Jasmine's Finding Forever

“God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.”

— William Shakespeare

I’m not religious. But then again I don’t have to be to get some sense out of that quote. Your face is your name one way or another. It’s how you’re recognized, identified, possibly even admired. In Bharati Muhkrajee’s novel “Jasmine” the character Jasmine realizes herself through different interpretations of her name across the world. Starting off as Jyoti in India and then slowly but surely transitioning into Jasmine during her marriage to another Hindu named Prakash, Kali as a mask used to strike at an attacker, and then Jazzy, Jase, and eventually Jane.

The interesting part of the name variation is that each describes a different angle of the same “jasmine” and each of the names is given to her by another person. Jyoti to her native Punjab, Jasmine to her husband prakash, Kali to her rapist Half-face, Jazzy to Lillian Gordon, Jase to Taylor, and finally Jane to Bud.

There were a lot of names and a lot of transitions but at the same time the way Jasmine explained it, they were ways of testing out the different “personalities” in her. I mean Jasmine is still Jasmine but every time she relocated to another part of the world (or U.S.) she got practically a clean slate, something new to start off with and, dare if you will a sort of physical form of schizophrenia. Whereas the state of multiple personality syndrome usually happens within the mind, in this case Jasmine is given small doses of that throughout her time spent meeting new people.  

Now I’m not trying to tangent off into any odd or ludicrous concept of the story I’m just trying to hone in on the similarities and almost complements between the first blog prompt of Hyphenation and Identity (what it means to be American), and the question “what’s in a name?”

I think that the ability of progressing and regressing between identities happens more commonly here in the U.S. because of the state of a culture of commerce rather than a state culture like that of Punjab, India. Had Jasmine still been in India there would never have been any new revelations about herself, she would still be the same old Jyoti with the same back story about her scar and her dysfunctional family. I mean the fact that she was named Jasmine from her husband was strictly because of his exposure to western forms of thinking. Prakash knew new names in places as traditional in India are the most extreme cases, and by going by something new you rebel against the standard. Sort of a counter-culture.

Sorry, I think I did venture off a bit. But what I mean is that in her time spent in the U.S. Jasmine experienced literally everything from “rock-bottom” to eventual happiness to post-shock before finally regressing to where she felt the most comfortable actually being her.

I guess I came to the conclusion that Jasmine never really owned her name, seeing as everyone else named her based on what they wanted to call her, and what Jasmine did own was herself. A sort of self realization took place in the novel where instead of watching her brothers grow into dysfunction or witness Prakash’s brief entry into western dreams, the story switched gears and she saw more and more of herself into the storyline.

I also think that she did do at least a little bit or running away from her old identities, but because sometimes you had to. She ran away from India becuase everything around her there reminded her of Prakash and her destiny to die old and alone. She ran away from the hotel with half-face because of the disturbing reminder of rape and murder. So there had to have been some form of running, get just getting away. But at the same time after running away and collecting herself, “licking her wounds”, she always seemed to run towards something new. She ran...into Lillian Gordon, who then got her to run...into Taylor indirectly in New York and so on and so forth.

If you really think about it the entire novel relates to one concept of the book, destiny or inevitability. Everything happened for a reason, just like her father was supposed to be gored by the bull, Jasmine was supposed to be there at the motel with Half-face, she was supposed to be there with Bud, she was supposed to be there in “prison” with Professorji. It was all part of the plan for her to eventually find out where she really wanted to be, with Taylor.