The Buddha of Suburbia

Before jumping on a train between Bristol and London, I scraffled around the only newsagents in the station, quickly searching for a magazine or book for the rest of this journey ahead. That one! Just out and it had Buddha in its title. I must have been eighteen-years-old and had had revelation after revelation. Naturally, I was curious about Buddhism, the most peaceful of religions; plus the tale took place where I grew up. I might learn something.

Our church was run by a vicar who liked his pints and, in my younger years, I pretended to run the services at home when we couldn't go lol. My only real connection with divinity occurred outside of the church. An invisible thread had kept me here, that third force that intervened, existed but not as we might imagine. I had met with something deeply wise, personal and beautiful in essence. I saw parallels between religions and found this more fascinating than any church service. Now I was searching for what made it real.

Maybe this book had some answers! But what a jamboree of taboo-breaking fun Hanif Kereishi's Buddha of Suburbia turned out to be, a family life with many parallels to my own, so close and yet so utterly different - deliciously terrible at times and just terrible at other times - hearty, heavy and full. It is the only book I have ever read illicitly from cover-to-cover within a single train journey. So what I thought I'd gain and what I actually found were worlds apart. In this book, I saw the human struggle and fell in love with that.

The conditions of life were formed long before birth, with all the societal rifts and strange expectations that we encounter. Yet it is said that through life, the true work begins. How we engage with each moment, what stories we tell - these shape what we come to know. This particular story is about a dance between these awesome realms of existence. And when I put my attention where it belongs, I become that familiar in the dance of life. What I take from this today is joyful, celebratory and heart-warming.