Jasmine

Shortly after her mother’s beating, Jasmine walks along the banks of the river, listening to the adult jokes told by the older women as they go out into the fields to go to the bathroom. In a clearing, Jasmine finds a large staff purchased from smuggling funds and used by the Khalsa Lions, or the lions of purity—a gang of scooter-riding young men who harass the villagers.

With staff in hand, Jasmine goes out into the fields, and while squatting, she listens to the raunchy comments made by the adult women around her. In the early dawn hours, the women know that men from the neighboring village across the river are watching them lustfully. Suddenly, a loud growl emerges from the bush. At first, Jasmine thinks the danger is from one of the men, but then she sees an animal’s head in the brambles.

The attacker is an abnormally large, rabid dog with a head “bloodied and monstrous” (44). Jasmine decides to challenge the dog with her newfound treasure, the staff. As the dog sees the threat Jasmine carries, it slowly creeps up on her until Jasmine can “see flies stuck in the viscous drool” (45) in its mouth. She prepares herself as the dog leaps, then cracks the staff against its nose. The sharp brambles wrapped around the staff hook into the rabid dog’s nose, and then the staff is driven into the dog’s eye.

The village women bring Jasmine back to her home, celebrating although her grandmother Dida dismisses the girl as not worth fussing over.

Jasmine’s father’s died unexpected, gored by a bull while taking a shortcut through the fields to a friend’s home. Taylor, the man whose children she cared for as an au pair in New York, questioned the Indian philosophy that death came for a person when his assignment from God was finished. But Jasmine recognizes that her father’s death gave her new opportunities: If her father had not died, she would not have eloped with an Indian man to America, would not have become a stranded widow in Iowa, would not have met Bud, and would not be pregnant. Then she wonders if she is too selfish and egotistical in thinking that her father’s death opened doors to her future: “Perhaps I don’t count in God’s design” (47).

In her conversation with Taylor, Jasmine tried to explain the Indian belief that “a whole life’s mission might be to move a flowerpot from one table to another […] If the universe is one room known only to God, then God alone knows how to furnish it, how to populate it” (47). Taylor believes this philosophy prevents a person from truly living life. Jasmine wants to argue that the “incentive […] is to treat every second of your existence as a possible assignment from God” (47), but she doesn’t speak.

Jasmine’s mother threw herself onto her father’s funeral pyre, and then, when she was not allowed to kill herself, she shaved her hair off with a razor, wore coarse clothing, and sat in a corner, despondent. Jasmine thought daily of her assignment from God while force-feeding her mother.