Book: The Buddha of Suburbia

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher:

My mental stagnation (or emptiness) continues and as a consequence, I read another novel by Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia. Ghalib said: Rukti haiy meri taba’h tau hoti haiy rawa’an aur. It’s different with me; my taba’h is still stagnating and doesn’t get going.

Kureishi wrote his Buddha with a great facility and handled difficult situations in a stride, in a down to earth and a matter-of-factly manner. Some believe the Buddha is based on his own life story. He has impersonated his father in the role of Buddha and may be he himself is Karim, a bisexual son of a Pakistani father and a British white mother, living in two worlds and two cultures in both of which he exists naturally and comfortably. He has a complex of not being wholly white though; he mostly identifies himself with the whites. The whites take to him condescendingly. At school, Hanif was jeered as Paki, wog, blackie, etc. He survived all that although they did leave an indelible imprint on his mind. Probably that is the reason, Karim empathizes with Gene, a West Indian black actor who was lover of his white girl friend, Eleanor, and who committed suicide out of frustration the way he was treated by his managers and producers.

The bisexuality, homosexuality, and heterosexuality which he deals with in his novel, here and there, without a qualm of indecency, are quite graphic. For Kureishi, there is no difference between what is generally considered as decent and proper or indecent and gauche. It seems that he has described honestly everything that he comes across in his daily life. I like to believe that his characters, though quite real, are not typical of the humanity at large, even in the west. A homosexual couple lives next door to me and life is as normal as it could ever be. Whatever they do in the privacy of their home is their business. Sex is beautiful as long as it is private and personal.

Raw sex is pornography. In Kureishi, the line between sex and pornography is rather thin, which seems to be growing ever thinner and thinner. He started as a pornography writer impersonating himself as a French female. Nothing succeeds like success (or sex). May be I am a prude.

Our tolerance to raw sex has become increasingly greater with the passage of time. It’s like becoming used to it so that it gradually lost its viciousness and grew upon us to become even desirable. Radclyff Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928, which was no more racy than “she kissed her full on the lips like a lover” led to an obscenity trial. “Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister (of England), his Chancellor Winston Churchill, and Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks went to great lengths to suppress the book. Then later on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover caused sensation and it was banned for its explicitness.

Kureishi’s novels and many other, by recent and contemporary authors by comparison hide nothing and describe homosexual relationships as factually as anything.

Coming back to the novel, the Buddha fascinates his limited white audience like a maha rishi or a guru. The exotic and oriental mystique captivates the materialistic whites. But the magic wears off in due time and Buddha is overwhelmed by his personal family problems. Karim’s character is strong though bereft of much practical meaning; he himself doesn’t know where he is going. He is adrift in the current of his wayward life. Changez’s character is somewhat unusual and atypical. It is comical which Kureishi wanted to exploit at the expense of his Indian roots. Most of the easterners, even those who find themselves trapped in unhappy situations like Changez, are not as docile, submissive and forgiving and fatalistic as he is. Anwar’s character is real to life and not so atypical.