Hanif Kureishi on his Musical Tastes")

Like in other Kureishi’s work such as Intimacy (1998) where a character is modelled on David Bowie, in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is Charlie Hero who exhibits the same characteristics as Bowie. Bowie, a musician whose sexuality has also been ambiguous, also wrote the original score for the TV mini-series The Buddha of Suburbia for the BBC. The suburbia of the title of the novel, is Bromley, where David Bowie grew up and consequently, the protagonists of The Buddha of Suburbia pay homage to this famous guru of suburban English pop numerous times, as Karim for instance makes his dad stop at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham (now called The Rat and Parrot) where Bowie’s career actually began ("Celebrating David Bowie"). The same goes for David Bowie, whose music is very much present in the novel and whose performativity challenges established orders:

He dressed as a woman! It was really the introduction of this idea that you could make yourself up, that identities weren’t fixed. That you weren’t born a white working-class boy, or you weren’t born a Paki, or a Scotsman or whatever. And Bowie blew all that up. He said you can do that, you can pretend to be that; identity is just a masquerade. The Bowie-like notion that you could make yourself seemed to me to be really freeing. In a way, liking Bowie was like being a Muslim, in that you have a new identity, a new identification. If you say you're a Muslim then you identify with a group and you feel strong. For me, pop was the ideology that I followed and that I loved. And not only is pop haunting and wonderful, but luckily it didn't involve killing people. It liberated me from the condition I was in - which was being a Paki on the streets of south London ("A Life Laid Bare").

Even though Charlie is the character modelled on Bowie, the latter’s undecidedness and his performativity on stage, also point to Karim as an artist in the novel. As an actor, he is asked to play Mowgli in a theatrical adaptation of Kipling’s Jungle Book. Having been told by Pyke that his destiny is "to be a half-caste in England" (The Buddha of Suburbia 141) earlier on, Shadwell, the director of the play forces him to smear paint on his face and imitate an Indian accent in order to play Mowgli. This is a forceful attribution of age-old characteristics of an exotic Orient who are being reinstated in the present, even if it is for a theatrical play. In order to be accepted as an actor, Karim must visibly and audibly meet the criteria of an audience deeply drawn into stereotypes: "It turned out that on stage I would wear a loin-cloth and brown make up, so that I resembled a turd in a bikini bottom….’Please don’t put this on me’, I said. ‘Got to…be a big boy’. And she covered me from head to toe in…brown muck" (The Buddha of Suburbia 146).

In playing Mowgli and just like the fictional character, Karim negotiates between identities and cultural identifications. Indeed, both characters are torn between "conformity to moral law and the promptings of nature" (Moore-Gilbert 125). The same happens regarding Karim’s accent:

"A word about the accent Karim. I think it should be an authentic accent".

"What do you mean, authentic?"

"Where was our Mowgli born?"

"India".

"Yes. Not Orpington. What accents do they have in India?"

"Indian accents"

"Ten out of ten"

"No Jeremy. Please no"

"Karim you have been cast for authenticity and not experience" (The Buddha of Suburbia 147)

Authenticity is interpreted as what the audience believes it is true. The director of Mowgli, Jeremy Shadwell, says to Karim: "Everyone looks at you, I’m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how interesting, what stories of aunties and elephants we’ll hear from him" (The Buddha of Suburbia 141). Moreover, Pyke’s theory of acting was that "to be someone else successfully you must be yourself" (The Buddha of Suburbia 220). Karim is forcefully transformed into an exotic commodity and given an identity according to how the West expects him to be. Schoene argues that Pyke creates the "ethnic subject whose emancipation he purports to facilitate[…]The members of his Pyke’s theatre group fail to register Karim’s actual multitude of intrinsic differences" ("The Herald of Hybridity" 123). Karim is both a social actor and an actor on stage and he oscillates between assumed identities, performing various roles both in society and on stage. These performances lead Karim through his self-discovery quest and point to the end of the novel where he will experience his self-realisation moment. The better an actor is at "playing" these different personas, the better actor he is considered to be. Therefore, Karim’s adaptability it is not so much a multiplicity of selves but a sense of malleability pertaining to a variety of social milieus, in which he could play whichever part it was expected of him.

Karim’s forced performativity to be like Western audiences expect him to be, I argue, reflects an identity confusion shared by second generation immigrants, pertaining to their impossible position of having to choose fixed identities or cultures. Such a seemingly impossible position is shared by Kureishi as well, and its realisation will come by the end of the novel through Karim’s process of self-realisation. Violence and performativity seem to be integral and necessary elements in Karim’s postcolonial identity, as they seem to interact and function as dynamic elements, being integrated into Karim’s identity, paradoxically working as "catalysts in a process of liberation or empowerment of the individual" (Carey 122). It seems that through the re-imagining of desire, the sexual experimentation of his characters and his employment of comical irony Kureishi is able to challenge prevailing systems of authority, accepting Karim’s (and his own) identity confusion. Indeed, it was artistic production that enabled Kureishi to escape the burden of being defined by others:

What I was interested in was the idea that other people have about you and what that does to you and what you can do to escape their definition. The way in which I did it was to write. You would walk down the street and people saw you as a Paki…You exist under their description. The way to make you own life is to go home, sit down and to begin to write and I called it to write back…I began to speak, I found my own voice, I began to create my own identity. The characters in The Buddha of Suburbia are making themselves, creating identities, I guess, in the way I was trying to make myself by using words and writing books and stories (World Book Club, emphasis added).

Thus, just as Kureishi began to create his own identity through artistic production, so does Karim’s identity in the end will integrate violence, performativity, displacement and desire, creating an unsettled subjectivity that nevertheless pertains to multiplicity and heterogeneity. His career as an actor allows for numerous changes and possibilities, as all personalities and identities are open for exploration and interpretation. Of course, the fact that he is an actor also entails a danger of commodification, as he is asked to sell his "authenticity", as in the case with Mowgli. Indeed, Tracey, a black woman in the cast of The Jungle Book, accuses him of being "what white people already think of us" (The Buddha of Suburbia, 180). On the contrary though, Karim tries to be successful in all new roles, whether in life or on stage, which is something that allows him to discover and occupy temporal positions. Of course, Karim does realise the danger of "selling out", after seeing Charlie in New York "selling his Englishness", which is something that makes him face, for the first time in his life, a moral dilemma. After the performance, Karim sees his mother:

I was leaving, I was getting out, when Mum came up to me. She smiled and I kissed her. ‘I love you so much’, she said.

‘Wasn’t I good, eh, Mum?’

‘You weren’t in a loin-cloth as usual’, she said. ‘At least they let you wear your own clothes. But you’re not an Indian. You’ve never been to India. You’d get diarrhoea the minute you stepped off that plane, I know you would’

‘Why don’t you say it a bit louder’, I said. Aren’t I part Indian?’

‘What about me? Mum said. ‘Who gave birth to you? You’re an Englishman, I’m glad to say?

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘It’s a job’

‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘Be what you are’ (The Buddha of Suburbia 232)

Even though Karim tries to do his job right, the matter of the fact is that being an artist is not "just a job" but it is much more complex than that. A job is just a commodity but the artist’s goal is to deconstruct this commodity. He is aware of his ambiguity as an actor and he starts feeling guilty for modelling his character on Changez, which entails a commodification of his culture. This artistic realisation comes at the end of the novel, as Karim finally faces his moral dilemma. As he accepts the role for another Asian in a soap opera, he says that the show would be watched by millions, and he would "be recognized all over the country" (The Buddha of Suburbia 259). But his fame will come with a price. In the beginning, as he admits, he was driven by desire and desire alone. But now he shows signs of growth as he was experiencing, for the first time, guilt, not only towards others but towards his own self:

If I defied Changez, if I started work on a character based on him, if I used the bastard, it meant that I was untrustworthy, a liar. But if I didn't use him it meant I had fuck-all to take to the group after the ‘me-as-Anwar’ fiasco. As I sat there I began to recognize that this was one of the first times in my life I’d been aware of having a moral dilemma. Before, I’d done exactly what I wanted; desire was my guide and I was inhibited by nothing but fear. But now, at the beginning of my twenties, something was growing in me. Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed restrictions. Perhaps no one would know I’d based my character in the play on Changez; perhaps, later, Changez himself wouldn't mind, would be flattered. But I would always know what I had done, that I had chosen to be a liar, to deceive a friend, to use someone. What should I do? I had no idea. I ran over it again and again and could find no way out (The Buddha of Suburbia 186-187).

Ironically, Karim finds true meaning through his performativity in a fake world and a staged scene, which of course also includes a danger of succumbing to the allure of commodification. Karim is torn between the "selling out" of himself and his culture and the artistic choices he needs to make. As an artist who performs Changez he is ambiguous as he commodifies him and his culture for market value and at the same time he has a moral obligation towards the character he is playing as well as his own self. Given that Karim is Kureishi’s literary projection in that he is Hanif as a young artist growing up in the 1970s, it is safe to say that Kureishi himself was caught between the allure of commodity and the truth of the artist. Indeed, in an interview to Bart Moore-Gilbert, he says that even though ethnicity can become a commodity, it can also carry a positive meaning as it can become a fruitful cultural interchange: "ethnicity is a commodity which is bought and sold, but you could also say in a way that it’s cultural interchange. Like Picasso taking African masks and making something else with them. You wouldn’t only say that he was exploiting Africa for images. This is how culture works" ("London in Hanif Kureishi’s Films" 11). Both Karim and Hanif come to the realisation that the artist is caught in an impossible position, torn as he is between his artistic truth which is to undermine commodification and the allure of the latter. Such an artistic realisation is what completes Karim’s self-realisation process by the end of the novel and Kureishi’s own development as a writer, opening up the way for his later work.

End of an era

As Eva and Haroon announce their wedding, Margaret Thatcher gives her inaugural speech after her victory in 1979. The looming political change evident throughout the novel comes officially in the announcement of the victory of the Conservatives, marking the beginning of the Thatcher era. Haroon’s quest seems to have brought him satisfaction and a sense of completeness as he is with the woman he wants. But, the positive nature of this relationship is challenged in the end. Despite his wedding, it is not certain that Haroon will be happy. Karim thinks: "Did he love her? I wasn’t sure...Eva doesn’t look after me now. She’s too busy. I’ll never get used to this new woman business. Sometimes I hate her. I know I should say it. I can’t bear her near me, but hate it when she’s not here" (The Buddha of Suburbia 262, 266). Eva’s status as a lover and the object of love for Haroon is questioned by Karim, who understands the discontents of their relationship. What is more, the physical features of the aging Haroon are described as unstable, reflecting the uneven and unpredictable relationship between father and son: "his flesh was heavy, marked, and fatty now, the upper half of his face composed of flaccid pouches sewn together under the eyes" (The Buddha of Suburbia 280).

The ending of the book is as complex as the protagonist’s identity. Positive feelings are mixed with negative ones, as Karim is trying to come to terms with his sense of belonging. Karim’s sense of not belonging anywhere diminishes by the end of the text, in London: "And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn’t always be that way" (The Buddha of Suburbia 284). There is both happiness and misery in this statement but hope is created for the future, even though it seems that it will not be easy. This open-endedness of the novel allows for a number of interpretations regarding the protagonist’s disposition. One the one hand, the text seems to resist the imposition of an ordered and happy ending, where everything falls into place, as Karim says that he feels miserable. On the other hand, it cannot be argued that Karim has simply failed in his quest. He is just happy in that he does not have to choose and be limited by essentialist choices. In fact, the textual complexity evident in the open-endedness of the novel alludes to the complexity of identities as well. Karim is not someone who can fit in an established order; rather, the identity he acquires constitutes a process of multiple additions. This kind of fragmentation is reflected in the space of London he currently occupies: "I walked around Central London and saw that the town was being ripped apart; the rotten has been replaced by the new, and the new was ugly […] The ugliness was in the people too. Londoners seem to hate each other" (The Buddha of Suburbia 258). Karim’s identity is a process that is made up from notions, connections and initiatives and his re-imagined desire now includes love: "one idea pulled another behind it, like conjuror’s handkerchiefs. I uncovered notions, connections, initiatives I didn’t know were present in my mind […] I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried,