Read Online Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee - Free Book Online Page B

first name. “Only in feudal societies is the woman still a vassal,” he explained. “Hasnapur is feudal.” In Hasnapur wives used only pronouns to address their husbands. The first months, eager and obedient as I was, I still had a hard time calling him Prakash. I’d cough to get his attention, or start with “Are you listening?” Every time I coughed he’d say, “Do I hear a crow trying human speech?” Prakash. I had to practice and practice (in the bathroom, in the tarped-over corner of the verandah which was our kitchen) so I could say the name without gagging and blushing in front of his friends. He liked to show me off. His friends were like him: disrupters and rebuilders, idealists.
    Pygmalion wasn’t a play I’d seen or read then, but I realize now how much of Professor Higgins there was in my husband. He wanted to break down the Jyoti I’d been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city woman. To break off the past, he gave me a new name: Jasmine. He said, “You are small and sweet and heady, my Jasmine. You’ll quicken the whole world with your perfume.”
    Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities.
    We had our arguments. “We aren’t going to spawn ! We aren’t ignorant peasants!” Prakash yelled every time I told him that I wanted to get pregnant. I was past fifteen, and girls in the village, and my mother, were beginning to talk. He said he was too poor to start a family and I was too young. My kind of feudal compliance was what still kept India an unhealthy and backward nation. It was up to thewomen to resist, because men were generally too greedy and too stupid to recognize their own best interests. I didn’t dare confess that I felt eclipsed by the Mazbi maid’s daughter, who had been married off at eleven, just after me, and already had had a miscarriage.
    “Just because you’re a good engineering student you think you know everything,” I fought back. “You think that hi-tech solves every problem. What does hi-tech say about a woman’s need to be a mother?”
    He said, “It says you are still very young and foolish. It says you are confusing social and religious duty with instinct. I honor the instinct, and there is nothing more inevitable than a fourteen-year-old married woman becoming a mother.” But he didn’t put real venom into it. And he didn’t hit me—he never hit me.
    Instead, he’d ask, “What’s ten divided by two?”
    “Five. You think I’ve forgotten how to count?”
    “And what’s ten divided by ten?”
    “One. I’m not dumb.”
    “And which number is larger, five or one?”
    There was no winning these arguments. He’d read more than I had. He had statistics for everything. He’d done more thinking than I had; he was twenty-four and I was fifteen, a village fifteen, ready to be led. He was an engineer, not just of electricity, he said, but of all the machinery in the world, seen and unseen. It all ran by rules, if we just understood them. The important thing, he said, was to keep arguing, fight him if I didn’t agree. We shouldn’t do anything if we didn’t both agree.
    So we didn’t start a family. My poor, good-heartedhusband! I think now that he was afraid of hurting me, afraid of embarrassing me with any desire or demand. “Jasmine, Jasmine,” he would whisper in the anguished intimacy of our little room, “help me be a better person.”
    And I did. I bit him and nibbled him and pressed his head against my bosom.
    Prakash left the apartment before five-thirty in the morning six days a week and didn’t get home before eight or nine in the evening. He worked two jobs, one as a repairman and bookkeeper for Jagtiani and Son Electrical Goods, and the other as a math tutor to a dreamy boy of thirteen. Then he crammed for his diploma exams. I missed him, but I didn’t feel abandoned. Abandonment meant deliberate withdrawal; his was absence. He had to pay rent, buy expensive technical books, save so we could start our family. He was a shameless