Jasmine (novel)
|
|
 |
Jasmine (1989) is a novel by Bharati Mukherjee set in the present about a young Indian woman in the United States who, trying to adapt to the American way of life in order to be able to survive, changes identities several times.
Jasmine's arranged marriage to a young Indian back in their home town ends abruptly when he is killed in a bombing. Still in her teens but already a widow, Jasmine flees India and, after an odyssey, arrives in Florida on a small boat and enters the United States as an illegal immigrant. During her first night in America, which she spends huddled together with some other illegal aliens in a disused motel, she kills the captain of the ship after he has raped her.
Aimlessly walking along a country road not knowing what to do next, Jasmine is picked up by a woman who has helped other illegal immigrants before her. After being given some basic introduction to U.S. society, she sets out to look for a fatherly friend of her dead husband's who is said to be working as a university professor. However, when Jasmine actually meets him she realizes that he holds some menial job and that for years he has been lying about it in his letters back home.
Disillusioned by this experience, Jasmine wanders on and gets a job as a nanny. She falls in love with her employer, has a brief fling with him and soon realizes that it is time she moved on. She ends up in a small town in Iowa, where she attracts the attention of an old woman whose son, a rich and influential man, has been shot at and is now paralysed. Jasmine marries the man and, as her husband would like to have a child by her, is artificially inseminated. However, just when she starts feeling her pregnancy she decides to leave her husband again and move to California with her former employer, who has split up with his wife but was given custody of their daughter. Just over 20, Jasmine is going to be the mother in a patchwork family.
Nowhere in the novel is there any mention of the police trying to track down the captain's killer.
Read on
- T. C. Boyle's novel The Tortilla Curtain (1995) is about a Mexican couple living illegally in California and getting into trouble.
- See Heroines in literature for a list of female protagonists.