Summary
The morning after Jasmine hears Prakash arguing with the Sikh in their courtyard, she packs extra food in her brothers' lunches and leaves a note asking whether their friend (Prakash) speaks English because, she recalls, "I couldn’t marry a man who didn’t speak English, or at least who didn’t want to speak English. To want English was to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world" (68). Her brothers assure her that Prakash speaks impeccable English and that his goal is to move to America within the next few years. In the siesta hour that day, Jasmine breaks out her old English books and practices reciting phrases.
A few weeks later, her brother Hari-prar shows her three movie tickets he purchased for the following evening. Jasmine immediately recognized the plot to have her "accidentally" bump into Prakash that evening, so she takes plenty of time to make herself up the next day. She wears a jasmine wreath, stylish dark glasses, and one of her mother's Lahore saris. Jasmine and her brothers take a scooter to the theater and, arriving early, retreat from the rain into a tea shop across the street. The tea shop happens to be owned by a friend of Jasmine's brothers, and he sits down with them and makes a big to-do about wooing Jasmine, but this is not the man Jasmine heard arguing in their courtyard. This was certainly not the man she was in love with. As the evening wears on, Jasmine worries that this was the man her brothers intended for her to meet. But, when they get up to go to the movies, they bump into Prakash. He charmingly introduces himself to Jasmine and promises they will talk soon.
Two weeks after their meeting in the tea shop, Jasmine and Prakash are married. Their marriage is dowryless, a civic proceeding in a registry office. Despite protests from his aunt and uncle, Prakash insists that he and Jasmine live in their own apartment. Jasmine's friend Vimla accuses them of living in sin because of their disregard for tradition. Prakash can't stand tradition and the prevailing conservatism in India. It takes Jasmine time to adjust to Prakash's liberalism; in her village, women only refer to men by pronouns, never by name. But Prakash insists that she call him by his name, that she speak in their home as his equal. In fact, Prakash is the one who gives her the name "Jasmine." Her birth name is "Jyoti," but Prakash calls her Jasmine "to break off the past." He says, "You are small and sweet and heady, my Jasmine. You'll quicken the whole world with your perfume" (77).
They disagree on some things, but Prakash encourages argument and insists on talking through the things about which they disagree. Jasmine wants children, Prakash thinks she is much too young. Six days a week, Prakash works two jobs, leaving the house before six am and returning well into the evenings. Jasmine secretly takes on her own door-to-door sales gig on the sly; she ins't sure how Prakash would react to her earning money, despite his liberal politics.
Over time, Prakash's work wears him down. He is deeply unhappy with his employers, who are misers and cheats, frequently asking him to cook their books. One night he returns home drunk and melancholy, talking about how their potential is being wasted in India and that they should go to America together. He shows her a letter from his old professor recommending several technical colleges in the states, entreating him to come. But he wants Jasmine to want to come to America, too, not simply follow him there. At the end of the chapter, Jasmine describes how her teacher from Hasnapur, Masterji, is brutally murdered in front of his class by the gang of Sikhs that had previously attacked and threatened him.
Jasmine reads more of Prakash's technical manuals, and before long he invites her to help him repair the electronics he brings home. He tells her they could open a store called Vijh & Wife, or "maybe even Vijh & Vijh" (89). In April, Prakash shares with Jasmine that he's been accepted to Florida International Institute of Technology. At first Jasmine is a bit upset that he didn't tell her he applied, but she is ultimately excited for him. She's still awfully nervous about the time they'll have to spend apart while she waits for a visa, but Prakash assures her that he'll always be faithful.
The night he receives his admission letter, they ride into town to buy Jasmine a luxurious wedding sari. While Jasmine is trying on saris, she sees two Lions carrying a music box in the doorway of the shop. Immediately Jasmine recognizes it as a bombing. She screams to warn Prakash, but it's too late. Prakash dies in the blast.
After Prakash's death, Jasmine moves in with her mother. The two widows are all but shunned by the rest of their community, only keeping the company of other widows. Jasmine is determined to use the money in Prakash's account to complete his dream for her; she arranges with her brother to procure illegal documents and travel to America by herself. Her grandmother Dida blames her impiety and disrespect of tradition for the death of her husband. Jasmine fights back and her grandmother cannot stand it. It's clear that nothing can stop her from going to America.
Jasmine describes her travels to the United States through the "shadow world of aircraft permanently aloft that share air lanes and radio frequencies with Pan Am and British Air and Air-India, portaging people who coexist with tourists and businessmen" (99). This "shadow world" allows passage to the States for some refugees who manage to slip through the authorities' scrutiny, like Jasmine, whose expensive fake documents pass for real ones. She makes it all the way to Amsterdam where a railway porter who speaks Hindi connects her to a ship that will travel to the U.S.
Analysis
These five chapters document the entire arc of Jasmine's relationship with Prakash, from the first time she hears his voice out in the courtyard, arguing with the radical Sikh, to the day he was killed by a bomb planted by Khalsa Lions. With the help of Prakash, Jasmine experiences a transformation. He is even the one to suggest she change her name to Jasmine from Jyoti, her birth name, as a way of rebelling against the feudal traditions of her conservative Indian upbringing. Mukherjee communicates the complexities of the power dynamic between Jasmine, a teenager, and Prakash, nearly ten years her senior but also a proponent of gender equality and promoting social progressiveness in India. Prakash wants Jasmine to be a modern woman, but he wants her to want to be a modern woman and break with the traditional conservative Indian values with which she was raised. And while some of what he says appeals to her, Jasmine is at first quite uncomfortable breaking out of the gender roles she was raised with, and it is difficult for her to start calling her husband by his name and regarding herself as his equal. Even this act of liberation is, in a sense, an act of obedience, because it's what Prakash wants.
Jasmine addresses this dynamic in Chapter 12 when she says, "Pygmalion wasn’t a play I’d seen or read then, but I realize now how much of Professor Higgins there was in my husband. He wanted to break down the Jyoti I’d been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city woman" (77). She's referring to a play by George Bernard Shaw in which Higgins, a Professor of phonetics, is challenged by a colleague to tutor a Cockney-speaking flower girl so that she can pass as a duchess. The power dynamics between Higgins and the girl, Eliza Doolittle, is an abysmal comparison for a marriage and recognizes that despite Prakash's intentions, there is still a fair deal of inequality between them. The title of the play, Pygmalion, refers to a myth in Ovid's Metamorphosis in which a sculptor named Pygmalion falls in love with one of his sculptures and begs the gods to give it life, thus creating a wife "in his own image." By renaming Jasmine and insisting that she learn English and break free from the traditions and values with which she was raised, Prakash is, in a way, shaping her to his preferred specifications.
The theme of fate returns when Prakash is tragically killed in a bombing in the sari shop. The circumstances of the bombing seem unfortunately to validate the prophecy of the fakir, who predicts that Jasmine will end up a young widow in exile. Earlier that evening, Prakash informed Jasmine of his admittance to Florida International University and, as a celebration, they were buying her a wedding sari. She was wearing the sari they were intending to buy when the Khalsa Lions detonated their homemade bomb, which was made with an electronic music box. Prakash's death is foreshadowed in previous chapters when Jasmine communicates his trepidation about bringing fancy new electronics into their home, when they only make people targets of theft. The Lions were notoriously stealing electronics like VCRs and clock radios and turning them into homemade bombs.
