Floating Populations

A person’s sense of identity is not complete without a feeling of belonging to a place.  Without this belonging a person would be nobody and nothing to anybody.  Their personality and overall existence would be influenced only by themselves.  In Bharati Mukerjee’s “Jasmine” the main character/narrator was born in Hasnapur.  She followed the traditional Punjab traditions and married very young.  She became a widow after her husband was killed in a market bombing.  Jasmine was with her husband at the time of the explosion but she sustained only minor injuries.  Not wanting to live the life of a widow, destined to die alone and in sadness, she makes the long journey to America.

On the way to her destination, Jasmine discovers many other immigrants in a similar position.  The way Mukherjee describes these unfortunate travelers can lead the reader to ask: why are these people abandoning their homes?  The obvious answer would be because they are in search of a better life.  Why else would somebody leave a place from which they are rooted? Jasmine is so desperately trying to gain control of her life that she would do anything or become anyone in order to defy what was meant for her.

In Chapter fifteen, at the height of Jasmine’s journey to America, she makes the realization “We are the outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines.”(p.101)  As she sits and listens to the Filipina nurse, the Tamil auto mechanic, and the Australian students Jasmine realizes that she is not alone in her lack of belonging.

As Jasmine traveled and was exposed to these other phantoms belonging to nowhere, she was probably as close as she would ever get to that sense of belonging.  When Jasmine made the decision to uproot herself from her familiar surroundings and take on the floating lifestyle, it was inevitable that she would end up in a place she didn’t belong.  Her intense desire to be in control of her life turned out to be her biggest mistake.