Running Towards A Future

                  Are you going towards a future, or running from the past?

People are always running from something. Old relationships, old jobs, past tragedies, past mistakes and misfortunes... Whether it is good or bad, everyone has a past and they are running away from it. The better question is, do they have a plan, or are they just running blindly from the past? Are they running towards a future, or are they just running?

In the book Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee, the protagonist Jasmine is always running from something. A question constantly brought up is if she is just running from an old identity or running towards newness. When she gets to her destination, she always acquires a new nickname which is usually given to her by someone else. She adopts these names as her own, and even somewhat changes her personality to fit the name. She grows into each name, but whether it is really her or just an act is up for debate. It holds true for all of her names, however, that she is running away from something, but most of the time she is also running towards something, and not just running blindly.

Jasmine is born as Jyoti, which is Hindu for light. I think this name fits her well, as she is seemingly a typical Indian girl. Her first name change comes about when she marries her first husband, Prakash, and he gives her the name Jasmine. While she "running from", or leaving behind her old life, her family and her poor past, she is running towards something good. She is running towards love, and a new life with the man she loves. When he dies in an explosion she decides to go to America as she had planned to do with her husband. Although she is then running away from her sad past and the death of her husband, she still has a plan. She plans to fulfill what she feels is her life’s mission and burn her husband’s suit and end her life under the palm trees at a university in Florida where her husband had planned on studying. For a brief while she is called Kali in the novel, who is the Hindu goddess associated with death and destruction. When she adopted this name she definitely had a plan. She went through with killing a man named Half-Face after he had raped her and she never looked back. After that she is cared for by a woman named Lillian Gordon who then puts her on a bus up to New York. Here she is running towards Masterji and the life that he can help give her, and when she leaves Masterji’s and eventually becomes Jase she still has a plan to capture what it is to become a true American. Even when she leaves Iowa, heads out to California and becomes Jase again, she is running towards a life with Taylor and Duff, and also Du who had moved to California.

There is one point in her life, however, that I think she is clearly running blindly from her past without running towards anything. It is when she runs from New York to Iowa. She had a great life in New York. She was in love with Taylor. He had fallen in love with her. She had a job, she had a child to look after, extra money to spend... she had everything that she wanted. Then she saw Sukhwinder, the man who had killed her husband, in the park. She fell apart. She ran to Iowa to get away from him. She didn’t know a soul in Iowa. All she knew about Iowa was that Iowa was where Duff, Taylor’s child, the child she looked after in New York, had been born, and that was where Taylor and his ex-wife had adopted her from. Duff was a miracle, and Iowa was where miracles happened. That was her sole basis for going to Iowa. She never would have gone if she hadn’t seen Sukhwinder. But she saw him, and he scared her so badly that she ran blindly for her life.

People can have many different names in a lifetime. They assume different identities and change their names because they are running from their past. Yet some are running towards plans and ideas and a new life, and others are just running blindly for their life. While Jasmine was always running, most of the time she was running towards a future. All the while she was just trying to become an American: always running towards a dream.