Out to Lunch with Reincarnation

When I was back in elementary school I was taught about reincarnation. The idea around being reborn and living another life, maybe an animal or another human begin, was so awesome to an innocent, 10 year old! I wanted to be a bird, horse, mermaid. The thought that if one mistake was made and your life was taken away, being able to live again, was very comforting. Some people don’t think they live on in heaven after they die, so with this belief in reincarnation, the thought of death might not be as scary. Mistakes can be made, new identities can be created and your soul lives on and on, maybe forever. Who wouldn’t want this to happen?

In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, Jasmine, the character, Jasmine, is a young Hindu woman. Her culture believes in reincarnation; they believe their spirit keeps revisiting the world. At one point in the novel, Jasmine in asked out to lunch by a woman, Dr. Mary Webb, that works at the University Club. How the two actually know each other seems slightly fuzzy, but it seems as if Jasmine helped her out with bank related duties in the past. When they get to lunch, Dr. Webb quickly gets to her point and speaks to Jasmine about her recollections of out of body experiences. Webb tells Jasmine as much as she can remember and notes that these recollections happen quite often. Jasmine believes that this is not just one of her past lives, but a mix up of all of her past lives.

 Dr. Mary Webb also tells Jasmine about her guru, who claims she has taken over another body so that she can be back on Earth. The guru, Ma Leela says that there is a data bank of bodyflow where she comes from and when she found out about a woman who planned on committing suicide, Ma Leela made a contact with her to take over her body. After the doctors revived the body, it was Ma Leela who came back.

After taken all this in, Jasmine begins to examine her life. After being renamed twice, she sees these times in her life almost like reincarnations. Even though she stayed the same person, she notices how different her life became after each time her name was changed. She begins to say “I do believe that extraordinary events can jar the needle arm, jump tracks, rip across incarnations and deposit a life into a groove that was not prepared to receive it.” Jasmine does not think she should have gone to the United States. After her husband died, she thinks that her life should have been taken as well by Lord Yama. She does not want to be living her life. She does not want to be a murderer and she does not want to be a victim of rape.

I think there is more to this scene and later on in the novel smaller parts will connect to and uncover the significance of the reincarnation talk over lunch with Dr. Mary Webb. From the beginning of the novel, when she had the run in with the astrologer when he told her that fate is fate and what happens is meant to happen, she knew what she didn’t want to be. Now, she has become something she doesn’t want to be and she wished she died back in her feudal village.