Jasmine's Webb of Life

      I recently had my palm read, and the woman, Theresa, told me I have lived three times before, each time dying young -- she assured me that this life would be different. While I have my doubts about psychics, tarot readings, and all that, I am not completely ignorant of everything supernatural or metaphysical: I will participate in the act of palmistry and hear my past and speculate about the future, but what I ultimately do with that information is up to me. Theresa told me that the lines of the future are constantly changing, forming, and disappearing depending on the decisions being made and paths being followed.

     For the title character in Bharati Mukherjeree’s Jasmine, the constant twisting and turning of her path would cause the patterns of her “future” hand to be different from one day to the next. Every person she encounters in this novel opens her to a world of possibilities; these worlds are nothing alike. For every world she is introduced to, she creates a new identity, or has one created for her; this is a small kind of reincarnation, and is found repeatedly throughout the story. Dr. Mary Webb speaks about the bigger kind of reincarnation - the living and dying and being reborn kind. Jasmine’s reincarnation of identity takes place so that her soul may remain intact and be reincarnated in the “bigger” vision.

      At lunch with Dr. Mary Webb and her “group,” Jasmine’s foreignness separates her: “I’m the youngest by at least twenty years. I’ve already been asked what I’m studying…I assume all the men and women wielding forks are scholars…I, a dropout from a village school” (123). However, as Mary Webb recounts her past life as an Australian black man, even offering up the names of her four children, Jasmine becomes less of an outsider and more of a cultural anthropologist. Jasmine admits that “theoretically, [she believes] in reincarnation,” but she is content with keeping the details to herself. She is “astounded by…the American need to make intuition so tangible, to possess a vision so privately” (125). Even as the doctor elaborates on her own theory, referring to the body as a “revolving door,” Jasmine will only offer that “yes, I am sure that I have been reborn several times, and that yes, some lives I can recall vividly” (126). It is unclear whether she is referring to past soul-lives, as Mary is, or to her past identities, which have been all too temporary. Her lack of elaboration invites speculation from a reader.

      As Jasmine’s story unfolds, the reader has followed her through various aliases, each one taking on its own personality, its own way of life; as they grow in number, it seems Jasmine begins to lose track of them amidst this fragmenting of herself. She recalls, “Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine…in Manhattan; that Jasmine isn’t this Jane Ripplemeyer…And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us has held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?” When one life has so many stories, it is hard to keep them all straight. Jasmine has a theory that supports her multitude of stories. She views the soul as a “giant long-playing record with millions of tracks,” believing that “extraordinary events can jar the needle arm, jump tracks, rip across incarnations, and deposit a life into a groove that was not prepared to receive it” (127). When this “deposit” takes place, when tragedy has struck, this reincarnation is necessary; it is a survival strategy, a kind of starting over.

      As we go through our own lives, we create new identities for ourselves. I am no longer “Jenny,” the shy and soft-spoken product of what is called a “broken home”; I am no longer “Jennifer,” the impossible problem-child my dad thought he had; I am “Jen,” known to some as “Bird.” I don’t know exactly what this identity entails yet - I’m still learning - but I know that it is going to fit me as the person I want to be.