Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  That’s what excited Prakash about electronics. It was a frontier, especially in India, and no one was staying back to service the goods that were flooding in. A good repairman would eventually make a fortune, even in Jullundhar. And an inventive one could devise electronics using native skill and native resources and designed for native conditions. He was basically an old-fashioned Indian patriot, with a lot of Gandhi and a lot of Nehru in him.

  Lately, the burglaries had gotten out of hand. Clock radios, Cuisinarts, sewing machines disappeared every day. Some people said the Khalsa Lions—the Lions in Jullundhar were older and bolder than the ones in the village—were behind the break-ins. The rumor was that the Lions didn’t just pass the goods on to a fence. They were converting them into homemade bombs to blow up shops and buses. Having the VCR in the house, Prakash complained, was begging for burglars.

  * * *

  I read his grumbling as self-hate. He hated himself for wasting his precious cramming time on freebies for Bloodsucker Jagtiani. At least the manual would help me scour the rust off my English. I started reading. By the time I finished, it was dark, it was time to bathe and change into a fresh kameez and light the butane and fry up pakoras.

  Prakash said, “So your mind hasn’t deteriorated after all. I’ve got you hooked, have I?”

  That evening was a turning point in our marriage. He had read aloud from the manual as he worked. “Here,” he said, “your hands are smaller. Lift this.” He gave me a pair of delicate pliers and guided them through a maze of tiny lines and wires. In bed he said, “I like having you near me when I work. We’ll have to open our own store someday.”

  “Bigger than Jagtiani and Son.” I laughed.

  “Vijh & Wife,” my husband said from deep inside my embrace. “Maybe even Vijh & Vijh.”

  These were happy times for us. Prakash brought home ruined toasters, alarm clocks, calculators, electric fans, and I learned to probe and heal. We lived for our fantasy. Vijh & Wife!

  Vijh & Vijh. Vijh & Sons.

  But these were unhappy times for the city. Radios burst into flames on store shelves. Cars blew up on the street. The scared swapped tips: the Lions don’t always wear beards and turbans—just the steel bracelet. They can look like you and me. We started looking first at the wrist, before getting closer.

  Then came confusing times. One day in April, Prakash said, very casually, “Well, it came through. You’re looking at a bona-fide student-to-be of the Florida International Institute of Technology.” He pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase but didn’t hand it to me. “Tam-pah,” he said. It sounded like a Punjabi village name, the way he pronounced it. Even now I think of it that way. Tampah.

  He showed me the brochure. Admission obtained, future guaranteed. Two young Indian or Pakistani men and two Chinese or Japanese women on the cover were standing under palm trees, smiling in their white shirts. Everyone on the cover and in the pictures inside was Indian or Chinese, with a couple of Africans. It didn’t look anything like the America I’d read about. “You don’t have to worry about me—it says ‘Indian food readily available.’ The Admissions Director is from the south. Ramaswamy.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d applied?”

  “I didn’t tell you in case I failed. I don’t share losses, only winnings.”

  “What rubbish is that?”

  “Always in such a hurry, Jasmine. You have a whole lifetime to share my losses. The husband must protect the wife whenever he can. Where is it written that a sixteen-year-old girl can share a man’s losses? Such a man should be put in jail.”

  “But I will be seventeen soon. When do we leave?”

  “You might be eighteen before this visa comes through. You think going to America is as easy as going to Bombay or Delhi?”

  Then he told me about American visas, how he’d have to prove to suspicious Embassy officials that I was legally married to him and that he had enough dollars to support me, and of course the foreign exchange was tricky because the arrangements with Devinder Vadhera would have to be hush-hush, illegal, sleazy, unfortunately necessary, just like the black-money bookkeeping for Mr. Jagtiani. He’d also have to lie about my age. I’d have to be eighteen, at least, maybe nineteen, since they’d assume we were lying. Give them a year or two so they could take it away.

  “I can’t live without you,” I said. I realized the moment I said it how true it had become. My life before Prakash, the girl I had been, the village, were like a dream from another life.

  He laughed. “Save it for the movies. I’ll send for you quickly, you’ll see. You’ll go back to your mother and write me every week from Hasnapur. Hari will scooter your letter directly to the post office. I’ll be one of those boys in a white shirt with a blue aerogram in his pocket.”

  “Standing next to a Chinese girl.”

  “Look how ugly they are. Really, Jasmine, I am a faithful husband and dedicated student.”

  “There will be all those hot-blooded American girls. You know what they’re like.”

  We flipped through the pages of the brochure. “Not here,” he said. We had a big laugh. “I don’t think they let Americans in!” We giggled at all the pictures, all the white shirts and mustaches. We made up names for all the stiffbacked, pompous-looking Indians. “Must be a Bengali,” he’d say, “No? I am a very good Bengali boy. My name is Babu Banerjee and I eat rabri and hilsa fish three times a day.” And “Oh, look at that crafty, ratlike pair of eyes. Sindhi, I’ll bet. Mr. Moneyani.” For the first time in my life I was looking at familiar Indian faces and seeing them as strange, a kind of tribe of intense men with oily hair, heavy-rimmed glasses, and mustaches.

  I knew he was a faithful husband, that he loved me, but I could be jealous of even the air around him if I wasn’t there. “If you leave me, I’ll jump into a well.”

  He laughed again and told me to stop regressing into the feudal Jyoti. “You are Jasmine now. You can’t jump into wells!” Then he ducked under the bed and pulled out a suitcase that I hadn’t seen because of the books piled in front of it. The suitcase smelled of some new man-made material. Inside it was just one thing: a neatly folded light blue Teriwool suit with a label, BABUR ALI/MASTER TAILOR/JULLUNDHAR, on the sleeve.

  And so, that hot cloudless April evening we rode the Bajaj through streets that seemed oddly empty, to the fanciest sari shop in the bazaar, where all the customers were paunchy perfectionists and all the shop assistants shameless flatterers.

  “Show us your wedding saris,” Prakash commanded. He seated himself by the doorway to catch the slightest, driest breeze.

  I felt rich, prized, a queen. A sari for the co-owner of Vijh & Wife. I draped gold-threaded silks over each shoulder and moved toward the wall mirror. It was the beginning of the real life we wanted, needed, to live.

  I was looking in the mirror and saying, “Prakash, I’ve made my pick, but I want you to guess which one; I want to know how good we are at telepathy, so we can talk to each other across the seas…” and Prakash was taking out the bills he kept neatly folded in his shirt pocket, when a shadow blackened the naphtha lamp on the stool by the shop’s door.

  Two Lions, one of them carrying a music box, lounged in the doorway. And then, behind them, something moved, a slight man on a motor scooter. I saw the man’s face, Sukhwinders face, Sukkhi’s, only something was different. It was wrong somehow. Sukkhi wasn’t wearing a turban. His hair was burry short, his face baby smooth.

  I swung around. “Prakash, look!” The Lions had left their music box just inside the door. On the sidewalk Sukhwinders motor scooter sputtered and growled.

  Instant replay in slow motion. I can’t turn the VCR off. The sidewalk surges, men scream. I am screaming. My hands touch a red wet cheek, my eyes are closed, Prakash and I stumble together, Sukkhi guns the motor, shouting, “Prostitutes! Whores!”

  I failed you. I didn’t get there soon enough. The bomb was meant for me, prostitute, whore.

  I let myself fall to the floor. Voic
es girdle me. “The girl’s alive. This is fate. This is a miracle!” My husband’s body cushions me. They can’t pry us apart, we’re that close.

  In the police car, the officer said, “I’m very sorry. You’ll have to do the identifying.”

  I clutched his sleeve. “I saw the man. I saw it happen.” Rosettes of blood bloomed on the sleeve of the officer’s stiff-starched uniform. I touched him again to make more rosettes bloom.

  “Identification of your respected late spouse,” he explained. He held open a plastic sack with the sari shop’s name printed on it. “This is your late husband’s watch, isn’t it? Just a nod will do for identification.”

  I put my hand inside the sack, but the man stopped me. “Now is evidence for forensic investigation only. Also, sometimes, legal questions are raised with respect to deceased’s jewelries and other valuables. In the case of a deceased married woman, for instance, is her dowry jewelry properly returned to her parents, the dowry givers, or is it the property of her husband or, in the case of multiple death, of the husband’s parents? You see how my hands are tied.”

  I heard a woman’s terrible scream. “If you can’t give me what’s mine, at least shut up and do your job right. I saw the man.” I clawed the officer and the officer tapped the horn. “Sukkhi. Sukhwinder. From the Vocational College in town. I saw his face in the mirror.”

  “Yes, yes, madam.” He meant to soothe me. “We will pursue every lead in this heinous act. One by one we are hunting down the miscreants.”

  “Kill him!” There was that terrible scream again. “At least do your job right and kill him!”

  14

  THINK Vijh & Wife! Prakash exhorted me from every corner of our grief-darkened room. There is no dying, there is only an ascending or a descending, a moving on to other planes. Don’t crawl back to Hasnapur and feudalism. That Jyoti is dead.

  My sisters all were living in cities, with jealous, drunken men who wouldn’t part with a few rupees of bus or train fare. They were gone from my life. Except for the visits of my brothers on the weekends, Mataji and I were alone in the widow’s dark hut, little better than Mazbis and Untouchables. My young friends, like Vimla, never visited. Inexplicable, seemingly undeserved misfortune is contagious. She didn’t want her unblemished young life in any way marred. A bull and a bomb have made them widows, mother and daughter! How they must have sinned to suffer so now! My mother kept company only with other widows, bent old women of public humility and secret bitterness. I felt myself dead in their company, with my long hair and schoolgirl clothes. I wanted to scream, “Feudalism! I am a widow in the war of feudalisms.”

  I grieved. I read slokas with swamis in mountainside ashrams. For every fish, there is a fisherman; for every deer a hunter. For every monster a hero. Our highest mission, said a swami, is to create new life. How many children do you have? When I bowed my head, he offered prayer.

  Later, I thought, We had created life. Prakash had taken Jyoti and created Jasmine, and Jasmine would complete the mission of Prakash. Vijh & Wife. A vision had formed. There were thousands of useless rupees in our account. He had his Florida acceptance and his American visa. I turned everything over to my brothers, along with my plan. They were stupefied. A village girl, going alone to America, without job, husband, or papers? I must be mad! Certainly, I was. I told them I had sworn it before God. A matter of duty and honor. I dared not tell my mother.

  Dida came down from her ashram. For once, the women agreed. My mother and I should stay together, two widows shopping and cooking for each other, keeping the shrines of their husbands alive. Dida didn’t need to read slokas for my edification: she had her own vast store of knowledge.

  If you had married the widower in Ludhiana that was all arranged … If you had checked the boy’s horoscope and not married like a Christian in some government office … If you had waited for a man I picked … none of this would have happened. I am told you called him by his proper name. It is very clear. You were in the sari shop to buy something you could not afford, to celebrate a separation from your husband and his desertion of India to make money abroad. God was displeased. God sent that Sardarji boy to do that terrible thing.

  Dida, I said, if God sent Sukkhi to kill my husband, then I renounce God. I spit on God.

  I blame the Muslims, she cried. If we had all stayed in Lahore, you would have married a prince!

  Blame the Mahatma, I shot back. Prakash would have been proud of me.

  No! she cried, throwing her hands over her ears. God, maybe; the Mahatma, never.

  A houseful of widows, that’s what my son’s house has become! she wailed. House of Sorrows! House of Ill Fortune!

  Hari-prar arranged my illegal documents. It took him months, many trips to Chandigarh and Delhi, and cost me everything Prakash had saved. My passport name, officially, was Jyoti Vijh. My date of birth made me safely nineteen years old. “Otherwise, problems,” said the travel advisers. All over Punjab “travel agents” are willing to advise. The longest line between two points is the least detected.

  15

  THERE are national airlines flying the world that do not appear in any directory. There are charters who’ve lost their way and now just fly, improvising crews and destinations. They serve no food, no beverages. Their crews often look abused. There is a 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. But we are refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our prayer rugs, reading our holy books, taking out for the hundredth time an aerogram promising a job or space to sleep, a newspaper in our language, a photo of happier times, a passport, a visa, a laissez-passer.

  We are the outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines, landing at the end of tarmacs, ferried in old army trucks where we are roughly handled and taken to roped-off corners of waiting rooms where surly, barely wakened customs guards await their bribe. We are dressed in shreds of national costumes, out of season, the wilted plumage of intercontinental vagabondage. We ask only one thing: to be allowed to land; to pass through; to continue. We sneak a look at the big departure board, the one the tourists use. Our cities are there, too, our destinations are so close! But not yet, not so directly. We must sneak in, land by night in little-used strips. For us, back behind the rope in the corner of the waiting room, there is only a slate and someone who remembers to write in chalk, DELAYED, or TO BE ANNOUNCED, or OUT OF SERVICE. We take another of our precious dollars or Swiss francs and give it to a trustworthy-looking boy and say, “Bring me tea, an orange, bread.”

  What country? What continent? We pass through wars, through plagues. I am hungry for news, but the discarded papers are in characters or languages I cannot read.

  The zigzag route is straightest.

  I phantom my way through three continents. The small airports in the Middle East lit by oil fires and gas flares, the waiting rooms in Sudan with locusts banging on the glass, landing always in the smaller cities, the disused airfields.

  On the first leg of my odyssey, I sit between a Filipina nurse and a Tamil auto mechanic both on their way to Bahrain. I walk my swollen feet up and down the aisles of our 747. Whole peoples are on the move! The Filipina say’s, “The pays great but I wish Bahrainis weren’t Muslims.” She shows me her St. Christopher medal on a blue sodality ribbon under her blouse. The Sri Lankan Tamil likes Muslims; he’s not much taken with Buddhists and Christians. I keep my sandalwood Ganpati hidden in my purse, a god with an elephant trunk to uproot anything in my path.

  I sit with missionaries, with the deported, with Australian students whoVe fallen somehow into the same loop of desperation, which is for them adventure. “Look,” says one, “you’d love Owstrylia. Perth’s just the plyce for you. Whatchu sye?” Hollow-eyed Muslim men in fur caps and woolen jackets, faces unshaven, make long-winded advanc
es in Farsi and Pashto, elegant ghazals learned for the occasion, ripe with moons and figs and spurting fountains, then try out their broken Urdu when they guess I’m Indian.

  In the soundproofed and windowless back room of an Indische Speishalle in Hamburg I watch on a tiny color television set the first of many wonders in the West, with cheering Arabs and Africans, the Hamburg Hummels cream the opposition. A Ugandan lifts his Mickey Mouse T-shirt to show off his flesh wounds. “When the American visa bastards turned me down, I tried to kill myself.” Later, in suburban Blankenese, the Polizei pull the Ugandan and me off a train and ask to see our travel documents. I hand over my forged, expensive passport. The Polizei scrutinize my inscrutables, then let me go. The Ugandan twitches and stammers. The flesh wound bleeds into Mickey Mouse as he scuffles. On the train I weep at the beauty of the visa stamps Hari-prar has bought me. I feel renewed, the recipient of an organ transplant.

  In Amsterdam a railway porter, a Surinamese Indian who speaks a little bit of Hindi, puts me in touch with the captain of a trawler who cargoes contraband into Paramaribo, then outward to the States.

  16

  ON the trawler out of Europe we slept in tiered bunks. In the New World, on a shrimper out of Grand Cayman called The Gulf Shuttle, four of us bound for the Gulf Coast of Florida slept under the tarp. You learn to roll with the waves and hold the vomit in.

  Dayrise.

  Gold gulls straddled topaz waves. Lapis fish leaped toward coral clouds. Some days the ocean was as stocked and still as an aquarium.

  Nights, Half-Face, our captain, lullabyed us with his Willie Nelson tapes. Half-Face had lost an eye and ear and most of his cheek in a paddy field in Vietnam. Kingsland, a Jamaican, knew the story, because Half-Face was famous in the west Caribbean. Half-Face was a demolitions expert before he became a sea captain. When I passed that on to Little Clyde, an anxious Belizian, he worried, “We got ourssels a clumsy mon! You waitn see, we end up domped in dat goddom ocean!”