Summary
Jasmine recalls the birthing hut in Hasnapur where she was born and explains that if she were a boy, the bountiful harvest of her birth year "would have marked [her] as lucky, a child with a special destiny to fulfill" (39). Daughters are considered burdens because they have to be married away and require a dowry. When Jasmine is born, she is the fifth daughter of her parents. She is born with dark bruises around her throat and tailbone, and says this is a mark of her foremothers trying to prevent her from coming into the world.
She then recalls her time in school, learning under Masterji, "the oldest and sourest teacher," (40) who, recognizing Jasmine's exceptional promise, teaches her to read and write in English and lends her his books of English literature. Jasmine's mother didn't like her daughter lingering after school and occupying herself with English books.
Jasmine explains her family's deep nostalgia for times when they lived in Lahore and enjoyed affluence. In Lahore, Jasmine's father owned businesses, land, and homes. They lived in a large, stucco home and had fine clothes. Even after they move to the village, her father continues to dress and carry himself like a wealthy man. He laments the way rural life lacks the poetry and sophistication of Lahore. Jasmine acknowledges the difference between culture in Hasnapur and Lahore, but says it's foolish to dwell on their decadent past when it is lost.
Jasmine remembers when electricity began to reach the bigger houses in her village, and her mother feared that the ghosts would all be driven to houses like theirs, who couldn't afford the electric lights. She recalls being obsessively clean, especially compared to those around her, who were less concerned with precautionary measures against bacteria. She says, "I had the scrubbed-rawest hands. I boiled the river water three and four times, when everyone else just let the mud settle before drinking" (45).
Jasmine's mother, Mataji, convinces Jasmine's father, Pitaji, to let her remain in school for three years longer than her sisters because of the promise Masterji sees in her. But Dida, Jasmine's grandmother on her father's side, strongly disapproves. Dida finds Jasmine a rich, older bridegroom who is a widower with three children and looking for a young wife to raise them. Upon hearing about this proposition, Jasmine's teacher Masterji bikes to her house and entreats her father to allow her to stay in school instead of marrying this man. Pitaji lets Jasmine choose her path, and Jasmine says she wants to be a doctor with her own clinic. Later that night, Jasmine can hear Pitaji beating her mother for insisting that their daughter be allowed to continue her schooling. By morning, her mother tells her that her father has been convinced.
Chapter 8 discusses the ladies' latrine hour in Hasnapur. Seven-year-old Jasmine enjoys going with the ladies down to the river bank and listening to their adult jokes and gossip, their bad-mouthing of the husbands. Jasmine recalls the perverts and peeping Toms lined up at the other side of the river, watching them. One morning, Jasmine finds a giant wooden staff left behind by the Khalsa Lions, a gang of young Sikhs who used the fields for discarding trash and unused wood. When she finds the older women, they already squatted and exchanging gossip. While they're all preoccupied in this rather vulnerable position, a huge wild dog, something between a jackal and a wolf, rabid and hairless, stalks them through the brush. The women are terrified and flee. Jasmine stands tall and blugeons the creature with her new staff. When the woman bring her back home, her grandmother Dida writes off her heroics by saying, "All it means is that God doesn't think you're ready for salvation. Individual effort counts for nothing" (57).
Chapter 9 deals with the fallout from Pitaji's death. The summer after he consents to more schooling for Jasmine, he's killed by a charging bull right after stepping off of a bus on his way to visit a friend from Lahore. Most of the chapter describes a conversation between Jasmine and her boss and love interest Taylor that takes place much later, during her time in New York as an au pair. She asks Taylor to consider her points of view about God, about how everyone's life's purpose might be to carry out a very simple assignment on behalf of a deity, perhaps as simple as "to pluck a certain flower and release a certain seed" (60). After Pitaji dies, Jasmine's mother tries to throw herself onto his funeral pyre, but her children prevent it. Describing the time following his death, Jasmine says, "Once a day I force-fed spoonfuls of rice gruel into her" (61).
After Pitaji dies, Jasmine's brothers return from technical school and open up a scooter repair shop, abandoning their dreams to move to the Emirates and become engineers. A man who was educated in Vancouver buys up their family's farm and the surrounding land and plants experimental crops which seem to grow with great success, though Jasmine suspects it is just luck. She feels disoriented watching this man, who they call "Vancouver Singh," stalk the perimeters of what was once her father's land. She burns all of her school books under a jasmine tree.
Political turmoil between groups of different faiths reaches Hasnapur. Jasmine remembers "a transistor radio blew up in the bazaar. A busload of Hindus on their way to a shrine to Lord Ganpati was hijacked and all males shot dead at point-blank range" (64). One day Jasmine's brothers bring an old school friend back to their house as a guest. Hearing the way he speaks, he seems like a radical Sikh. He talks about how "the Impure must be eliminated" (64) and disparages Hindus, calling for a sovereign state for the Khalsa, Khalistan. Her brothers laugh at him, writing his politics off as absurd and foolish. Jasmine is surprised that a fight doesn't break out.
Later that night, Jasmine overhears a new voice arguing with the young Sikh in their courtyard. The voice belongs to Prakash, who strongly refutes the Sikhs prejudicial and violent suggestions. Jasmine falls in love with Prakash before even laying eyes on him, just from the sound of his voice and the conviction it carries.
Analysis
These five chapters abandon Iowa for a time and narrate primarily memories of India. Mukherjee returns to the theme of being marked by fate, as Jasmine remembers in Chapter 6 the stories of her birth. "Daughters were curses," (39) says Jasmine, as she recalls the bruise marks on her infant neck when she was born. She relates these early memories through the lens of sharing them with Taylor and his wife Wylie, a Manhattan family wealthy enough to hire an au pair to augment their parenting. Jasmine makes a point to show how her stories scandalized and upset Wylie, and Wylie's reactions demonstrate a fundamental breakdown in her ability to relate or at least begin to understand Jasmine's culture, and any culture, really, besides the one she's accustomed to. Jasmine says, "Listening to Wylie I thought I understood the philosophy behind Agent Orange. Wylie would overkill" (40). Referring to Agent Orange aligns Wylie with a brutal, colonial, specifically Western biological weapon used during the Vietnam War. Jasmine sees Wylie as reactionary and afraid of that which she doesn't immediately understand, afraid of anything that seems threatening and willing to use any measures to stamp it out entirely.
In a later chapter, after Jasmine remembers the smile on her mother's face the morning after she convinced her father to allow Jasmine to continue school, a smile "so wide that the fresh split in her upper lip opened up and started bleeding again" (52) from the beating she received at the hands of Jasmine's father, she describes another scene with Wylie: "When I said to Wylie once that my mother loved me so much she tried to kill me, or she would have killed herself, she pulled Duff, their daughter, a little closer to her" (52). This gesture of pulling Duff closer demonstrates Wylie's fear of Jasmine's difference from her. The love she's describing is one with which Wylie is unfamilar, and thus deems dangerous.
The motif of the cracked jug reappears at the end of Chapter 6 in relation to Jasmine's father's unrelenting nostalgia for Lahore before the partition, when he was a wealthy and well-respected landowner. In Hasnapur, he misses the poetry and urbanity of the city he's traded in for what he finds to be a crass and uncultured countryside. Jasmine says, "Fact is, there was a difference. My father was right to notice it and to let it set a standard. But that pitcher is broken. It is the same air this side as that. He’ll never see Lahore again and I never have. Only a fool would let it rule his life" (43). This observation mirrors Jasmine's experience moving from NYC to Iowa, where she notices that the attitude towards her foreignness is quite different in rural America than in New York; however, Jasmine still finds meaningful relationships and understanding in Iowa, and doesn't write off the experience the way her dad all but wrote off the people in Hasnapur.
When Jasmine says, "I’ve never been to Lahore, but the loss survives in the instant replay of family story: forever Lahore smokes, forever my parents flee" (41), her words reflect her own mission to express her past traumas through repetition, trying to find a way to relate these stories in a meaningful way for herself. She attempts to make this connection with Du, who resists her attempts to have him share his experiences from before he was adopted by the Ripplemeyers.
A major conflict in these chapters arises between Jasmine's paternal grandmother Dida and Jasmine. Dida, who spends most of her time in an ashram, thinks it is deplorable that Jasmine would seek out further education rather than marrying a man and raising children. She finds a well-off widower with three children seeking a young wife to raise them for him. Jasmine's teacher Masterji's appeal to Jasmine's father and the consequences of his appeal shows the complex ways in which ego and culture collide and ultimately inform what Jasmine is and is not able to do. In the end, Pitaji allows Jasmine to choose school, but her mother endures a beating for it. Masterji is a Sikh, but he is deemed impure by the Khalsa Lions and is a target of their bullying and violence because he doesn't adhere exactly to the letter of Sikhism. He smokes tobacco, for example. So when he arrives at Jasmine's house to convince her father to let her stay in school, there is a dark red spot on his turban from where the Khalso Lions either threw a tomato or a rock at his head. His disheveled appearance and the mark on his turban in this humbling moment of entreaty symbolize that, while deemed "impure" by radical religious groups, Masterji, the "sour" old pedagogue, is trying to do everything in his power to do the right thing, to continue Jasmine's education.
The symbol of dogs returns when the rabid, hairless jackal stalks the women during their latrine hour. But when Jasmine bludgeons the jackal with a staff she found left behind by the Khalsa Lions, all her grandmother Dida can say is, “All it means is that God doesn’t think you’re ready for salvation. Individual effort counts for nothing" (57). Dida refuses to accept that Jasmine did a good thing by saving the women's lives and turns it into a criticism, as if the only reason she was spared is that she was unfit for salvation.
