Outrunning Fate

      Claire is walking through a beaten path in the forest when she comes to a giant fallen tree blocking her way. Does she: a) turn around and head back to camp, or does she b) go around the tree and continue on her way? (If a, go to page 27; if b, go to page 36).

      We remember the books; “Choose your own ending!” they boasted on the cover. However, Claire’s endings could never be as exciting or as horrendous as those of Bharati Mukherjee’s protagonist and title character in Jasmine. Because Jasmine knows only where she does, and doesn’t, want to end up, and knows little about how to go about getting there, she is at the mercy of various characters around her. In an attempt to “choose her own ending,” Jasmine, or Jyoti Vijh, is at once taking control of her life’s purpose, and being forced to subject herself to the will and wants of those who “help” her along her journey.

      While Mukherjee’s story is full of instances that have our protagonist running away from some part of herself, tangled with her need to flee is a determination to strive for something better, an action of running toward. Jasmine’s real “running” takes place after she has heard the “low, gravelly, unfooled” voice of Prakash; she “fell in love” and “was prepared to marry the man that belonged to that voice” (66), which she did two weeks later (75). Even before she saw him, Jasmine was running to Prakash: “Love before first sight: that’s our Hasnapuri way” (67). Her love for him only grows after their marriage and his love for her encourages her to pursue her own interest in learning English (84). With their common interest in tinkering and fixing electronics, they begin building a dream: their own shop, Vijh & Vijh (89). When he eventually decides to leave for America to get away from India’s feudal tendencies, and to send for her later (84), Jasmine tells him, “I can’t live without you,” realizing the moment she said it “how true it had become” (91). She becomes just as invested as Prakash in the goal of a life together in America, believing that “if [they] could just get away from India, then all fates [of “widowhood and exile” (3)] would be canceled” (85). Prakash decides that before he leaves he wants to get Jasmine a sari fit for a bride. As Jasmine “draped gold-threaded silks” over her shoulders, a “shadow blackened the naphtha lamp on the stool by the shop’s door” (93), and her life took a devastating turn.

      Prakash’s abrupt absence initiates an action from Jasmine that will become a pattern: she ran. With the explosion, one of the old man’s fates had come true: widowhood; she even hears a voice say, “This is fate.” Jasmine, as narrator, describes the events that unfolded then in a detached voice, describing her own scream as “a woman’s terrible scream” (94). This disassociation from herself hints at a larger attempt to run away from the woman she is forced to be without her loving and devoted husband by her side. Even further: this life that she and Prakash had been running to, that she continues to run to now, alone, is, essentially, an act of denial -- a running away from the fact that this life, as it was originally imagined, is now an impossibility.

      Jasmine is determined and relentless; her memory of Prakash pushes her onward through the perils of an illegitimate overseas-journey alone as an inexperienced sixteen-year-old girl. Her foreignness and her lack of alternatives leave her in the hands of Half-Face, “a man with too many options” (113). Having had her hope ripped from her when the authorities pried Prakash’s dead body from hers (94), Jasmine is easily broken down and resigned to the will of the stars. She claims, “What was fated to happen would happen” (111). As he repeatedly smashes her head against the motel television set, and proceeds to rape her, Half-Face seals Jasmine’s surrender. In another instance of running away (though for this, surely, she can’t be blamed), she asserts, “I had already left my earthly body.” Only the fear of her “mission” being unfulfilled kept her from killing herself (117). She settled instead for committing murder (118).

      Sukkhi’s “music box” became Jasmine’s very own Pandora’s box; once that bomb went off, the door to the world of evil opened. She still carried with her the belief that her fate pertained only to her life in India; unfortunately for Jasmine, the stars don’t only shine there -- the fates will follow her wherever she goes, just as they will follow us.