" 41someone like Prince is a fascinating prism through which you can view sexual and racialpolitics, and is well worthy of study?.Discussing the title of his novel, in an interview to Maya Jaggi, Kureshi says: ?I was thinking of the two white albums - by the Beatles and Joan Didion - in theinnocent 1960s. It was the new enlightenment of peace, love, integration, the civil rightsmovement. Things have got darker since then.?As Avtar Brah observes that ?embedded within the concept of diaspora is the notion of theborder?(198).Accordingly,borders are ?arbitrary dividing lines that are simultaneously social,cultural and psychic; territories to be patrolled against those whom they construct as outsiders,aliens, the Others; forms of demarcation where the very act of prohibition inscribestransgression; zones where fear of the Other is the fear of the self; places where claims toownership- claims to =mine‘, yours and theirs – are staked out, contested, defended, and foughtover. However, borders are arbitrary contructions. Thus they are metaphors?(198). The noveldramatises that identities are fluid for a diaporic subject. The diaspora not only crosses thegeographical or national border from one land to another he/she also crosses the borders ofracism and discrimination.As a result, some of them create borders around themselves of hatredand resentment. In this case the religion. Shahid refuses to fit in any of the categories becausethat would eventually lead to a distorted diasporic identity. Most of the characters portrayed inthe novel are extremes. For example, Riaz, Chad and Chili. The novel carries an embeddedcritique of these characters. They are failed characters. Chad gives up pleasure and becomes afanatic. Compared to religiously fanatic characters like Riaz , Shahid does not remove himselffrom pleasure, music or books. 42 The idea is that a diasporic subject cannot live within borders. All borders and barriers must bebroken down for a dasporic self to gain stability. The concept of diaspora valories fluidity ofidentity. For Shahid who lived his life in the suburbs of Kent, London symbolises freedom. Hisbrother tried to prepare him through movies such as ?Mean Streets and Taxi Driver? However, itis also a city that overwhelms him:?He went to the cinema or obtained the cheapest theatre seats, and one night he hadattended a socialist political meeting. He went to Piccadilly, and sat for an hour on thesteps of Eros, hoping to meet a woman; wandered around Leicester Square andConventGardens; entered an =erotic‘ bar where a woman sat beside him for ten minutesand a man tried to charge him £100 for a bottle of fizzy water, and punched him when hewalked out. He had never felt more invisible somehow this wasn‘t the =real‘ London.(Kureishi 5)Shahid‘s image of London as a place to realize his freedom and escape from the suburbs isfurther thwarted as he comes across sheer poverty. Very early in the novel, Shahid is familiarisedwith the darker side of London:?He wondered, too, whether a nearby asylum had been recently closed down, since dayand night on the high road, dozens of exhibitionists, gabblers and maniacs yelled into theair. One man with a shaved head stood all day in a doorway with his fists clenched,mumbling…There was a girl who spent the day collecting firewood from building sitesand skips.? (Kureishi 3)IV43Hari Kunzru‘s novel Transmission (2004) explores the migration of South Asians in the later partof the twentieth century. According to Judith Brown a large-scale migration of South Asiansoccurred when ?countries which had once barred their doors to people of non-European descentnow opened them - particularly Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA?(52). Asportrayed by Kunzru through his protagonist, Arjun Mehta, it is a migration of the ?skilled? andthe ?well educated?(Brown 52).In this section I wish to draw attention to the forms of migration explored by a British Asianwriter. Kunzru seeks to demonstrate migration as a form of movement of labour. There is asimilarity between the South Asians who migrated to Britain in the 1950s and the 1960s tocompensate for the labour shortages. However, it seems little has changed since then. Those whomigrated to Britain were unskilled labourers whereas Arjun Mehta is a skilled migrant and an ITprofessional.Unlike, Monica Ali or Hanif Kureishi, Kunzru distances himself from portaying theexperiences of South Asians living in Britain. However, this should not be viewed as a drawbacksince it allows him to explore the complexties faced by a diasporic identity when he migrates to adifferent nation. It allows us to establish certain concerns which are central to diasporicexperiences such as nostalgia, longing for homeland as well as disappointments. The writersdiscussed in the paper suggest that the impulse behind the migration of South Asians is largelyeconomic upliftment or dissatisfaction with the political scenario of the homeland.Kunzru seeks to portaray urban India in his novel. Like Ali and Kureishi there is an attempt onthe part of Kunzru to revisit the subcontinent in his novel. However, no judgement is passed onthe Indian subcontinent as the writers seek to capture its economic development. Unlike hisfather Kunzru was born and raised in Britain therefore he has no memory of the Indiansubcontinent. As Kunzru demonstrates in his novel:44Around him Connaught Place seethed with life. Office workers, foreign backpackers,messengers and lunching ladies all elbowed past the beggars, dodging traffic and runningin and out of Palika Bazaar like contestants in a demented game. (6) In the context of this novel I also wish to explore the ways in which the three writers recreateBangladesh, Pakistan and India in their writings. The framework for this interrogation is SalmanRushdie‘s seminal text: Imaginary Homeland: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. According toRushdie, the diasporic writers are often compelled to revisit their past through their writings.However, these writers are fully aware of the fact that they are distanced from their homelandand that they cannot fully retrieve was is lost.One can draw parallel between Rushdie and thewriters discussed in this paper insofar as they are ?emigrants?(10). Both Monica Ali and HariKunzru revisit the lands of their ancestors in their writings. Unlike Hanif Kureishi who‘s primaryconcern is to capture the complexities of the Asian youth in Britain. In the The Black Album,Kureishi weaves in the polemical =rushdie affair‘ in order to interrogate the issues of religion andracism.Unlike Kureishi, Kunzru distances himself from portraying the experiences of South Asianssettled in Britain. Although Kunzru himself is an Asian settled in Britain, as a writer he choosesto discuss larger problems of immigration across the world. Kunzru is interested in technology aswell as flow of capital and people across the globe. Despite the overwhelming allusions to thepost-industrial world of capitalism, Kunzru‘s novel primarily remains about human errors. Setting his novel in the urban city of India Kunzru seeks to chart out the progress of thesubcontinent. It is not a sense of nostalgia that compels him to revisit the subcontinent in hiswritings but a sense of engagement with the so-called homeland. There is an acknowledgement45of his dual identity. In an interview given to Jacqueline Ann Surin, Kunzru observes that India asa nation is getting moreconfident about itself:?Well, I think, certainly in Asia, coming to the end of what you would call the post- colonial period, there's been several generations of people who really have come to termswith the existence of national culture, if such an idea really means anything. And also therelationships of emerging nations with their former colonial powers. I mean the case Iknow best is India where one of the legacies of two centuries of British rule was thegenuine sense that Indian things were inferior to British things. And that has taken, youknow, several generations to work through and now there's a great sense of confidence.?Kunzru also makes an effort to map out the urban landscape of the Third World country:?As the bus travelled over YamunaBridge, past the huge shoreline slum seeping its refuseinto the river, he ran several variations of this basic fantasy, tweaking details of dress andlocation, identity of companion and soundtrack. The roar of public carriers receded intothe background. Lost in his inner retail space he stared blankly out of his window, hiseyes barely registering the low patchworked thatch and blue polythene by the roadside,the ragged children, standing under the tangle of illegally strung, power-lines?. (Kunzru11)This urban landscape of the Indian cities can be contrasted with the image of America that iscreated for the potential migrant. His current favorite daydream was set in a mall, a cavern of bright glass through which a near-futureversion of himself was travelling atspeed up a broad black escalator. Dressed in abutton-down shirt and baseball cap with the logo of a major software corporation "