Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Karin went on: “I feel hate for you. I want to be a good Christian.”

  I moved out of the shed. A Mennonite girl, her lace cap riding the waves in her golden hair like a skiff, was holding a puppy with a price tag hanging from its collar. The girl crushed her face into the puppy’s. I hated her having to give up the puppy, even if it was to help starving Ethiopians.

  “Help me,” Karin said.

  The sky, softened by summer heat, puffed out over the treeless fairground.

  “Help me not to hate you, Jasmine.”

  Around us big men in overalls lined up for the $4.75 buffet breakfast. Eggs, sausages, pancakes, home-baked breads and coffee cakes, jams and apple butter, cantaloupes, strawberries, and melons. Mennonite teenagers raced sedately in polished Model T’s. Somber children stood in line for pony rides. The astrologer of Hasnapur cackled his predictions over the cheery noises of the fairgrounds: foolish and wicked girl, did I not tell you you’d end up among aliens?

  “Forgiving’s going to take me the rest of my life, but I’m going to do it.”

  Sukkhi, the New York vendor, pushes his hot-dog cart through my head. I do not seek to forgive, and I have long let go of my plans for revenge. I can live with both impulses. I have even written an anonymous letter to the INS, suggesting they look into the status of a certain Sukhwinder Singh, who pushes a hot-dog cart in New York City. Goodness and evil square off every moment. Forgiveness implies belief in an ultimate triumph. I dream only of neutralizing harm, not absolute and permanent conquest.

  “I might leave here,” Karin continued. We’d made our grim way into the cool, dark shed where quilts were being displayed. One hundred and seven pieces, numbered and encased in clear plastic, hung from rods.

  “You’ve been here just months and you’ve managed to drive me out of Baden.” She kicked up a forlorn cloud of sawdust with her navy flats.

  “Bud’s happy,” I said. “I didn’t do anything to make him happy, but he’s happy. Does that help?” I walked away toward a quilt that seemed not exotic but different, among the traditional Mennonite pieces. This one—smoky blue whorls swirling seamlessly on a sky of slate gray—intrigued me because of the invisibility of its quilting stitches. I read the card stapled to it: The Lutheran (Hmong) Church of Dalton. The Hmong, too, had fled. In Dalton, where fast-talking developers were planning their buyout of Darrel, Hmong women, animists and Lutheran, were quilting in church basements.

  “Maybe I’ll go off to L. A. Half of Iowa’s relocated to L.A. Maybe this kick in the pants is what I needed. I should be thanking you.”

  I said, “You don’t have to go anywhere.”

  “Aside from Bud, I’ve won only one thing in my life. I won a Purple Ribbon in a 4H state fair with my How-to-Pack-a-Suitcase demo,” Karin said. She could have been talking to herself. “I could pack the best bag but I never got to travel. Not like you. You travel around the world, swoop down in a small town and take the best man for yourself and don’t even think of the pain you’ve left behind.”

  “He chose me. I did nothing to encourage it.”

  “And I suppose you never asked, Are you a married man?’ You just batted your big black eyes and told him how wonderful he was, didn’t you?”

  She covered her face with her large-knuckled, middle-aged hands. I watched the disintegration of enviable virtues: dutifulness, decency, compassion. Where could I go?

  Karin sobbed. “I have no way of competing with you! Last night I dreamed that Baden was hit by a tornado. I don’t have to ask a shrink to know that you are the tornado. You’re leaving a path of destruction behind you. I’m going to L.A. where you can’t hurt me anymore.”

  But she didn’t run away. She lives alone in the two-story brick-and-wood house with white columns that Bud built for her. It’s the kind of large, neat, comfortable house that perfect TV families of the fifties live in, in Du’s black-and-white reruns. She invited me in a month after she had told me her tornado dream. By then she’d accepted the change, she said. She still had her health, her friends. It wasn’t the end of the world. Even in Elsa County there was a high percentage of divorces, and getting higher. She was the norm.

  She’d been tidying up the storage area of the basement and found some things of Bud’s that she thought I might want. She had them in a shopping sack: a red satin wind-breaker with BADEN LANES embroidered in yellow silk on the back, and a pair of freshly polished bowling shoes. Bud wears size 10. In the car I put on Bud’s bowling jacket over my cotton blouse. But the bowling shoes with the number 10 on the heel made me shudder so much that I dumped Bud’s shoes in Karin’s trash can.

  Karin found herself a volunteer job right after the divorce. She staffs the only Suicide Hot Line in the county. When Bud was shot two years ago, I saw her on television. She said, “It doesn’t have to be war out there, that’s what I tell the men who call. They aren’t bad managers. Farming isn’t a business you manage between nine and five like an office job. It’s a way of life. I find myself talking to frightened, panicked people, to angry people who don’t know whom to be angry at. The banker just happens to be visible.”

  If she had been in the house when Harlan broke into our living room, she would have known what to do. I feel responsible. For Prakash’s death, Bud’s maiming. I’m a tornado, blowing through Baden.

  Karin and I have had just one other confrontation. Yesterday she called me and said, “I thought I was doing okay until I heard you were pregnant. Why? Why are you forcing a man in Bud’s condition to go through with this? What do you know about looking after a man like Bud? What are you trying to prove? He already has two good, affectionate sons.”

  I said, “Karin, maybe you ought to write my name on a slip of paper and burn it again.”

  For seconds I heard nothing, as though Karin’s phone had gone dead. “Hullo, Karin?” I shouted. Screams, taunts, meanness would have been easier for me to fight. “Hullo! Hullo!” Then soft, raspy noises floated at me. I could picture Karin by the telephone table in the hallway of her big house, twisting and twisting the telephone cord around her wrist. I thought I heard the sighs of a wild, despairing woman. “Karin,” I pleaded, “I’m not the enemy.”

  A sigh thickened into a gravelly cough. Finally Karin said, “How’s the Lutz boy doing out there alone? I worry about him. He used to call me a lot, but he doesn’t call me much anymore.”

  “Hey, I may have one more for you,” Thad, the mailman, shouts as he is about to get back into his funny little mail jeep. Some days he parks just outside our driveway and eats his lunch in the jeep. One time he broke his thermos and I brought him a mug of microwaved water for his tea bag. He’s a friendly, bearded, bookish-looking man who once spent a month in Kathmandu and tries out Nepalese words on me that I don’t understand but that I pretend to. He sees himself as the final link in a world of communications. Someone ten thousand miles away drops a letter in a strange-looking box and a week later, out of all the people in the world, it comes to him and he gets to lay it in my hand. (He also said, “If I didn’t make up these little stories, I’d go crazy.”) He tells me the names of famous people on his route, famous meaning they were in the papers, even the Des Moines Register, for winning something, or losing.

  I don’t think, growing up in Hasnapur, we ever sent or received a letter. I like to keep him talking as long as I can; he brings the world with him, and when he finally drives away, I feel abandoned, almost betrayed. I used to feel so secure, being alone on the farm with Bud, in the winter; now I feel deserted, except for Du, who rarely talks. New York wasn’t like this. Even with the men in stores and on the streets, I felt safe and never alone. I think sometimes I can appease the mailman; I see his jeep approaching from a mile away and I say a quick series of prayers, the way I do when a promising cloud appears on the low horizon. Rain, rain, I say, the same way I find myself praying, Letter, letter, from New York. I think sometimes if I can come up with the right prayer or appeasement, a letter will come from New York. Taylor will
find me somehow, sometime.

  “If it’s a bill, I don’t need it.” I laugh, but I take the kitchen steps in one running leap. I don’t get or send out much mail, I rip myself free of the past. Why leave a paper trail for the INS to track? Only this noon, what the mailman’s holding in his hand is not a glassine envelope but a black-and-white postcard with a woman’s face on it. The woman has stark-white bobbed hair and a sad, heavy, wrinkled face. It’s the face of a poet or a philosopher, the face of a woman who has come to terms with all the Sukkhis and Half-Faces out there and is no longer afraid.

  “Hold on, Mrs. R.,” he says, squinting at the address. “I figure around here you’re the only one with a name like this.” He mouths the name on the postcard to himself.

  I read his lips, I hold my breath. “Jasmine Vijh, yes.”

  “Oh, jeez,” he says, handing over the card. “Is that Jane in Hindu? Sure sounds prettier in your language.” It’s addressed to Jasmine Vijh, Elsa County, Iowa, and it’s found me here. Less than a week old.

  “Hindi,” I say.

  The card says: DUFF AND I’RE HEADING YOUR WAY. SHE STILL DOESN’T KNOW AND I’M HOPING YOU’LL HELP.

  SHE’S QUITE A YOUNG LADY AND SHE REMEMBERS YOU PERFECTLY. AS DO I. WYLIE DOESN’T CONSIDER MY TRIP INSANE. STAY PUT. DON’T DARE RUN AWAY AGAIN. ??? T.

  Is the word before T “love”? I lean against the cold dusty side of the jeep in case my legs give way. How bold to scribble “love” on a postcard that anyone can read, how lucky to be a man without secrets.

  Du is standing by the fridge drinking 2 percent milk straight out of the carton. We can’t get him to drink skim. “Don’t worry,” he says, not looking at me, “I’m not watching you.”

  “What are you watching, then?”

  “Whatever you’re planning to do is okay. Just do it.” His eyes fix on the postcard on top of the fridge. I haven’t hidden Taylor’s postcard. It’s easy to hide things from a man in a wheelchair.

  “Do I look as though I’m plotting?”

  “So now you want me to look at you?”

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to pour milk into a glass first?”

  “I went to a cheap manners school, remember? Anyway, even if I did, would that make Dad love me any more?”

  “He’s a good father, Du. Don’t take that away from him.”

  “Okay, he’s a good father. He gives us a good home.”

  How dare we want more? I march to the window and bang it down to the sill. The glass is cold. Coldness, darkness swirl outdoors. I try to garrison myself with light, with warmth. Out there somewhere Taylor and Duff are burning up the highways. They point their car onto the West Side Highway, then take the exit to the George Washington Bridge, and without another traffic light, they end up in Elsa County, Iowa, like a letter.

  “Who’s your Mr. T.?” Du asks, very cautiously. “Gold chains and a Mohawk?”

  “Mr. T.!” I touch Du’s receding hair with the fluttery tips of my fingers. What crazy connections he makes—Taylor and Mr. T. I want to tell him something he may never have learned: Don’t get too close to Mr. T. Mr. T. is the enemy. The whole A-Team, they’re the assholes. America keeps sending these ambiguous messages. “I looked after their little girl, that’s all. I already told you about him.”

  He puts the carton back. He looks at me and I can read his mind: And whose little boy am I? From the hallway I hear him one more time. “By the way, you know who that woman is on the postcard?”

  Du never asks a question unless he already knows the answer. He asks only to test us.

  “Go ahead, tell me.”

  “A revolutionary’s wife who ended up living among strangers.” His door, wired with electronic gadgets, whirs shut. The name on the postcard, British-born, married to a Russian, means nothing to me.

  My wise son wants me to do the right thing.

  Taylor the Rescuer is on his way here. He taught me to yank down that window shade. For a couple of years I felt powerful, shutting out meanness and sealing in goodness. Then I saw Sukkhi that day in the park and it was as though the cord came off in my hand.

  On Claremont Avenue I came closest to the headiness, dizziness, porousness of my days with Prakash. What I feel for Bud is affection. Duty and prudence count. Bud has kept me out of trouble. I don’t want trouble. Taylors car is gobbling up the highways.

  25

  BUD’S working late tonight because the team of state inspectors is due next week. He used to welcome them. He called it his private seminar in ag banking. They used to come every year and a half and spend a week at the bank, inspecting each loan, commenting on its riskiness, raising routine doubts about collateral. Bud enjoyed the give-and-take. His faith in character, integrity, and the basic soundness of an operation, against their charts and statistics. He always won.

  Now their load’s so heavy they don’t come that often, and it’s become impersonal. Cranky bureaucrats, men with itchy collars and high-pitched voices, suggesting that this looks like a bad loan, and this and this, saying in pained voices that a banker who co-signs his neighbors loan—which Bud’d often done for Gene Lutz and which he, now, torments himself thinking he should do for Darrel—is getting that farmer in a tougher spot than if he were to point out in a no-options voice, “No way you can make all these payments.” In these times a good banker has to be able to walk away from dreamers and pleaders and potential defaulters.

  “I’ll wait supper for you. Indian wives never eat before their husbands.” I add a laugh to lighten what I’ve just said.

  Bud cries, “Wife? Did I hear wife?”

  There’s so much about me he doesn’t know, that might kill him to find out. The old Bud, the pre-Harlan Bud, I might have been able to tell. And then marry.

  “Marry me, Jane,” the pillar of Baden begs. I hear Orrin Lacey saying, Look, Bud, this is his situation. We’ll have to tell him, let’s look at what’s best for you. You still have $200,000. Now let’s figure out what’s the most essential part of your operation, and see if you shouldn’t sell off eighty acres. Orrin must be picking at his graying sixties sideburns or at his droopy mustache. He does that when he has to deliver unpleasant news.

  “Marry me before the baby comes. Put this old bull out of his pain.”

  I stick the pot roast back in the oven. Pot roast and gobi aloo: sacrilegious smells fill my kitchen. Du is at soccer practice. He’ll drive over to Arby’s afterward. He passed his driving test on the first try. Amazing, the instructor said.

  Only the farm kids who’ve driven tractors since they were six pass on the first shot. Why shouldn’t he? I wanted to say. I passed mine; it runs in the family.

  At school they say Du’s doing so well, isn’t he, considering. Considering what? I want to say. Considering that he has lived through five or six languages, five or six countries, two or three centuries of history; has seen his country, city, and family butchered, bargained with pirates and bureaucrats, eaten filth in order to stay alive; that he has survived every degradation known to this century, considering all those liabilities, isn’t it amazing that he can read a Condensed and Simplified for Modern Students edition of A Tale of Two Cities?

  Du’s doing well because he has always trained with live ammo, without a net, with no multiple choice. No guesswork: only certain knowledge or silence. Once upon a time, like me, he was someone else. We’ve been many selves. We’ve survived hideous times. I envy Bud the straight lines and smooth planes of his history.

  Until Harlan. Always, until Harlan.

  “I feel crazy tonight,” Darrel says on the phone.

  I’ve called him, after talking to Karin. It’s seven-thirty. He should be working on his hog house before the light goes. “How crazy?”

  He whistles a song I don’t recognize. “Crazy enough to hold up a bank, for instance.”

  “Stop right there.”

  “Hijack a school bus. Take hostages. I feel ready for massacre and mayhem.”

  “Tried calling Karin’s H
ot Line?”

  “Karin’ll get her chance if you fail. I’m giving you the chance to save me first.”

  I still think of myself as caregiver, recipe giver, preserver. I can honestly say all I wanted was to serve, be allowed to join, but I have created confusion and destruction wherever I go. As Karin says, I am a tornado. I hit the trailer parks first, the prefabs, the weakest links. How many more shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more husbands?

  “Come over and say a mantra,” Darrel goes on. “Hold my hand. Keep me sane. And if that doesn’t work, dial Karin.”

  Karin and Jane, wives of the wounded god. Who will say a mantra for us?

  I smell the cumin, coriander, and turmeric even before I push Darrels back door open. We don’t lock, though we should. After three years in Iowa, I still take Manhattan security as the norm. I never belittled Taylor and Wylie’s three locks with three separate keys. Many things, even disparate things, are reminding me of Taylor. Has he found Duff another day mummy, a Letitia, some Caribbean make-over to replace his Jase? I whisper the name, Jase, Jase, Jase, as if I am calling someone I once knew.

  Darrel stands in the middle of his kitchen, wearing a butcher’s apron and holding a bottle of Bombay lime pickle in a hand that’s bleeding from where he cut it on the jagged edge of the bottle’s tin cap. Third World packaging.

  “Welcome,” he announces, and guides me to the kitchen table still cluttered with cereal boxes, dirty mixing bowls, and Baggies of spice.

  “I’m ready to serve us a banquet fit for an Indian princess.”

  “Darrel,” I protest, smiling, “I came to save your life, remember? I didn’t come to pig out.” Bud’s and my pot roast is drying in the turned-off oven. A good Hasnapur wife doesn’t eat just because she is hungry. Food is a way of granting or withholding love. I lift lids off the two pots on Darrel’s stove. He hands me a ladle. “Pilaf,” he boasts, “and motor pan. Did I say that right?”