Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  The villagers say when a clay pitcher breaks, you see that the air inside it is the same as outside. Vimla set herself on fire because she had broken her pitcher; she saw there were no insides and outsides. We are just shells of the same Absolute. In Hasnapur, Vimlas isn’t a sad story. The sad story would be a woman Mother Ripplemeyer’s age still working on her shell, bothering to get her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s.

  * * *

  Mother Ripplemeyer tells me her Depression stories. In the beginning, I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. Not that she’s hostile. It’s like looking at the name in my passport and seeing “Jyo—” at the beginning and deciding that her mouth was not destined to make those sounds. She can’t begin to picture a village in Punjab. She doesn’t mind my stories about New York and Florida because she’s been to Florida many times and seen enough pictures of New York. I have to be careful about those stories. I have to be careful about nearly everything I say. If I talk about India, I talk about my parents.

  I could tell her about water famines in Hasnapur, how at the dried-out well docile women turned savage for the last muddy bucketful. Even here, I store water in orange-juice jars, plastic milk bottles, tumblers, mixing bowls, any container I can find. I’ve been through thirsty times, and not that long ago. Mother doesn’t think that’s crazy. The Depression turned her into a hoarder, too. She’s shown me her stock of tinfoil. She stashes the foil, neatly wrapped in a flannel sheet, in a drawer built into the bed for blankets and extra pillows.

  She wonders, I know, why I left. I tell her, Education, which is true enough. She knows there is something else. I say, I had a mission. I want to protect her from too much reality.

  She says she likes me better than she did Karin, though Karin grew up right here in Baden and Karin’s mother, who is eighty-two, still picks her up for their Lutheran Mission Relief Funds quilting group. Last year the Relief Fund raised $ 18,000 for Ethiopia. Mothers group’s quilt went for eleven hundred dollars to a bald, smiling man from Chicago who said it was for his granddaughter, but I read the commercial lettering on his panel truck.

  Just before the divorce, according to Bud, Karin was agitating to stick Mother in the Lutheran Home. Mother senses I have different feelings about family.

  The table is set and ready. Du’s made a centerpiece out of some early flowers and I’ve polished the display rack of silver spoons. Bud has five brothers and three sisters, and they were all born or at least christened with silver spoons in their mouths. I, too, come from a family of nine. Figure the odds on that, Bud says. He has a brother in Minneapolis and a sister in Omaha and a brother named Vern Ripplemeyer, Jr., who died in Korea, the family’s only other encounter with Asia. All the others are in Texas or California. After the divorce, Mother asked Karin to give the spoons back. “Call me an Indian giver,” Mother likes to joke. “I mean our kind.”

  Du and Scott, whose father works down in the corn sweetener plant, are sprawled on the rug watching Monster Truck Madness. It’s trucks versus tanks, and the tanks are creaming them. We bought ourselves a satellite dish the day after we first talked long distance to Du. There’s no telling where this telecast is coming from.

  Du’s first question to Bud, in painful English over trans Pacific cable, was “You have television? You get?” He talked of having watched television in his home in Saigon. We got the point. He’d had two lives, one in Saigon and another in the refugee camp. In Saigon he’d lived in a house with a large family, and he’d been happy. He doesn’t talk much about the refugee camp, other than that his mother cut hair, his older brother raised fighting fish, his married sister brought back live crabs and worms for him to eat whenever she could sneak a visit from her own camp. From a chatty agency worker we know that Du’s mother and brother were hacked to death in the fields by a jealous madman, after they’d gotten their visas.

  “Look at that sucker fly!” Scott shouts, crawling closer to the screen. “All right!” Mud scuds behind the Scarlet Slugger.

  “Whoa, Nellie!” Du can match Scott shout for shout now. “Hold on, mama!” The Slugger is the body of a Chevy Blazer welded onto a World War II tank.

  Mother wanders over to the television but doesn’t sit down. In an instant replay we watch the Scarlet Slugger tear up the center of a bog. I can’t help thinking, It looks like a bomb crater. Does Du even think such things? I don’t know what he thinks. He’s called Yogi in school, mainly because his name in English sounds more like “Yo.” But he is a real yogi, always in control. I’ve told him my stories of India, the years between India and Iowa, hoping he’d share something with me. When they’re over he usually says, “That’s wild. Can I go now?”

  “Holy Toledo!” Mother is into it.

  “Mom, it’s okay, isn’t it, if Scott stays for dinner?”

  “If it’s okay with his parents.”

  Scott grins at me with his perfect teeth. I envy him his teeth. We had no dentist in Hasnapur. For a long time we had no doctor either, except for Vaccinations-sahib, who rode in and out of the village in a WHO jeep. My teeth look as though they’ve been through slugfests. Du’s seventeen and wears braces. Orthodontics was the Christmas present he asked for.

  “And if the two of you wash the beans,” I add.

  “You aren’t making the yellow stuff, Mrs. R.?” I detect disappointment.

  “I will if you name it.”

  I see him whispering to Du, and Du’s bony shoulder shrug. “Globey?” he says.

  It’s close enough. I took gobi aloo to the Lutheran Relief Fund craft fair last week. I am subverting the taste buds of Elsa County. I put some of last night’s matar panir in the microwave. It goes well with pork, believe me.

  Bud wheels himself in from his study. “I can’t let the kid do it!” The kid is Darrel, whose financial forms he’s been studying. “It’s plain stupid. Gene would never forgive me.”

  I’ve sent away for the latest in wheelchairs, automated and really maneuverable. The doctor said, “I had a patient once who had his slugs pierced and hung on a chain around his neck.” Bud said to throw them out. He didn’t want to see how flattened they’d got, bouncing off his bones. The doctor is from Montana. I haven’t been west of Lincoln, Nebraska. Every night the frontier creeps a little closer.

  Think of banking as your business, I want to tell Bud. Don’t make moral decisions for Darrel. It’s his farm now. He can make half a million by selling, buy his franchise and a house, and I can look out on a golf course, which won’t kill me. Bud gets too involved. It almost killed him two years ago.

  “Watch him, Dad!” Du whoops. “Watch him take off!”

  Bud puts away the Financial Statement and Supporting Schedules form he’s been penciling. He skids and wheels closer to Du to watch the Python.

  “Can you do a wheelie yet, Mr. R.?” Scott jokes.

  “Boy!” He smiles. “That thing gives the guy great air!”

  The Python’s built himself a fancy floating suspension. Father and son watch the Snakeman win his class.

  On the screen Cut Tire Class vehicles, frail as gnats, skim over churned-up mud. Helmeted men give me victory signs. They all plan on winning tonight. Nitro Express, Brawling Babe, Insane Expectations. Move over, I whisper.

  Over the bleached grounds of Baden, Iowa, loose, lumpy rainclouds are massing. Good times, best times, are coming. Move over.

  Mother paces between the windows. “Poor Vern.” Her hands pick at lint balls I can’t see. “It’s blowing so hard he’ll never find his way back from the barn. A man can die in a storm like this.”

  Bud flashes anxiety at me. His father was Vern. I calm him with a touch. He rests his head on my hip. “Kiss an old fool for love?” He grins. I bring my face down close to his big face. He kisses my chin, my cheeks, my eyelids, my temples. His lips scuttle across my forehead; they warm the cold pale star of my scar. My third eye glows, a spotlight trained on lives to come. This isn’t a vision to share with Bu
d. He is happy. And I am happy enough.

  The lemon-pale afternoon swirls indoors through torn window screens. The first lightning bugs of summer sparkle. I feel the tug of opposing forces. Hope and pain. Pain and hope.

  Mother moves around the room, turning on lamps. “Seen the quilt?” she says. “How much do you think it’ll bring? Thirty-five? Forty?”

  In the white lamplight, ghosts float toward me. Jane, Jasmine, Jyoti.

  “It’ll depend on the Christian conscience of strangers,” Bud jokes. “You might get more than thirty-five.”

  “Think how many people thirty-five dollars will feed out there.”

  Out there. I am not sure what Mother imagines. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out There, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least for now.

  Oh, the wonder! the wonder!

  3

  DARREL was looking a little out of control in the HyVee parking lot last week. He was trying to avoid me, but I didn’t read the signs in time. I called out his name and started running. He was carrying a case of Heileman’s Old Style and a six-pack of blue Charmin. He’d nearly stashed it all in the front seat by the time I got there. His eyes were red and unfocused and he was unsteady on his feet.

  Bud always says, of young farmers or the middle-aged ones with shaky operations, Look out for drinking. I don’t know if Darrel’s a drinker. I do not count off-hours drunkenness a sin. I invited him for dinner that night, but he politely refused. That is, it started politely, with a decent enough excuse, but then he saw me watching him and he knew there was no good excuse except that he was drunk and intending to stay that way.

  Since his father died, Darrel’s had no time for fun. No dates, no movies, no vacation weekends. In the spring, that’s understandable, but not the winter. Iowa farmers pamper themselves in the winter if they can afford it. Gene and Carol always did. The blond girl who visited for a while didn’t seem too helpful. We had her over with Darrel. She was sullen, cut out for nobler ventures. “It’s the hogs” is his usual excuse, “you have to baby-sit hogs.” He has a hundred and fifty Hampshires; Gene had wanted to build up to three hundred.

  Bud says, “It takes a good man to raise hogs.” Gene was a good man. Bud’s talking discipline, strength, patience, character. Husbandry. All of that is in short supply. Maybe Darrel doesn’t have it, in which case a golf course isn’t a betrayal. Most people in Elsa County have lost it. Just look at all the dents and unpainted rust spots on the cars in front of the Hy-Vee.

  “I couldn’t go another round with Bud,” Darrel finally admitted.

  “He’s just trying to make you see both sides, that’s all.”

  “Jane, his mind is closed against me. He’s just dead set against non-ag uses for anyone’s ground, especially Gene Lutz’s ground. But then he turns around and won’t lend me enough to get my crops in and still expand my herd. He thinks he’s my goddamn father.”

  I felt awful for him, and worse for myself. I didn’t want to be disloyal. But what he said is true. The First Bank of Baden has survived in harsh times because Bud can read people’s characters. Out here, it’s character that pays the bills or doesn’t, because everything else is just about equal.

  “Bud’s trying to tie my hands and pin my ears back. He thinks I’m a lousy manager. He thinks he has all the answers. Well, tell him something from me, tell him to bring me rain if he’s God.” Then, almost immediately, he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been drinking. I apologize.”

  We’re dry right now. The rains will come. “Let me drive you home,” I say.

  He lets himself be led, fumbling with his beer and toilet paper, to my Rabbit. He’s drunker than I thought. He drums his fingers on the case of beer. He’s like my brothers, with their scooter repair. They work and drink. It’s the only life they know, and I wouldn’t call them flawed.

  All alone he’s backhoed a 40,000-gallon pit for his hogs’ nightsoil, and with sewer men and electricians on the weekends, he’s built a self-sufficient city for hogs. Once the pump is working, they’ll fertilize two hundred acres automatically, organically, and perpetually. A farmer’s dream. I’ve told Bud that financing this project is his best hostage against the golfing boys from Dalton. No farmer could walk away from it. But he thinks it’s too big for Darrel.

  Darrel’s right about the bottom line. Bud doesn’t trust him.

  Most nights, when Bud and I head to the Dairy Queen after supper, we can see Darrel up on the crossbeams of his hog pen. It’s already bigger than Gene’s old barn, and a lot more secure. Last week when I drove him home down his access lane between the rows of maple and elder, he sobered up as he just stared at the roof skeleton rising high above the poured-concrete floor and the metal sidings. The sheer scale of his achievement! You could smell the hogs and hear their squealing. That unfinished building looked like a landbound Ark. Big sloppy Shadow came out to greet him.

  He was slow, more reluctant than drunk, in getting out. “I’d like to invite you in someday,” he says. In seems to be saying something different from over. More exclusive. “I’ve been practicing with some of your recipes. Need an expert to tell me how I’m doing.”

  4

  BUD calls me Jane. Me Bud, you Jane. I didn’t get it at first. He kids. Calamity Jane. Jane as in Jane Russell, not Jane as in Plain Jane. But Plain Jane is all I want to be. Plain Jane is a role, like any other. My genuine foreignness frightens him. I don’t hold that against him. It frightens me, too.

  In Baden, I am Jane. Almost.’

  Last week on our favorite cable channel, Du and I saw twenty INS agents raid a lawn furniture factory in Texas. The man in charge of the raid called it a factory, but all it was was a windowless shed the size of a two-car garage. We got to hear agents whisper into walkie-talkies, break down a door, kick walls for hollowed-out hiding places. They were very thorough.

  Du snickered, but he gives no sign of caring, one side or the other. He’s very careful that way. There were only two Mexicans in the shed. They ducked behind a chaise longue that was only half-webbed. One minute they were squatting on the floor webbing lawn furniture at some insane wage—I know, I’ve been there—and the next they were spread-eagled on the floor. The camera caught one Mexican throwing up. The INS fellow wouldn’t uncuff him long enough for him to wipe the muck off his face.

  I thought I heard Du mutter, “Asshole.” And I realized I didn’t know who were the assholes, the cowboys or the Indians.

  A woman in a flowered dress said, “I don’t think they’re bad people, you know. It’s just that there’s too many of them. Yesterday I opened the front door to get the morning papers and there were three of them using my yard as their personal toilet.”

  The reporter, a thin, tense man with razor burns, stopped a woman in an Olds. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t know what to feel anymore.” The reporter got ready to move off to somebody else, but she stopped him. “Steve, my husband, lost his job. That was last November. We were doing so good, now we can’t make the house and car payments. Are you listening, Mr. President?”

  I wanted to shout to the lady, Mrs. Steve, Two years ago Bud got shot and will never walk again. Are you listening? What kind of crazy connection are you trying to make between Mexicans and car payments? Who’s the victim here? And what about Du? Mr. President, what about Du?

  The officer in charge flat-handed the mike away, but I thought I heard, “The border’s like Swiss cheese and all the mice are squirming through the holes.”

  So they got two. Which meant that there had to be scores more who scampered away at the start of the raid. Du and me, we’re the ones who didn’t get caught. The only mystery is who’ll get caught and who’ll escape. Du made it out of the refugee camp, and his brother didn’t.

  I visit Du in his room. He’s sitting over his typewriter. I smell tobacco, nothing more serious. A mother, even one no older than a sister, can be forgiven if she looks i
n because the door is open a crack, because it gives a little when she leans her shoulder on it.

  “Try me with your homework? I used to be pretty good in my day.”

  He laughs, but something is wrong. I can see it in the stiffened neck. “Thanks, but I don’t think you know much about Teddy Roosevelt.” He gives his history book, jacketed in brown paper as demanded by Mr. Skola, an irritated shove. “Speak softly but carry a big stick. I bet that’s all you know about Teddy Roosevelt.”

  Truth is, I didn’t know that. I know a little bit about one of the Roosevelts, and about his wife, who was a friend of Indian freedom. At least, Masterji said she was.

  At the last PTA meeting Mr. Skola sought me out by the coffee urn and said, “Yogi’s in a hurry to become ail-American, isn’t he?” I said, “Yes. He doesn’t carry a dictionary around anymore.” And then he said, “He’s a quick study, isn’t he? They were like that, the kids who hung around us in Saigon.” He didn’t make “quick study” sound like anything you’d like to be. We’re all quick studies, I should have said. Once we start letting go—let go just one thing, like not wearing our normal clothes, or a turban or not wearing a tika on the forehead—the rest goes on its own down a sinkhole. When he first arrived, Du kept a small shrine in his room, with pictures, a candle, and some dried fragrances. I don’t know when he gave it up.

  “I tried a little Vietnamese on him,” Mr. Skola went on, “and he just froze up.”

  I suppressed my shock, my disgust. This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing. How dare you? What must he have thought? His history teacher in Baden, Iowa, just happens to know a little street Vietnamese? Now where would he have picked it up? There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams. All this I should have explained to the red-faced, green-shirted, yellow-tied Mr. Skola. Instead, I said, “Du’s first few weeks with us, my husband thought we had an autistic child on our hands!”