He insists that she call him by his name, as opposed to by the formal pronouns with which women in Hasnapur usually refer to their husbands. Prakash is relatively progressive compared to what Jyoti grew up around.
Not long after she moves away from home, her teacher Masterji is murdered by a gang of militant Sikhs in front of his class.Īt fourteen, Jasmine marries a friend of her brother's named Prakash. Shortly after her father makes the concession about her schooling, he is gored by a loose bull in the countryside and dies. He advocates for her with her family and eventually convinces her father (much to the chagrin of her grandmother, Dida) to allow her to stay in school longer than any of her sisters. Masterji believes that Jasmine has the capacity to overcome the traditional, conservative, feudal ways of Hasnapur and that, if she desires, she can amount to more than a man's obedient wife.
He begins instructing her in English language and literature. Jyoti excels in school and is recognized by her teacher, Masterji, as leagues above her classmates. Despite her sisters' horror that the scar would prevent her from finding a suitable groom, Jyoti is convinced that it is her "third eye," and that with it, she will gain sage-like knowledge about the workings of the universe. When she falls, she hits her head on a bundle of sticks which punch a bleeding wound into her forehead in the shape of a star.
She resists the fakir's prophecy and he strikes her down, returning to his trance. The overarching chronology of the novel begins when Jasmine (then Jyoti) is seven years old and receives an ominous prophecy from a fakir that she will be widowed and live in exile. The narrative of Jasmine shuttles between then-present-day Iowa and the chronology of its eponymous protagonist's odyssey from Hasnapur, India to New York City and eventually to Baden, Iowa.
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