Life's Chaotic Sense

I remember being asked, “Where do you think you will be five years from now?” And at the time I did have a perception of my destination. I know where I wanted to end up, but going about to figure out how to get there was the question I wanted to get answered. Though I have not yet reached my destination, I do have a feeling that I am getting closer.

Life works in mysterious ways and it never really points you in the straight direction. As humans, we all make mistakes, and it is from these mistakes that we learn. A mistake is like a checking system, in my belief, put in place by some divine power to intellectually guild us from wondering far from where we want to go. However, sometimes it is these very mistakes that puzzle me. Sometimes you don’t learn that you’ve made a mistake until you have reached the destination. And what is even weirder is that, even though these mistakes help guild us to where we want to go, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be related or conceived in any natural order. When it happens, it happens. It is through these random events, which will guild us toward a path we are searching for. Like making order out of randomness.

I see this in relation to James Gleick’s Chaos Theory where he states, “The new geometry mirrors a universe…a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined.” And it is this very chaos that goes on in the world that gives it order. Similar to the Chinese belief in the Yin and Yang, where good and evil co-exist. One cannot be without the other.

            And this is what I believe Jasmine, the main character in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel called Jasmine, experiences with the events that she has been through discussed in the novel. In fact, the quote stated earlier from James Gleick Chaos Theory is the first thing you see right before the novel begins. Even on the very first page, Jasmine hints what the novel is going to be about. The first passage states, “Life times ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears his satellite dish to the stars and foretold my widowhood and exile.” Instinctively the readers gets a suggestion of a pre-ordain destiny that Jasmine faces. However, that is all that Mukherjee leave the reader with. A feeling of being boxed in, not escaping the boundaries of the cultural context that Jasmine was born into.

But if you would read the last passage at the end of the novel, Mukherjee is now saying something different. Jasmine points out in her passage, “It isn’t guilt that I fell, it’s relief, I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane. Adventure, risk, transformation: the frontier is pushing indoors through uncaulked windows. Watch me re-position the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who floats cross-legged above my kitchen stove.” It seems like Mukherjee is pointing out that Jasmine has finally found order in her life. Whether she is running away from her pre-destined past or actively seeking her future she has chosen for herself, doesn’t matter. For being active and passive is only the nature of how the event took place, it’s the yin and yang of her chosen path that keeps her inline of her goal. From the random chaotic events that she’s experienced in the novel, led her to find peace and order at the end.

The multiple identities that Jasmine has acknowledge throughout the novel were, what I believe, symbolic to the events that help guild her to the path that would lead her to her ultimate goal. For when she was Jyoti, a young miss-fortuned girl who was told over and over that she can’t escape her fate, symbolize a time when she was lost and confused. To Jasmine, the time when she was loved by a great husband and chosen to marry him on her own free will, however lost her husband to a terrorist bombing, symbolizes an event in her life where she was loved and heart broken. To Jane, a time in her life where she is a mother and a woman supposedly getting married to Bud, symbolizing a time when she felt needed and secure. To Kali, a time where she symbolizes the God Kali, God of death, as she took the life of the man who savagely raped her. These random events that Mukherjee portrays of Jasmine all have a lesson to be learned, and these lessons are given to the reader indirectly through the events and sub-events that Jasmine portrays in the novel. At the end is where Mukherjee really summarizes the events and makes the final connection from random to order. From “widowhood and exiled” to “Watch me re-position the stars…” Jasmine finally received what she sought after. And it becomes clear that freedom is what she chose. Because freedom is what she wanted, she went with the name Jasmine; a time in her life which symbolized her first step toward her freedom, and it was the freedom choosing the person whom SHE wanted to marry.