Hindi-speaking Italian

His name is Frank.  And everyone knows him.  They don’t know his last name, where he’s from or his culture.  He’s just Frank; a long time bartender and sole employee at a local bar.  He doesn’t talk about it much but I do know he is not Italian.  He says he is, so as not to go into any long detailed story of Pakistan.  He throws out disclaimers of admiration of Sinatra and Martin and sings along with Cash from the jukebox.  He says it’s just easier.  Non-understanding, simple people tend to accept him more when he’s Italian not Pakistani.  I understand he has a business to attend to but why not educate the simple minded?  He confided that not only is he not willing to possible jeopardize his financial stability of the bar but in all reality it doesn’t bother him one bit and could care less if people think he’s Italian, Pakistani, French or whatever, he’s just Frank.    

Frank would probably relate to the narrator, in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, Jasmine.  The narrator, Jasmine, a.k.a. Jyoti, a.k.a. Jane, is consistently redefining herself and changes her name throughout her metamorphosis.  She has traveled from her homeland, Hasnapur, Jullundhar District, Punjab, India, to New York then to Baden, Elsa County, Iowa where she now calls home.  Although she is constantly referred to as someone who is Asian and is “from a generic place, “over there,” which might be Ireland, France, or Italy (p. 33)” she doesn’t seem to mind as much nor does she ever make a fuss to correct anyone.  Even her boyfriend, Bud doesn’t make any attempt to get to know Jane.  She feels he never asks her about India because it scares him. “My genuine foreignness frightens him.  I don’t hold that against him.  It frightens me, too (p. 26).”  He calls her nick-names Calamity Jane, and “Me Bud, you Jane” but never calls her Plain Jane.  But she doesn’t mind ‘Plain Jane,’ because that’s all she wants to be. “Plain Jane is a role, like any other (p. 26).” 

Jane is comforted by simplicity and creating her own path; not conforming to the patriarchal society that she was raised in.  When leaving New York, the man she was with, Taylor asked, why would she want to move from New York, because she deserves much better than dull Iowa?  “Taylor thought dull was the absence of action, but dull is its own kind of action.  Dullness is a kind of luxury (p. 6).”  She is now 24, pregnant through insemination by Dong-jin, “Dick,” Kwang.  She has been dating and living with a man twice her age, for the past three years, Bud Ripplemeyer; a divorced, father of two boys, 53 year old banker, who is confined to a wheelchair because of a gunshot and their adopted seventeen-year-old son Du Thien from Hong Kong.  This is definitely not the normal life of woman in patriarchal India.  She is not married to Bud but enjoys being known as his wife and as a Ripplemeyer.  When describing their house, a ‘hired mans house’, which has several additions, she states, “the add-ons cozy me into thinking that all of us Ripplemeyers, even us new ones, belong (p. 13)” 

Is that the American dream; a sense of being a part of something, belonging, even if you’re an ‘add-on?’  Or is that the dream of everyone, regardless of agency, race, ethnicity or gender?  I believe that Jane does hold on to her culture, although she doesn’t force it down people’s throats, she still remembers where she came from.  She brought a traditional Indian cuisine to a craft fair, and stated she was “subverting the taste buds of Elsa County (p. 19).”  Although she is conforming to what she believes to be American she will never be able to loose her identity.  In actuality, her past identity forms who she dreams of being based upon who she has been.   She states, “There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself.  We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams (p. 29).”  Cultural traditions, rituals or habits are innate.  Although people associate certain attire, religions or cuisine with culture you cannot shed or discontinue ethnicity.  Skin color, facial features and mannerisms all play a collective role in which we are regardless of a name change. 

Jane has changed her name three times so far, up to chapter nine, and is still morphing.  It is not known if she is positively moving forward or transgressing by running away.  “I had a past that I was still fleeing.  Perhaps still am (p. 34).”  When one talks about moving in a positive direction, ‘fleeing’ is not a word associated in a positive recourse of action.  When she was talking about Taylor’s friends in New York, she makes a strong and poignant decisive distinction between ‘them’ and ‘me’.  “For them, experience leads to knowledge, or else it is wasted.  For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill (p. 33).”  A brighter tomorrow, hope or the dream is all Jane is wants.  She comes from a place where, “village girls are like cattle; whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go (p. 46).”  She was very well educated and new that in order to live the life she wanted she would have to leave India.

But by leaving somewhere doesn’t mean that you change who you are, it means you develop and grow into the person you are to become.  She knows she doesn’t want to live a wasted life, she knows she doesn’t want to be an empty shell or ‘pitcher’.  She believes that her father, Pitaji and Mother Ripplemeyer, both are very foolish to let certain uncontrollable subtleties rule their lives.  “The sad story would be a woman Mother Ripplemeyer’s age still working on her shell, bothering to get her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s (p. 15).”  I don’t know what is better, a person who dwells on their issues or a person who never faces them. 

I believe Jane to be a person who will eventually face them.  She was named Jyoti by her grandmother, which means Light.  But looking back on her life, she believes she was already Jane, which means a fighter and adapter.  She is a free spirit trying to find a place in her world.  While living in Iowa, she gets urges to continue her journey and move again, heading west.  “Every night the frontier creeps a little closer (p. 20).”  She is positively redefining herself through adapting cultures not by abandoning them entirely.  Frank has done the exact same thing.  He has positively redefined himself, through adapting current, past and present experiences and cultures that create who he is today; an Italian who speaks Hindi.