Dead Space

            Often is that case that people live their lives by not really living.  This concept is the same as the saying in sports when athletes are not trying their best.  They are simply “going through the motions.”  One has to try their best to be successful.  This applies to life as well as one can simply drift through life and not accomplish anything or get caught between two identities.  This is the case in Bharati Mukherjee’s book, Jasmine.  Jasmine moves in with Professorji and his family in New York.  The family is simply wandering through life and is caught between the worlds of India and America.  Jasmine lives with them for five months before she becomes severely depressed and realizes she can’t live this way and decides to leave.

            The family consisted of Professorji, his parents, and his wife Nirmala.  Jasmine finds out America is not exactly how Professorji described it to Prakash in convincing him to come to America.  Five days a week, from seven to six Professorji was at work.  Nirmala had the same schedule working at a store selling upscale fabrics.  At the end of the day, they both came home “harassed and foul-tempered” (144).  On Sundays, when Professorji got drunk, “he complained that America was killing him” (147).  Both Nirmala and he were working long days to barely get by as they lived in a very tiny apartment. 

            The family is struggling to maintain their heritage while at the same time integrating into America.  However, on al accounts, the family is an unhappy one and struggling with the day to day aspects of life.  The lifestyle takes its toll on Jasmine and she finds herself, “spiraling into depression” (148).  On many occasions, Jasmine would be, “in the bathroom with the light off, head down on the cold, cracked rim of the sink, sobbing from unnamed, unfulfilled wants” (148).  Eventually, this gets the best of her and she decides to move on.

            This scene of five months is very important in the novel.  It reaches back to the first chapter where Jasmine says she knows what she doesn’t want to become.  She sees the unhappiness in the family and knows if she stays with them that will be her fate in life as well.  She decides to move on in an attempt to integrate into America and try to actually live her life instead of floating through every day and essentially being “dead space” like Professorji and his family.