The Mission for Jasmine

           Have you ever imagined that if once your love is killed by an accident and what you can do is to promise him/her you will carry on what he/she has left? Often people have to experience certain events in their life in order to get stronger. In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel “Jasmine”, the main character, Jasmine, experiences a huge event in her life and this event totally changes her entire perspective for living. Her name was Jyoti, but she got married to a man named Prakash Vijh who gave her new name Jasmine. Prakash had been got into the Florida International Institute of Technology, but an accident had taken everything away from him. He was killed by a boom. After Prakash was killed, Jasmine chose to leave India because she did not want to be a widow for the rest of her life. She would rather complete the mission of going to Florida and burning herself on top of her husband’s suit under the palm trees of the college campus.

        Jasmine left Punjab, India by a shrimp boat called The Gulf Shuttle which was bound for the Gulf Coast of Florida. The captain of the boat named Half Face because “he had lost an eye and ear and most of his cheek in a paddy field in Vietnam” (Mukherjee P.104). Half Face is the one who took Jasmine in on the first night she was in America and she soon found out that was the biggest mistake in her life. “Just you keep it coming and I’m your meal ticket outta here.  Give me any grief and you’re dead meat” (Mukherjee P.115). Half Face stared at Jasmine and tried to kiss her, but she twisted to avoid him kissing. Her eyes tried to keep on the Ganpati she brought along in her suitcase and prayed for the strength to survive, long enough to kill herself (Mukherjee P.116).  By keeping her eyes on Ganpati, she is looking to this lord for wisdom. After this, she found that there would be no meaning for her to live.  

        After finding out what America is like, Jasmine felt that there would be no point to live anymore. She then went to take a shower and vomited. She told herself that she could not let her personal dishonor disrupts her mission. Therefore, she took a knife and cut her tongue so that the blood would be filled in her mouths and her soul would fill with murder. After that, she cut Half Face’s throat and then leaned on him so that her blood can be dripped from her mouth to Half Face’s neck. Half Face tried to leave from his bed because he wanted to stop his blood, but the cut on his neck was too small so he was not able to find where the wound was. Jasmine then grabbed a bedspread to cover Half Face and stab him.

        Jasmine once states, “Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down” (Mukherjee P. 59). Her assignment was to go on her life and complete what she promised her husband that she would do. Lord Yama is the guidance she looks to and she creates the justice based on what Lord Yama stands for herself. Lord Yama sends human beings after death for appropriate punishment. Jasmine did the same thing. Half Face raped her and she knew that he would never get punished or justice from the police, so she decided to do it on her own. After murdering him, she took a shower and said, “it was a place that permitted a kind of purity” (Mukherjee P. 117). She took shower to clean her body and purify her soul. Be cleaning herself, she is ultimately being reborn. In the end, she becomes a new person. She did not let that horrible event ruin her life because she had a mission to complete.