Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  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 double-wide, air-conditioned cab of a monster tractor. Gene Lutz weighed nearly three hundred pounds and needed every square inch.

  This is Darrel’s first planting alone. The wheels of his tractor are plumed with dust as fine as talcum. The contour-plowed fields are quilts in shades of pale green and dry brown. Closer in, where our ground slopes into the Lutzes’, Shadow, Darrel’s huge black dog, picks his way through ankle-high tufts of corn. A farm dog knows not to damage leaves, even when it races ahead after a weasel or a field mouse. The topsoil rising from Shadows paws looks like pockets of smoke.

  Last winter Gene and Carol Lutz went to California as they usually did in January, after the money was in and before the taxes were due, and Gene, who was fifty-four years old, choked to death on a piece of Mexican food. He was so heavy Carol couldn’t lift him to do the Heimlich maneuver. The waiters were all illegals who went into hiding as soon as the police were called.

  Gene looked after everything for me when Bud was in the hospital. Now Bud wants to do
the same for Darrel and the Lutz farm, but he’s not the man he once was. I can look out Mother Ripplemeyer’s back window and not see to the end of our small empire of ownership. Gene used to say to Bud, “Put our farms smack in the middle of the Loop and we’d about reach from Wrigley to Comiskey.”

  In our three and a half years together, I have given Bud a new trilogy to contemplate: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. And he has lent me his: Musial, Brock, and Gibson. Bud’s father grew up in southern Iowa, and Gene’s father came from Davenport. Ottumwa got Cardinal broadcasts, and Davenport got the Cubs. Baseball loyalties are passed from fathers to sons. Bud says he’s a Cardinals banker in Cubbie land. He favors speed and execution: he’ll lend to risk takers who’ll plant new crops and try new methods. Gene Lutz went with proven power: corn, beans, and hogs. After a good year, he’d buy himself the latest gadget from the implement dealer: immense tractors with air-conditioned cabs, equipped with stereo tape deck. A typical Cubbie tractor, Bud would joke, all power and no mobility—but he approved the purchase anyhow. Gene even painted an official Cubs logo on its side. I thought it said Ubs. Darrel painted the Hawkeye logo over it.

  Darrel has a sister out in San Diego, married to a naval officer. Carol moved to be near her. With all the old Iowans in Southern California, she does not think she’ll be a widow for long. Darrel had a girl living with him last fall, but she left for Texas after the first Alberta Clipper.

  Darrel talks of selling, and I don’t blame him. A thousand acres is too much for someone who graduated from Northern Iowa just last summer. He’d like to go to New Mexico, he says, and open up a franchise, away from the hogs and cold and farmers hours. Radio Shack, say. He’s only a year younger than I, but I cannot guess his idea of reality. I treat him as an innocent.

  Yesterday he came over for dinner. People are getting used to some of my concoctions, even if they make a show of fanning their mouths. They get disappointed if there’s not something Indian on the table. Last summer Darrel sent away to California for “Oriental herb garden” cuttings and planted some things for me—coriander, mainly, and dill weed, fenugreek and about five kinds of chili peppers. I always make sure to use his herbs.

  Last night he said that two fellows had come up from Dalton in Johnson County with plans for putting in a golf course on his father’s farm. Bud told me later that the fellows from Dalton are big developers. With ground so cheap and farmers so desperate, they’re snapping up huge packages for future non-ag use. Airfields and golf courses and water slides and softball parks. It breaks Bud’s heart even to mention it.

  Darrel’s pretty worked up about it. They’d have night golf with illuminated fairways. Wednesday nights would be Ladies’ Nights, Thursday nights Stags Only, Friday nights for Couples. They’re copying some kind of golf-course franchise that works out West. The plan is to convert the barn into a clubhouse, with a restaurant and what he calls sports facilities. I’m not sure what they’ll do with the pig house and its built-in reservoir of nightsoil.

  “If you’re so set on sticking with a golf course,” Bud said, “why don’t you buy the franchise yourself?”

  “I couldn’t stand watching folks tramping down my fields,” he said.

  “So, what’ll you call the club?” I asked Darrel. It didn’t seem such a bad idea. A water slide, a nighttime golf course, tennis courts inside the weathered, slanting barn.

  “The Barn,” Darrel said. “I was hoping you’d come up with a prettier name. Something in Indian.” He started blushing. I want to say to Darrel, “You mean in Hindi, not Indian, there’s no such thing as Indian,” but he’ll be crushed and won’t say anything for the rest of the night. He comes from a place where the language you speak is what you are.

  The farmers around here are like the farmers I grew up with. Modest people, never boastful, tactful and courtly in their way. A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty. They’re hemmed in by etiquette. When they break out of it, like Harlan Kroener did, you know how terrible things have gotten.

  Baden is what they call a basic German community. Even the Danes and Swedes are thought to be genetically unpredictable at times. I’ve heard the word “inscrutable.” The inscrutable Swedes. The sneaky Dutch. They aren’t Amish, but they’re very fond of old ways of doing things. They’re conservative people with a worldly outlook.

  At dinner, Bud snapped Darrel’s head off. “What farmer is nuts enough to golf three or four nights a week around here?” he asked.

  Darrel tried to joke about it. “Times change. Farmers change. Even Wrigley’s getting lights, Bud.”

  Bud’s probably right. Most times he’s right. But being right, having to point out the cons when the borrower wants to hear only the pros, is eating him up. He pops his stomach pills, on top of everything else. Blood pressure, diuretics, all sorts of skin creams. Immobility has made him more excitable. Later that night I tried to calm him down. I said, “Darrel won’t have to sell. You’ll see, it’ll rain.” Then I took his big pink hand, speckled with golden age spots and silky with reddish blond hairs, and placed it on my stomach. His hair is bushy and mostly white, but once upon a time he was a strawberry blond with bright blue eyes. The eyes are less bright, but still a kind of blue I’ve never seen anywhere else. Purple flecks in a turquoise pond.

  I am carrying Bud Ripplemeyer’s baby. He wants me to marry him before the baby is born. He wants to be able to say, Bud and Jane Ripplemeyer proudly announce …

  He hooks his free hand around my neck and kisses me on the mouth, hard. “Marry me?” he says. I always hear a question mark these days, after everything he says.

  Bud’s not like Taylor—he’s never asked me about India; it scares him. He wouldn’t be interested in the forecast of an old fakir under a banyan tree. Bud was wounded in the war between my fate and my will. I think sometimes I saved his life by not marrying him.

  I feel so potent, a goddess.

  In the kitchen, today as on all Sundays, Mother Ripplemeyer is in charge. We have gone over to Mother’s for our Sunday roast. Bud and his eight brothers and sisters were born in this house. From Baden, it’s the first livable house on the second dirt road after you pass Madame Cleo’s. Madame Cleo cuts and styles hair in a fuchsia pink geodesic dome.

  When Bud and Karin’s divorce became final, Karin got their fancy three-story brick house with the columns in front, their home for twenty-eight years. The house he bought after the divorce is low and squat, a series of addons. It had been a hired mans house. Eventually we’ll take over Mother Ripplemeyer’s house. Until then, we wait out here on three hundred acres, which isn’t bad. My father raised nine of us on thirty acres.

  This was a three-room frame house. He rents out the three hundred acres for hay. We added a new living room with an atrium when we moved in, and a small bedroom when we got word from the adoption agency in Des Moines that Du had made it out to Hong Kong. The house looks small and ugly from the dirt road, but every time I crunch into the driveway and park my old Rabbit between the rusting, abandoned machinery and the empty silo, the add-ons cozy me into thinking that all of us Ripplemeyers, even us new ones, belong.

  Du is a Ripplemeyer. He was Du Thien. He was fourteen when we got him; now he’s seventeen, a junior in high school. He does well, though he’s sometimes contemptuous. He barely spoke English when he arrived; now he’s fluent, but with a permanent accent. “Like Kissinger,” he says. They tell me I have no accent, but I don’t sound Iowan, either. I’m like those voices on the telephone, very clear and soothing. Maybe Northern California, they say. Du says they’re computer generated.

  It was January when Du arrived at Des Moines from Honolulu with his agency escort. He was wearing an ALOHA, Y’ALL T-shirt and a blue-jean jacket. We’d brought a new duffel coat with us, as instructed. Next to Bud, he seemed so tiny, so unmarked, for all he’d been through. The agency hadn’t minded Bud’s divorce. Karin could have made trouble but didn’t. The agency was charmed by the notion of Bud’
s “Asian” wife, without inquiring too deeply. Du was one of the hard-to-place orphans.

  He had never seen snow, never felt cold air, never worn a coat. We stopped at a McDonald’s on the way back to Baden. 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.

  The day I came to Baden and walked into his bank with Mother Ripplemeyer, looking for a job, Bud was a tall, fit, fifty-year-old banker, husband of Karin, father of Buddy and Vern, both married farmers in nearby counties. Asia he’d thought of only as a soy-bean market. He’d gone to Beijing on a bankers’ delegation and walked the Great Wall.

  Six months later, Bud Ripplemeyer was a divorced man living with an Indian woman in a hired man’s house five miles out of town. Asia had transformed him, made him reckless and emotional. He wanted to make up for fifty years of “selfishness,” as he calls it. One night he saw a television special on boat people in Thai prisons, and he called the agency the next day. Fates are so intertwined in the modern world, how can a god keep them straight? A year after that, we had added Du to our life, and Bud was confined to a wheelchair.

  Mother likes to cook, but she’s crotchety this afternoon. It’s one of her medium-bad days, which means she’ll wink out on us entirely by the end. She is seventy-six, and sprightly in a Younkers pantsuit, white hair squeezed into curls by Madame Cleo, who trained in Ottumwa.

  In Hasnapur a woman may be old at twenty-two.

  I think of Vimla, a girl I envied because she lived in a two-story brick house with real windows. Our hut was mud. Her marriage was the fanciest the village had ever seen. Her father gave away a zippy red Maruti and a refrigerator in the dowry. When he was twenty-one her husband died of typhoid, and at twenty-two she doused herself with kerosene and flung herself on a stove, shouting to the god of death, “Yama, bring me to you”.