Run Little Girl, Run!

My husband died at the age of 29…in my arms….on our living room floor. Luckily my best friend and her husband and their kids were there, so I was not all alone.  We were married in June of 1981 and that night on the news they said that tornados had touched down near our house. We laughed about it being some kind of omen. But we had a good marriage. When he died we had just bought our first home. He had his Harley and his pickup truck and I had the family car. (Typical Midwest types.) We had three beautiful sons; the last just born 9 weeks before. He didn’t mean to leave me, I know that. But when I think of that day I can’t help but remember that he always use to joke about not living to the age of 30. Funny huh? Hindsight is always prophetic I guess.

One of the first things my mother-in-law said to me after he died was “Please don’t take my grandsons and move far away.” I had two reactions to that: first I thought “of course I am not going anywhere; this is where my family is!”. But the second thought was “how dare you try to tell me what my future should be! What right do you have to make me promise that I will never live my life except that I think of your feelings first?” She must have seen something in my eyes that day. Something I didn’t want to admit to myself. Two years later I was packing up everything in the house in a Ryder truck and moving three thousand miles away. Back to my childhood home of California, and as far away from the house with the ghost of my husband in it that I could get. She was a smart lady, my mother-in-law. Of course she was upset; so were my parents. But I knew what I didn’t want. And that was good enough for me at 26.

Some of these memories have been popping up for me lately because of a book I am reading called “Jasmine”. The book was written by Bharati Mukherjee, and is about a woman who emigrates from Pakistan to American. There are many ways that Jasmine and I are different. She grew up in a country where her options as a human being were limited because of her culture. I didn’t. She traveled through danger to get to where she wanted to be (America). I didn’t. But there are some similarities between Jasmine and me. In the first chapter, Jasmine makes one of the defining statements in the book: “I know what I don’t want to become”. This may sound as if because she knows what she doesn’t want to become, that means she knows what she wants to become. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jasmine has a habit of running away from the things she doesn’t want to be, but her rush forwards has no real destination. She cannot see or articulate exactly what she wants for her life, but she does a good job of leaving behind the person she does not want to be. Jasmine does not want to be the traditional Pakistani wife and mother. She is hungry to learn and her mother goes to bat with her father to give her that option. She studies English with her Masterji (teacher) but she never talks of wanting to go to American some day. She just knows that she doesn’t want to be like the other women in the village. When Masterji comes to her father to plead with him to allow Jasmine to continue her education instead of marrying a local farmer, her father asks Jasmine if “you are wanting position of steno in the state bank?” Jasmine’s father seems to be able to see that far for Jasmine’s future if that is what she really wants. But Jasmine replies “No, I don’t want to be a steno….I want to be a doctor and set up my own clinic in a big town.” At this point Jasmine has not thought of medical school, she just knows she wants something much bigger for herself than anyone around her can understand. Being a doctor is something that is so out of reach for women in her country, it is a good illustration for Jasmine to use to explain her need to reach toward “something else”. Her father is so flabbergasted by her reply that he decides she is crazy and agrees to her further education. It seems at this point that Jasmine has big plans for herself and no one is going to get in her way.

But suddenly all of this changes when she meets Prakash, a friend of her brothers. Prakash is all the things she wants to be herself…educated, confident, ambitious. Jasmine falls head over heels for this young man and marries him as soon as he will have her. All of a sudden, Jasmine is content to play the role of wife to her husband and seems to let go of her dreams of being more. She is happy to live her dreams through him, and supports his dreams of becoming more than what he is. Prakash tries to talk Jasmine into letting go of the traditional role of wife. He tells her that they are a “modern” couple and that she is not his slave, but his partner. Jasmine likes hearing these things but she seems to have lost her drive to go against the grain. When Prakash tells her that he has been accepted into a Technical college in the U.S., Jasmine at first seems bewildered. She tells him “I cannot live without you.” This is the girl who at the age of seven told a fortune teller that he was full of baloney when he told her that her future was going to be a bad one. That little girl seemed to have given up.

After a few years of happy marriage, the unthinkable happens to Jasmine just like it happened to me. Prakash is killed by a bomb blast in the market and Jasmine is right there when it happens. She knows who did this thing. She sees his face outside the shop window right before it happens. But when she tries to tell the policeman at the scene, he treats her like the weak and hysterical woman that she seems to be. Her rage and frustration at not being able to get through to this policeman is eventually transformed into the compulsion to become what she always said she didn’t want to be. She decides to react to her husband’s death in the same way that the other women of her village react. She will “turn a kerosene flame into a lover’s caress”. Jasmine’s mind is set on traveling to America with her husband’s new suit that he bought for college and setting herself on fire while lying on top of it under a palm tree on the campus grounds. She cannot see any other choice for herself, since the life of a widow in her village is one she refuses to accept. Her brothers help her to get the Visas she needs and she undertakes a dangerous and frightening journey to America alone to commit suicide like a good Pakistani wife. Again, Jasmine is running away from what she does not want to be and is oblivious to the future. She is already dead to herself, and she only wants to do her duty. But why is she doing this thing thousands of miles away in a foreign country? What is really driving her to go to America? After finally arriving on the shores of Florida, she is unsure where to go next. The captain of the boat she arrived on can see she is vulnerable and lost and takes advantage of this. Jasmine allows herself to he taken in by this man, even though she does not trust him. He takes her to his motel room in a deserted area, and of course tells Jasmine that she must submit to him if she wants to survive. Suddenly, Jasmine’s rage and frustration she carries from her husband’s death is again transformed into something else. When the man opens her suitcase and “defiles” her husband’s suit, and makes her tell him what she plans and then laughs at her for it, something snaps in Jasmine. She turns all her fury on this man and becomes the avenging goddess Kali, mouth full of blood and soul full of murder. She slashes the man’s throat and then stabs him repeatedly until he is dead. For her, the man has become the surrogate for the man who murdered her husband back in Pakistan. She knew the police would not make the man who murdered her husband pay, and she also knew the police in American would not make this man pay either. Someone had to pay. Once more, Jasmine knew what she did not want to be…but had no idea what she did want to be. As she leaves the motel after cleaning up the mess and burning her suitcase, she is running away from what she has done as well as leaving behind the person who did it. She walks down the road alone and has no idea where she will go. Again, the future is obscure. She is only sure of what she does not want to be.

When I arrived back in California at the age of 26 with three children, I had no idea really what I was going to do with my life. I knew I didn’t want to be a widow. But I didn’t know who I wanted to be. It has been a long journey since then and I have had to decide again and again where I want to go with my life and who I want to be. That first time I ran was not the last time. I have run away again since then. Maybe I will run again in the future. I hope not. But like Jasmine, I know what I don’t want to become. Hopefully that will be enough to steer me toward who I do want to be when I grow up.