Key moment of Jasmine in her transformation

With a battle for fate and a bold move to prove her control over her life, Jyoti, a poor Indian village girl decides to leave her village, renounce from her haunting past and start a new life in America in the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukerjee.

Jyoti, being widowed and with a sense of lost control of her own life sets off on a long agonizing journey as an illegal immigrant to the United State. She describes the journey in much detail that the reader gets a very clear point of view on some type of ‘subalterns’ that are left unnoticed: illegal immigrants and the hardship they go through to chase their own version of the American Dream. It indeed open my eyes to the fact that there are a hundreds of thousands of such illegal immigrants who go through the same hardship as Jyoti to make their dreams come true. So make it. But some pay the ultimate price.

Jyoti was somewhat lucky that she made it safely into the country. But upon arriving in Florida, she’s being raped by a mindless half-faces Bubba, the man who illegally smuggles her into the United State. She was in the verge of killing herself with all lost hope and helplessness. She cries out, "The pitcher is broken. Lord Yama, who had wanted me, who had courted me, and whom Id flirted with on the long trip over, had now deserted me" (p.107)..  My body was merely a shell, soon to be discarded . . . if he had only killed me" (p.108). But "suddenly, death was being denied." And she finds the courage to get up and move on.

This episode of her illegal journey to the United States and her experience on the first day itself represents her transformation. Her whole personality and attitudes change after this and she reflects on her transformation later on: "..I changed because I wanted to."

Undoubtedly, this experience can be taken as one of the key moments in Jasmine’s life that somewhat transformed her that it served as a catalyst to shed her haunted past and embrace a ‘new life.’