Summary
The novel begins with Jasmine retelling a memory from her childhood which serves as the reference point for her current situation as an adult. In the memory, she describes a scene under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur. An astrologer tells her, then just seven years old, that she would end up widowed and in exile. Jasmine refutes the astrologer, and he cackles and strikes her down before returning to his trance.
When Jasmine falls, she hits her head on a bundle of sticks and the fall leaves her with a bleeding wound on her forehead in the shape of a star. When she returns to the river bend with her bundle, a familiar scene greets her. The muddy, smelly earth was "choked with hyacinths and feces from the buffaloes that village boys washed upstream" (4). When her sisters see her, they are panicked over the bleeding wound on her forehead, worried that it will scar and as a result, Jasmine will never find a husband. Jasmine insists that the wound is not a scar, but her third eye, and that now she is a sage. She swims out into the river to evade her sisters' criticism and while swimming, brushes against a decomposing dog. When she touches the dog, its body splits open, and it sinks into the river. Jasmine then tells the reader that, as she is narrating, she is twenty-four, and lives in Iowa. She says that every time she drinks a glass of water, she remembers that dead dog in the river.
Chapter 2 plunges the reader into Jane's (Jasmine's) life as a twenty-four-year-old woman living in Iowa with a man named Bud Ripplemeyer and their adopted son, Du. The narrator identifies by several names, depending on where she is in the world. In Iowa, she goes by Jane Ripplemeyer. Among family and in India, she is Jyoti Vijh. She is also Jasmine, which is sort of in-between Jyoti and the fully Americanized "Jane."
Jane lives on the Ripplemeyer's family farm with Bud, Du, and Bud's mother. Bud is a banker who took over the bank his father began above a barbershop in Baden, Iowa. Bud wants Jane to marry him before she gives birth to their child, but Jane resists his proposals—one of her reasons being that she fears the fakir's prophecy will come true and that if she marries Bud, he will die.
The Ripplemeyer's farm shares a border with the Lutz family farm, and the Ripplemeyers and Lutzes have been neighbors for a long time. They've always looked after each other. When Bud was in the hospital, Gene Lutz looked after his land, and now Bud feels responsible to look out for Gene's son Darrel after Gene died on vacation, "choked to death on a piece of Mexican food" (8).
Darrel is thinking about selling his family farm now that his father has died and his mother and sister are both living in California. He would like to rid himself of the burden of a thousand acres, back-breaking work, and farmer's hours and trade them in for a franchise store somewhere in the Southwest. Developers have approached him, talking about turning his farm into a golf course and turning the barn into a clubhouse with a fancy restaurant. Bud hates the idea of all this farmland being snatched up by developers and turned into water parks, golf courses, and airfields. He also doesn't think, as Darrel's banker, that Darrel stands to gain the most from selling to these developers, but Jane warns Darrel against becoming too emotionally involved.
When Bud's divorce from his previous wife, Karin, is finalized, Bud and Jane move into a small workman's quarters on their 300-acre property. They add on to the house, little by little—a living room when they move in, an additional bedroom when their adoption of Du is approved—and as these small additions to the house are made, Jane feels more and more like she belongs here, that this is her home, too.
Du is fourteen at the time of his adoption by the Ripplemeyers, seventeen at the time of the narration. Jane describes Du as "a real yogi, always in control" (18). Since the time of his adoption, Du is serious, somewhat withdrawn, and doesn't share with Jane about his time in the refugee camps.
Jane describes meeting Bud for the first time. Mother Ripplemeyer takes her into the bank to ask for a job, and Bud is still ambulatory, "a tall, fit, fifty-year-old banker" (14). His children are both grown, married, and farming in neighboring counties. Within six months of meeting Jane, Bud divorces Karin and moves in with Jane on the property. He calls the adoption agency after "he saw a television special on boat people in Thai prisons," wanting to "make up for fifty years of 'selfishness'" (14).
Jane describes a family dinner with Du, Du's friend Scott "whose father works down in the corn sweetener plant," Mother Ripplemeyer, and Bud. Before dinner, Du and Scott watch the monster truck derby on the television, which involves giant trucks battling against military tanks in an arena. Du is really into it. The program attracts everyone's attention, even Mother Ripplemeyer's. Scott asks Jane to make a traditional Indian dish called gobi aloo, though he can't remember the name of the dish without Du's help. Mother Ripplemeyer looks out onto a harsh storm and expresses concern for her husband, Vern. She says, "It's blowing so hard he'll never find his way back from the barn. A man can die in a storm like this" (20). Vern passed long ago, and his mother's comment makes Bud anxious, hinting that she's slipping into dementia.
Chapter 3 shows a scene between Darrel and Jane outside of a grocery store. Jane flags him down as he's walking back to his car and doesn't realize until too late that he was trying to avoid interacting with anyone. Darrel is drunk and obviously under pressure about the prospect of selling his family farm. Jane insists on driving him home, and when she drops him off, he makes a pass at inviting her over one day, saying that he's been practicing some of the traditional Indian dishes that she's shown him.
In Chapter 4, Jane expands on her relationship with Du. They sit and watch the news on the television, which is showing an immigration raid in Texas. The screen shows Mexican immigrants being cuffed and dragged out of a lawn-furniture factory, and Jane observes Du's dispassion towards the violence on the screen. Jane is frustrated by many Americans' attitudes toward immigrants; they seem to displace any frustration, anger, and sadness for their misfortunes onto immigrants. Jane finds it hard to connect with Du—he's private and resistant—but at the end of the chapter, she describes a scene in which she checks in on him while he's doing his homework. He rejects her help, thinking she doesn't know anything about Teddy Roosevelt. But before she leaves, he gives her a gift: a rhinestone gem in the shape of a ladybug. Du tells her, "You were meant to have pretty things" (30).
Jane describes an encounter at the hospital in the gynecology annex waiting room with another patient, who cries behind a book she's reading. The woman is also pregnant and feels utterly unprepared. Jane then describes the process of lovemaking after Bud becomes paralyzed. She has to take control of all of their sexual experiences, has to switch between caretaker and dominant sexual partner. She has to massage his prostate and use sex toys that Bud would never have used before he was paralyzed, and he feels a great deal of shame in his vulnerability.
Analysis:
From the very first chapter, Mukherjee conveys the role fortune and fate will play in the novel. The first scene between Jasmine and the fakir ends with Jasmine tripping and bashing her head on a bundle of sticks, and the bleeding wound takes the shape of a star. After the fakir reenters his trance, Mukherjee writes, "Bad times were on their way. I was helpless, doomed. The star bled" (4). The bleeding star symbolizes Jasmine's hemorrhagic fate and foreshadows hard times ahead. The bleeding star may also represent the imprecision of astrology as a method of anticipating future challenges, the star being a representation or symbol of astrology as a practice. Seven-year-old Jasmine refers to the wound as her "third eye," and calls herself a sage. This indicates that perhaps she has the ability to intervene to change her preordained fate.
The first chapter ends with the image of a bloated dog carcass splitting open in the river when Jasmine brushes it with her arm while swimming. The image helps Mukherjee connect this past memory to the novel's present, when Jasmine, now known as Jane, lives in rural Iowa with a man named Bud and their adopted son, Du. Jane says, "that stench [of the dog] stays with me. I’m twenty-four now, I live in Baden, Elsa County, Iowa, but every time I lift a glass of water to my lips, fleetingly I smell it. I know what I don’t want to become" (5). In this way, the reader is made aware of the narrator's present situation while also understanding the dog as a symbol of her fears and past traumas.
Mukherjee's themes quickly emerge in Chapter 2, which begins with Jane describing a friend's efforts to convince her not to move to Iowa. "Iowa is dull and flat," says the friend. She replies, "So is Punjab" (6). Discussions of sameness and otherness, immigration, discrimination, and prejudice are central to these chapters. Jane describes the fumbling ways in which the Iowans she meets attempt to engage with her culture, and the way others avoid engagement with cultural difference. In one scene, Darrel sheepishly expresses his hope that Jane will come up with a name for his golf club in her first language, Hindi. But instead of referring to the language as Hindi, Darrel calls it Indian. Mukherjee communicates that Darrel simply doesn't know what to call it, that he meant no harm but that "he comes from a place where the language you speak is what you are" (10-11). Jane has to constantly contend with this balance of being "polite," identifying ignorance that isn't malicious, educating others about her culture, and then dealing with the local academic community whose assumptions about her background are also problematic, but in a different way, a way that casts themselves in a superior, anthropologically curious light.
Mother Ripplemeyer cherry-picks the way she engages with Jane's culture and tends to generalize Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia as far-off, unknowable places, at one point saying, “Think how many people thirty-five dollars will feed out there" (21). Jane responds, in narration, "Out there. I am not sure what Mother imagines. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out There, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least for now" (21). Mukherjee pushes into the at-times-unconscious orientalism and othering that the characters, even those closest to Jane, often exhibit.
Du's character becomes a vital part of Jane's expression of outrage toward the way immigrants are treated in America and also her personal desire to contend with past trauma. When she attempts to reach Du and have him express to her the things he experienced in the refugee camp where he lived with his family, where his mother and siblings were murdered, he keeps these memories to himself. Jane seems to respect the control Du has over his emotions and his unflappable strength, but as a mother, she has a desire to reach him emotionally. She feels outrage on his behalf, knowing the kind of racism he faces at school by people who don't even understand their own bigotry, the way his history teacher calls him a "quick study" in a disparaging way at a PTA meeting. The history teacher, who fought in the Vietnam War, tells Jane that he "tried a little Vietnamese on him ... and he just froze up" (29), and Jane can't believe her ears. Jane narrates, "I suppressed my shock, my disgust. This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing. How dare you? What must he have thought? His history teacher in Baden, Iowa, just happens to know a little street Vietnamese? Now where would he have picked it up? There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams" (29). Jane understands that hearing Vietnamese from this American likely triggered distress for Du, and this teacher obviously associates Du with his time in Vietnam, where the Vietnamese were sworn enemies. This distinction is made, for the teacher, by Du's appearance. He regards Du with distrust and fails to consider the consequences of his own words to this child to whom he's responsible for teaching American history.
