Astrology - The Star Bled
In Chapter 1, Jasmine recalls when a fakir knocked her down after predicting her grim fate. She says, "I fell. My teeth cut into my tongue. A twig sticking out of the bundle of firewood I’d scavenged punched a star-shaped wound into my forehead. I lay still. The astrologer re-entered his trance. I was nothing, a speck in the solar system. Bad times were on their way. I was helpless, doomed. The star bled" (3-4).
This language of this passage tapers from longer, descriptive sentences grounded in the reality of the scene to shorter sentences with broad figurative interpretations. By the time Jasmine says, "I was nothing, a speck in the solar system," we've left the realm of immediate reality and shifted into the religious/philosophical perspectives of the fakir and possibly Jasmine. By the time we reach the end of the passage, "the star bled," the line between Jasmine and the stars, the universe, and the concept of fate is sufficiently blurred, so the image of Jasmine's wound bleeding conjures the notion that fate and the stars themselves are bleeding, which would call into question whether the fakir's prophecy can be fully trusted.
Resilience - Du's Arrival
Jasmine recalls when Du arrived to Iowa: "When we parked, Du jumped down from the back, leaving the new coat on the seat. The wind chill was –35, and he waited for us in the middle of the parking lot in his ALOHA, Y’ALL T-shirt while we bundled up and locked the doors. He wasn’t slapping his arms or blowing on his hands" (14).
Preceding this passage, Jasmine says that Du "had never seen snow, never felt cold air, never worn a coat" (14), and yet, he doesn't appear to be affected by the cold, or doesn't betray any discomfort he feels. The image of Du standing still in the middle of this sub-freezing parking lot reflects his resilience and conjures the suffering he's already survived in the camp. His T-shirt represents a commercial mishmash of regional American language and a Hawaiian word, a product of capitalism and colonialism.
Masterji Targeted by Khalsa Lions
Jasmine remembers when Masterji visited her house in Hasnapur to ask her father to let her stay in school longer than her sisters: "When Masterji unstraddled his bike, we noticed the damp red stain on the back of his turban. Tomato seeds still stuck to the stain. The Khalsa Lions had taken to hurling fruit and stones from their scooters" (49).
The image of a red stain on Masterji's turban suggests that he's been marked for death. Although the stain is from a tomato, the image conjures a graver violence and foreshadows Masterji's tragic fate.
New York
"We took the bridge into Queens. On the streets I saw only more greed, more people like myself. New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens" (140).
This is the image Jasmine takes in as she rides in a taxi toward Flushing, where Prakash's former professor Dave Vedhera lives with his family. Mukherjee's use of the word "aliens," though it refers to people from other nations, also has the connotation of other planets. The word "seething," while having the meaning of hectic and chaotic crowd movement, is more commonly known for its association with rage. So this sentence overall paints New York as a furious alien planet, so foreign to Jasmine that it seemed removed from Earth.
