The narrative of Jasmine shuttles between then-present-day Iowa and the chronology of its eponymous protagonist's odyssey from Hasnapur, India to New York City and eventually to Baden, Iowa. The overarching chronology of the novel begins when Jasmine (then Jyoti) is seven years old and receives an ominous prophecy from a fakir that she will be widowed and live in exile. She resists the fakir's prophecy and he strikes her down, returning to his trance. When she falls, she hits her head on a bundle of sticks which punch a bleeding wound into her forehead in the shape of a star. Despite her sisters' horror that the scar would prevent her from finding a suitable groom, Jyoti is convinced that it is her "third eye," and that with it, she will gain sage-like knowledge about the workings of the universe.
Jyoti excels in school and is recognized by her teacher, Masterji, as leagues above her classmates. He begins instructing her in English language and literature. Masterji believes that Jasmine has the capacity to overcome the traditional, conservative, feudal ways of Hasnapur and that, if she desires, she can amount to more than a man's obedient wife. He advocates for her with her family and eventually convinces her father (much to the chagrin of her grandmother, Dida) to allow her to stay in school longer than any of her sisters. Shortly after her father makes the concession about her schooling, he is gored by a loose bull in the countryside and dies. Not long after she moves away from home, her teacher Masterji is murdered by a gang of militant Sikhs in front of his class.
At fourteen, Jasmine marries a friend of her brother's named Prakash. Prakash is relatively progressive compared to what Jyoti grew up around. He insists that she call him by his name, as opposed to by the formal pronouns with which women in Hasnapur usually refer to their husbands. Prakash believes in equality in their relationship. He wants Jyoti to learn English and immigrate to America with him, where they can own a business together. He calls her Jasmine as a way to "break off the past" (77). Prakash also has a reputation for challenging the radical Sikhs, known as the Khalsa Lions, and arguing with their views, which he believes to be arcane and prejudicial. Prakash is admitted to a university in Florida and explains to Jasmine that he may be in the US for many months before he's able to bring her over to him, but that they will write and call each other frequently. As a celebratory gift, Prakash brings Jasmine to a fine sari store in the bazaar where they live. While she's trying on beautiful, luxurious saris, Prakash is killed with a homemade bomb detonated by Khalsa Lions outside the store. He dies in her arms.
Determined to make a pilgrimage to the university where Prakash intended to attend so she can burn his suit there as a funeral pyre, Jasmine enlists her brothers in helping her obtain a fake passport and begins a long journey by air, train, and sea to the coast of Florida. During her travels, Jasmine endures horrible trauma—hunger, illness, rape, and the constant looming threat of death or extradition. Upon arriving to Florida, the captain of the schooner that took Jasmine through the final leg of her journey drives her to an abandoned motel and rapes her. When he falls asleep, Jasmine slashes his throat, throws a blanket over his hemorrhaging body, and stabs him to death.
She continues her journey on foot, on the brink of infection and starvation, until up the road she's discovered by a woman named Lillian Gordon who provides refuge for Kanjobal immigrants from Guatemala. Lillian takes Jasmine in, calls in a doctor to give her stitches and disinfectant, gives her a room of her own for a week, buys her American clothes, and teaches her American mannerisms so as to not draw attention from INS. After a week, Lillian puts Jasmine on a Greyhound bus to New York where she plans to visit Prakash's professor from India—the man who had who convinced him to come to America in the first place.
When Jasmine arrives in Flushing, Prakash's professor David Vadheera takes her in as family. She lives in his apartment with his young wife, Nirmala, and his two elderly parents. While Nirmala and Dave work during the day, Jasmine attends to his parents, escorting them to social gatherings with other elder Indians in their building and their neighborhood. The neighborhood in Queens feels to Jasmine much like she never left India at all. They speak only Hindi in the house, and all the businesses in their neighborhood are run by Indians. Jasmine grows restless in Flushing and desires more for herself, but feels unsafe going outside without a green card. She convinces Dave to loan her the money for a high quality fake green card and leaves Queens for Manhattan.
In Manhattan, she meets with Lillian Gordon's daughter, Kate, a successful photographer. Kate sets Jasmine up with an au pair job for her friends Taylor and Wylie Hayes who live on the Upper West Side, near Columbia and Barnard's campus. Taylor is a physicist and Wylie a publisher and editor. Jasmine lives with them in their spacious apartment, caring for their daughter Duff and making an unexpectedly high wage. She quickly falls in love with Taylor and develops a powerful bond with his daughter, Duff. When Wylie leaves Taylor for an economist on Columbia's faculty, Taylor professes his love for Jasmine. One day while in the park with Taylor and Duff, Jasmine makes eye contact with a hot dog vendor, who she instantly recognizes as the Khalsa Lion who killed Prakash. The vendor recognizes her, too. This sends her into a panic attack. Her throat closes up, and Taylor quickly gets her back home where she explains everything that has happened to her preceding her immigration to the States. She insists that she must flee New York—she feels unsafe and targeted by the Lion. She decides to move to Iowa, because that's where Wylie and Taylor adopted Duff.
In Iowa, Jasmine meets a woman named Mrs. Ripplemeyer who introduces her to her son, Bud Ripplemeyer, the owner of a family-run bank. The introduction is meant to land Jasmine a job, but love blooms between her and Bud, and within a matter of months, he has divorced his wife Karin and moved in with Jasmine. Together they adopt a child named Du, who is a Vietnamese refugee. Du remains reserved and guarded about his experiences in the camp, and all they know of his trauma is related by a caseworker, despite Jasmine's attempts to relate to him as someone familiar with a refugee experience. Du demonstrates an aptitude for engineering and electronics, quite like Prakash.
The relationship between Iowan farmers and bankers in Baden grows more contentious over the course of the novel. Bud becomes paralyzed from the waist down when a local farmer shoots him in the back for rejecting his loan application. The farmer then shoots himself. Bud and Jasmine's neighbor, Darrel Lutz, is in his early twenties, the same age as Jasmine, when he takes over his family farm because his father died choking on a piece of Mexican food on vacation. Darrel is infatuated with Jasmine. Over the course of the novel, he becomes increasingly consumed by despair from the pressure of maintaining his family farm. He tries to convince Jasmine to leave Bud and come with him to New Mexico, where he plans to open a Radio Shack franchise store. Jasmine refuses. Shortly after that contentious discussion, Darrel hangs himself with an extension cord from the rafters of his hog house.
Du abruptly leaves Iowa one afternoon, at the age of seventeen, after finding the address of his sister in Los Angeles. A few months after Darrel's suicide and years after Jasmine left New York, she receives a letter from Taylor Hayes informing her that he and Duff are going to drive to Baden and see her. Taylor still loves her and wants to make a life together in California; he was hired as faculty at UC Berkeley. When Taylor and Duff arrive one quiet afternoon, Jasmine is torn between her desire to leave with him and her obligation to Bud. She is, at the time, well into her pregnancy with Bud's child. As Taylor and Duff wait in her living room, Jasmine calls Bud's ex-wife Karin to tell her that she's leaving for California. Karin, who is still in love with Bud and always felt scorned by his moving on to Jasmine, is understood to be a probable candidate for someone to care for Bud and manage his many medical needs. And after she hangs up the phone, Jasmine gets in Taylor's car and starts the journey to California.
