Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Why did I get the needy, ingratiating charmers and oafs instead?

  Hari-prar checked his Seiko—a present from a customer whose smuggled Toyota he’d fixed—and asked for the check.

  “You want to insult me? You think I’d charge you money when you have brought me however brief a presence of this lovely lady?”

  We gathered our umbrellas and flashlights. The rest of the night seemed unstoppable and unbearable. Three hours or more in soggy clothes in an over-air-conditioned hall, men copping feels in the chilly dark, mice scurrying under seats for warmth.

  “Arvind!”

  I clutched my flashlight.

  “So, you do think she’s a temptress? You took so long we thought she’d failed the test!”

  The stumbler floated toward me.

  “What is your name?” He asked the question in English. He asked it in a very soft voice.

  “Arré,” Arvind-prar objected. “You know her name already.”

  But the voice kept welling over me. “Does she talk? What is your name?”

  “Answer him!” Arvind-prar ordered. “She is all the time talking, we can hardly shut her up.”

  “Shut up,” he said, not unkindly, in Punjabi. “She is blushing. She is a woman of fine sympathies, not like you blockheads. You are blushing. Are you afraid of me? There is time to talk. I saw you worry, back there, when I stumbled. It was instinctive, wasn’t it? Don’t talk. Don’t say a word. I want to be surprised when I hear your voice.”

  12

  TWO weeks later we were married. I wore Matajis red and gold wedding sari, which was only slightly damaged by mold, and in my hair the sweetest-smelling jasmines. Ours was a no-dowry, no-guests Registry Office wedding in a town a 250-rupee taxi ride south of Hasnapur. Vimla, who was engaged to the son of the Tractor King of our district (he imported Zetta tractors from Czechoslovakia and was supposed to have illegal bank accounts all over Europe), accused us of living in sin. I showed her our marriage certificate, but she shook her head. She said, “It isn’t for me to say anything like this, I know, and of course the papers nowadays are full of caste-no-bar-divorcees-welcome matrimonial ads, but it seems to me that once you let one tradition go, all the other traditions crumble.”

  She and her fiancé were holding off their marriage till he was twenty, because of their horoscopes. “What is the sacrifice of a little bliss now for a guaranteed lifetime?” Just because you’re clever in school doesn’t mean you can ignore your fate in the stars, she reminded me. I’d already had my warning, which I succeeded in blocking (“Believe an old fool?” “What does he know? Ha!”) every time the memory of the banyan tree and the old man came over me in the night.

  My husband, Prakash Vijh, was a modern man, a city man. He did trash some traditions, right from the beginning. For instance, in Jullundhar, instead of moving in with his uncle’s family, as the uncle had expected us to—Prakash had lost his parents in a cholera epidemic when he was ten—he rented a two-room apartment in a three-story building across the street from the technical college. His uncle fussed: “In the old days we had big houses and big families. Now nobody cares for old people,” and his aunt wept: “Your wife is so fancy that our place isn’t good enough for her?” The Prime Minister was destroying ancient values with her vasectomy program and giving out free uterine loops.

  But Prakash remained impatient. “There’s no room in modern India for feudalism,” he declared.

  For the uncle, love was control. Respect was obedience. For Prakash, love was letting go. Independence, self-reliance: I learned the litany by heart. But I felt suspended between worlds.

  * * *

  He wanted me to call him by his first name. “Only in feudal societies is the woman still a vassal,” he explained. “Hasnapur is feudal.” In Hasnapur wives used only pronouns to address their husbands. The first months, eager and obedient as I was, I still had a hard time calling him Prakash. I’d cough to get his attention, or start with “Are you listening?” Every time I coughed he’d say, “Do I hear a crow trying human speech?” Prakash. I had to practice and practice (in the bathroom, in the tarped-over corner of the verandah which was our kitchen) so I could say the name without gagging and blushing in front of his friends. He liked to show me off. His friends were like him: disrupters and rebuilders, idealists.

  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. To break off the past, he gave me a new name: Jasmine. He said, “You are small and sweet and heady, my Jasmine. You’ll quicken the whole world with your perfume.”

  Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities.

  We had our arguments. “We aren’t going to spawn! We aren’t ignorant peasants!” Prakash yelled every time I told him that I wanted to get pregnant. I was past fifteen, and girls in the village, and my mother, were beginning to talk. He said he was too poor to start a family and I was too young. My kind of feudal compliance was what still kept India an unhealthy and backward nation. It was up to the women to resist, because men were generally too greedy and too stupid to recognize their own best interests. I didn’t dare confess that I felt eclipsed by the Mazbi maid’s daughter, who had been married off at eleven, just after me, and already had had a miscarriage.

  “Just because you’re a good engineering student you think you know everything,” I fought back. “You think that hi-tech solves every problem. What does hi-tech say about a woman’s need to be a mother?”

  He said, “It says you are still very young and foolish. It says you are confusing social and religious duty with instinct. I honor the instinct, and there is nothing more inevitable than a fourteen-year-old married woman becoming a mother.” But he didn’t put real venom into it. And he didn’t hit me—he never hit me.

  Instead, he’d ask, “What’s ten divided by two?”

  “Five. You think I’ve forgotten how to count?”

  “And what’s ten divided by ten?”

  “One. I’m not dumb.”

  “And which number is larger, five or one?”

  There was no winning these arguments. He’d read more than I had. He had statistics for everything. He’d done more thinking than I had; he was twenty-four and I was fifteen, a village fifteen, ready to be led. He was an engineer, not just of electricity, he said, but of all the machinery in the world, seen and unseen. It all ran by rules, if we just understood them. The important thing, he said, was to keep arguing, fight him if I didn’t agree. We shouldn’t do anything if we didn’t both agree.

  So we didn’t start a family. My poor, good-hearted husband! I think now that he was afraid of hurting me, afraid of embarrassing me with any desire or demand. “Jasmine, Jasmine,” he would whisper in the anguished intimacy of our little room, “help me be a better person.”

  And I did. I bit him and nibbled him and pressed his head against my bosom.

  Prakash left the apartment before five-thirty in the morning six days a week and didn’t get home before eight or nine in the evening. He worked two jobs, one as a repairman and bookkeeper for Jagtiani and Son Electrical Goods, and the other as a math tutor to a dreamy boy of thirteen. Then he crammed for his diploma exams. I missed him, but I didn’t feel abandoned. Abandonment meant deliberate withdrawal; his was absence. He had to pay rent, buy expensive technical books, save so we could start our family. He was a shameless saver.

  I found things to do all day without trying. For instance, there was a Ladies’ Group raffle in our building and I was asked to take over its running. And then Parminder in flat 2B said that since I had no in-laws and no infants to harass me all day, why didn’t I go with her on her door-to-door detergent-selling routes in three neighborhood buildings and she would cut me in. The commission I kept secret from Prakash. He was a modern man. Still, I wasn’t sure how he would react to my having my own kitty.

  * * *

  Sundays were our
days together. Mr. Jagtiani couldn’t buy Prakash on Sundays, not even with promises of off-the-record double overtime. Mr. Jagtiani, like Potatoes-babu and other traders, did some of his business in black money that didn’t appear in the books and some in taxable white. Prakash hated having to keep the books for Mr. Jagtiani. “I’m an inventor,” he grumbled, “I shouldn’t have to lie and cheat and be that louse’s accomplice!” Prakash grumbled, I consoled. We were content.

  In good weather we could ride deep into the countryside on his scooter. Beggars with broken bodies shoved alms bowls at suited men in automobiles. Shacks sprouted like toadstools around high-rise office buildings. Camels loped past satellite dishes. Centuries coalesced as we picnicked.

  “I feel lucky,” I often whispered as I rode pillion. Prakash had a secondhand Bajaj scooter which he’d fixed up himself. I was lucky. Vimla’s avaricious husband-to-be with the perfect horoscope was demanding a red Maruti car from Potatoes-babu.

  “Foolish woman.” Prakash laughed. “Someday I’ll be able to make you genuinely happy.”

  One late Sunday night—he’d been cramming for the exams in bed and I’d started out the night helping by massaging his neck and shoulders and then, I guess, fallen asleep—he shook me awake roughly.

  “You’re ill?” I gasped, scrambling to a sitting position inside our mosquito net. Prakash looked awful. I hadn’t seen him that confused or gloomy. “You are ill!”

  “Yes,” he said. He dropped his head heavily on the pillow. “Yes, I’m ill.” He tapped his heart. “Ill here.”

  He untucked the mosquito net and pushed himself off the bed. I heard the buzz of greedy bugs. He went out to the porch for boiled water. He gulped two aspirin, and brought two more back for me.

  “Jasmine, what do you think of America?”

  I didn’t know what to think of America. I’d read only Shane, and seen only one movie. It was too big a country, too complicated a question. I said, “If you’re there, I’ll manage. When you’re at work in America, I’ll stay inside.”

  He let out one of his long, exasperated sighs.

  “What should I have said?”

  “Listen to me, Jasmine. I want for us to go away and have a real life. I’ve had it up to here with backward, corrupt, mediocre fools.”

  Mr. Jagtiani must have asked him to cook the books again. “All right,” I said, “if you want me to have a real life, I want it, too.”

  “Arré, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. You have to want to go away, too. You have to want to have a real life.”

  “What is this real life? I have a real life.”

  But his head slackened onto my pillow. For the rest of the night, I faked sleep.

  * * *

  A week later Prakash came home drunk. I’d seen my brothers drunk, but never Prakash. My brothers were rowdy drunks, Prakash was melancholy. He laid his textbooks out in a row on the bed. I hated what the job at Mr. Jagtiani’s was doing to him.

  “Let me get you Andrews Liver Salt,” I said.

  “You think everything can be fixed with Andrews Liver Salt.”

  “Don’t work for that man anymore,” I begged. “You’re an engineer, not a lackey.” Impulsively I showed him the empty tin of biscuits in which I hoarded my savings from the detergent route. Parminder could be talked into giving me my own route, a longer one.

  “You secretive little monkey!” he shouted.

  I panicked. For all his talk of us being equal, was he possessive about my working? I remembered how on Sundays when the Bajaj chugged us along pedestrian-packed streets, he imagined strange lewd hands grabbing at me and pinching. We’d been married under a year. My mother always warned me that a husband has layers, like an onion, and you’ll still find things to surprise you, usually bad things—since men show off their good side very early—years and years after you marry. Maybe he was possessive and jealous and even a secret drunk, reeling around the bedroom trying not to spill a glass of antacid, and I was stuck with him.

  “Oh, that bloodsucker again?” I asked.

  “No, that bloodsucking Sindhi has nothing to do with what I’m feeling.” Then, like a magician groping in a top hat for a new trick—Masterji had once taken our whole class to the Gandhi Auditorium in the bazaar to see Marvelous Mahendra, the Maharaja of Magic, and we had loved Marvelous Mahendra more than we had the American movie Seven Village Girls Find Seven Boys to Marry—he whipped an aerogram out of his trouser pocket and flicked me with it.

  How velvety the paper felt on my forearm and wrist! Our aerograms were rough and fibrous, you had to gouge your sentences into the paper. CELEBRATE AMERICA, the American postal services commanded. TRAVEL … THE PERFECT FREEDOM. “Read,” he said. “I should be sending, not receiving, letters from Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, Queens.”

  The letter was from a Professor Devinder Vadhera. I knew that Professor Vadhera had taught Prakash his first year in the technical college, and that he’d lent Prakash money for books, college fees, examination fees, tiffin, bus fare, everything, out of his own less-than-nothing instructor-level salary, so Prakash could stay in school.

  “Without this man, I’d be like your brothers. I’d be just tinkering and tampering.”

  Devinder Vadhera’s letter was in English. I handed it back to my husband. “You read it to me,” I said.

  “What’s the matter? You’ve forgotten all the English Masterji dinned into you? You’ve become like the others, my little flower?” There was a slurred, nasty edge to his voice, nothing playful, and his eyes were red. “Caring only about pregnancies?”

  It was unfair. I had no books, no magazines, I reminded him.

  “Then study the technical textbooks and manuals I bring home every night!”

  He read me only the part he wanted me to hear.

  Day by day our Jullundhar graduates are rushing to this country and minting lakhs and lakhs of rupees. They stay in nice houses with 24-hour electricity and no load shedding. They have running hot and cold water. They and their wives also are liking to work. They enjoy all manner of comforts and amenities. I see the onrush of the dunderheads from our college. When will I see my truly best student blooming in the healthy soil of this country?

  Professor Vadhera, still the benefactor, went on to list two technical institutes (both with “International” in the name and both in Florida) which, for a fee, made it easy for international students to get their visas and which also negotiated a very generous exchange of Jullundhar college credits.

  “You heard that,” Prakash said, after he’d finished reading. “I was his best student. The rest were dunderheads. Dunderheads! You see how the mediocre are smart enough to get away? Only we, the best ones, let ourselves be hemmed in by bloodsuckers and dunderheads.”

  “We’ll go to America,” I said, helping him out of his clothes and into bed. I laid a dampened washcloth over his eyes and forehead and sprinkled cologne on it. He smelled of beer. Like my brothers. My brothers were good men, but they weren’t imaginative and they weren’t ambitious. All they had were nearly harmless consolatory vices. They would never get away to the emirates, and they knew it. They drank and gambled to forget they once upon a time had wanted to. My husband was obsessed with passing exams, doing better, making something more of his life than fate intended.

  I heard melancholy snores. I thought of the old man under the banyan tree. If we could just get away from India, then all fates would be canceled. We’d start with new fates, new stars. We could say or be anything we wanted. We’d be on the other side of the earth, out of God’s sight.

  One day back in Hasnapur, my mother told me, when the children were gathered under the banyan in the schoolyard, a scooter started sputtering and backfiring very close to Masterji’s desk on the raised dais he called his stage. He tolerated the interference as long as he could, then stopped the class and walked over to the boys, who were just sitting on the scooter, firing up the engine and letting it throb. He got about ten feet from them, and then spun around and start
ed running back toward the class. The boys gave chase and caught him without much effort. In front of the students they first knocked his turban off. They called him insulting names. He started crying and holding his beard and his exposed white hair in his hands. “I am a good Sikh, a pious Sikh,” he cried. “Why are you doing this? We are peaceful people.” They pulled out the ceremonial comb, and his life-long hair fell over his shoulders, down his back. The boys were laughing, and the students didn’t know what to do. While one boy barbered the teacher, chopping at the hair in great clumps, another held a machine gun over the children.

  After they freed his rolled-up beard and chopped it off, they spun him around until he staggered and fell. Then they shot him, emptying over thirty bullets in him, according to the police inspector.

  13

  THE next afternoon, instead of helping the Ladies’ Group with their weekly raffle, I lay across the bed and flipped through the thinnest of Prakash’s manuals. He had books, papers, manuals, charts, stacked in neat rows on the bed as well as under it; we slept across the width of the mattress so we wouldn’t knock down the Prakash Vijh Technical Library. The diploma exams—preparing for them, passing them with first-class honors—obsessed him.

  The manual was for a VCR that Mr. Jagtiani had smuggled back from Dubai and that he had wrecked trying to hook up by himself. Prakash was having to work on it at home so that Mrs. Jagtiani, whom we’d never met, could record a popular religious show that weekend. Prakash hated bringing a conspicuous electronic item like a VCR home because burglars were likely to be tempted. There were no secrets in our building. People kept their windows open and their televisions and stereos blaring. What was the point of owning high-status goods if nobody knew you owned them? Punjabis were so rich! We hadn’t seen it all happening in the village, but in the towns, every little flat had a television set, and everyone had a close relative in Canada or the United States bringing back the latest gadgets.