Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee

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       JASMINE

      ALSO BY BHARATI MUKHERJEE

       Fiction

      The Tiger’s Daughter

      Wife

      Darkness

      The Middleman and Other Stories

      Holder of the World

      Leave It to Me

      Desirable Daughters

      The Tree Bride

       Nonfiction

      Days and Nights in Calcutta

      The Sorrow and the Terror

       JASMINE

       Bharati Mukherjee

      Copyright © 1989 by Bharati Mukherjee

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

       Printed in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Mukherjee, Bharati.

      Jasmine / by Bharati Mukherjee.

      p. cm.

      eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9635-4

      I. Title.

      PR9499.3.M77J3 1989

      813′.54—dc20 89-7611

      Designed by Paul Chevannes

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

      841 Broadway

      New York, NY 10003

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      www.groveatlantic.com

       For Jim Harris, ardent Hawkeye

      The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined.

      James Gleick, Chaos

JASMINE

       1

      LIFETIMES ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears—his satellite dish to the stars—and foretold my widowhood and exile. I was only seven then, fast and venturesome, scabrous-armed from leaves and thorns.

      “No!” I shouted. “You’re a crazy old man. You don’t know what my future holds!”

      “Suit yourself,” the astrologer cackled. “What is to happen will happen.” Then he chucked me hard on the head.

      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.

      “I don’t believe you,” I whispered.

      The astrologer folded up his tattered mat and pushed his feet into rubber sandals. “Fate is Fate. When Behula’s bridegroom was fated to die of snakebite on their wedding night, did building a steel fortress prevent his death? A magic snake will penetrate solid walls when necessary.”

      I smelled the sweetness of winter wildflowers. Quails hopped, hiding and seeking me in the long grass. Squirrels as tiny as mice swished over my arms, dropping nuts. The trees were stooped and gnarled, as though the ghosts of old women had taken root. I always felt the she-ghosts were guarding me. I didn’t feel I was nothing.

      “Go join your sisters,” the man with the capacious ears commanded. “A girl shouldn’t be wandering here by herself.” He pulled me to my feet and pointed to the trail that led out of the woods to the river bend.

      I dragged my bundle to the river bend. I hated that river bend. The water pooled there, sludgy brown, and was choked with hyacinths and feces from the buffaloes that village boys washed upstream. Women were scouring brass pots with ashes. Dhobis were whomping clothes clean on stone slabs. Housewives squabbled while lowering their pails into a drying well. My older sisters, slow, happy girls with butter-smooth arms, were still bathing on the steps that led down to the river.

      “What happened?” my sisters shrieked as they sponged the bleeding star on my forehead with the wetted ends of their veils. “Now your face is scarred for life! How will the family ever find you a husband?”

      I broke away from their solicitous grip. “It’s not a scar,” I shouted, “its my third eye.” In the stories that our mother recited, the holiest sages developed an extra eye right in the middle of their foreheads. Through that eye they peered out into invisible worlds. “Now I’m a sage.”

      My sisters scampered up the slippery steps, grabbed their pitchers and my bundle of firewood, and ran to get help from the women at the well.

      I swam to where the river was a sun-gold haze. I kicked and paddled in a rage. Suddenly my fingers scraped the soft waterlogged carcass of a small dog. The body was rotten, the eyes had been eaten. The moment I touched it, the body broke in two, as though the water had been its glue. A stench leaked out of the broken body, and then both pieces quickly sank.

      That stench stays with me. I’m twenty-four now, I live in Baden, Elsa County, Iowa, but every time I lift a glass of water to my lips, fleetingly I smell it. I know what I don’t want to become.

       2

      TAYLOR didn’t want me to run away to Iowa. How can anyone leave New York, he said, how can you leave New York, you belong here. Iowa’s dull and it’s flat, he said.

      So is Punjab, I said.

      You deserve better.

      There are many things I deserve, not all of them better. Taylor thought dull was the absence of action, but dull is its own kind of action. Dullness is a kind of luxury.

      Taylor was wrong. Iowa isn’t flat, not Elsa County.

      It’s a late May afternoon in a dry season and sunlight crests the hillocks like sea foam, then angles across the rolling sea of Lutzes’ ground before snagging on the maples and box elders at the far end of ours. The Lutzes and Ripplemeyers’ fifteen hundred acres cut across a dozen ponds and glacial moraines, back to back in a six-mile swath. The Ripplemeyer land: Bud’s and mine and Du’s. Jane Ripplemeyer has a bank account. So does Jyoti Vijh, in a different city. Bud’s father started the First Bank of Baden above the barbers; now Bud runs it out of a smart low building between Kwik Copy and the new Drug Town.

      Bud wants me to marry him, “officially,” he says, before the baby comes. People assume we’re married. He’s a small-town banker, he’s not allowed to do impulsive things. I’m less than half his age, and very foreign. We’re the kind who marry. Going for me is this: he wasn’t in a wheelchair when we met. I didn’t leave him after it happened.

      From the kitchen I can see the only Lutz boy, Darrel, work the ground. Darrel looks lost these days, like a little boy, inside the