Compassion for Jasmine

            People come into our lives randomly.  In special instances, these people change our lives for the better.  Sometimes we find out who are true friends are after a crisis, sometimes over a long period of time, and sometimes even after a period of animosity.  In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, the protagonist (Jasmine) meets one such special person named Lillian Gordon after she is savagely attacked by the first American she ever meets.  Lillian embodies a trait that Jasmine greatly admires—ordinariness. 

            Jasmine is constantly reinventing herself.  She is born into a traditional Indian background, moves to America for personal freedom, and eventually melds the two cultures with her own special touch.  Throughout the novel she is faced with episodes that truly test her will.  The parts of life Jasmine truly loves, however, are those instances she considers ordinary.  The peace and simplicity of ordinariness make Jasmine comfortable, and she consequently speaks highly of those who lead simple lives and do simple things.

            Ordinariness Manifest Lillian Gordon is the best example of stability for Jasmine.  Lillian picks up a stumbling, famished, dehydrated Jasmine and brings her to her home, no questions asked: “I didn’t tell Mrs. Gordon what she had rescued me from.  In a fundamental way, she didn’t care” (p. 131).  She gave Jasmine a crash course in acting American to avoid INS detection, and all the while never once asked her of her past or what had brought her to such a bizarre corner of the globe. 

Jasmine cherished Lillian’s compassion.  Jasmine had already been sure she would die soon, and possibly by her own hands; meeting Lillian motivated Jasmine to press on.  Lillian made Jasmine comfortable enough to formulate a plan to travel as a full-fledged, albeit illegal, American: “I said, ‘I want to go to New York.  I have an address there’” (p. 134).  Jasmine is determined to carry out her mission of burning the clothes with which she had traveled for so long, despite being soaked in the blood of her attacker: “the vision of lying serenely on a bed of fire under palm trees in my white sari had motivated all the weeks of sleepless, half-starved passage” (pp. 120-121).  She remained fiercely committed to her mission, but yet her life would take more turns.

Throughout the novel, Jasmine endures many trials and tribulations.  These experiences are devastating, and yet because she changes her self-concept so often she seems a little resistant to it.  She simply acts in the moment, entirely of her own volition.  She saves her self from being mauled to death by a dog, she avenged her violation by murdering the despicable “human form” (p. 119), lost her first husband to war, lost her companion in Iowa’s mobility, and more horrible episodes.  All throughout, however, Jasmine remains confident that she is someone.  She truly values Lillian Gordon not for what she does, but for what she doesn’t do.  The timing of Jasmine and Lillian’s introduction was impeccable, and furthermore, random.  Sometimes when we are truly in need, a dirt road in the middle of nowhere can be the setting of the creation of a friendship that stirs the soul.