Karim is a half-Indian teenager coming of age in the 1970s. At the beginning of the novel, he is interested in following fashion trends, trying drugs, and having as much sex as he can. He also wants desperately to escape the suburbs and move to London, as he believes that the suburbs are a place of misery and racism, while London will be the place where he can pursue his interests without inhibition. Despite identifying this dream, Karim is directionless, so he finds his father’s lover Eva and her son Charlie fascinating in part because both of them have definite directions for their lives. Karim’s coming of age over the course of the novel has two major thrusts: he develops an adult life (his career as an actor blossoms and he moves to America), and he begins to see people he once idolized as fully human with all the complexity that entails. For example, as Dad begins his relationship with Eva, Karim is forced to see his father as not just a boring suburbanite like he always thought, but rather as a full person with desires and contradictions that were invisible when Karim simply saw him as a parent. Over the course of the novel, Karim also develops a more complicated relationship to race. While he once identified almost fully with the white, English side of his identity, he comes to embrace his Indian side more, partially through genuine appreciation for his family and partially through realizing that allowing white people to exoticize him can be professionally and socially rewarding. In most of his relationships, Karim is flakey and selfish. Though he's interested in other people in an abstract sense, his true interest is in figuring out how he fits into the lives of others. Because of this, he finally comes of age when he realizes he's outgrown his love and admiration for Charlie and he can see himself on his own terms, rather than through the lens of others.
The The Buddha of Suburbia quotes below are all either spoken by Karim or refer to Karim. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
But divorce wasn't something that would occur to them. In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness.
Related Characters: Karim (speaker), Haroon (Dad) , Mum Related Themes:
I put my ear against the white paintwork of the door. Yes, God was talking to himself, but not intimately. He was speaking slowly, in a deeper voice than usual, as if he were addressing a crowd. He was hissing his s's and exaggerating his Indian accent. He'd spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he was putting it back in spadeloads. Why?
