Even so, from being a fragrant flower that had blossomed in a quiet village, she turns into a tornado destroying much in her path. The reader is left sitting with Jasmine in a world of arrivals and departures. As the heroine observes, In America, nothing lasts. I can say that now and it doesnt shock me, but I think it was the hardest lesson of all to learn. We arrive so eager to learn, to adjust, to participate, only to find the monuments are plastic, agreements are annulled.
Nothing is forever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it wont disintegrate.
She looked happy, sounded happy, acted happy. Mukherjee's narrative wanders between worlds bridging time, containing time past in time present, visualizing time future. The experience of reading the novel is that of holding connected and contradictory layers of consciousness simultaneously. On Jasmines life as a child sitting under a banyan tree listening to an astrologer predict her future, Mukherjee constructs the glitter of Karen Ripplemeyers two-storeyed mansion in Iowa in which she takes calls on her Suicide Hotline. Life and death in different worlds are inextricably entwined.