Before long, we gather that the police have evidence of her involvement in gory Maoist killings
Shashi Warrier’s latest novel, My Name is Jasmine, begins on an intriguing note. We encounter a woman who wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who she is or where she is from. She is terrified by her absence of identity and personhood, and perhaps equally by the fact that the police seem to know more about her history than she does.
Before long, we gather that the police have evidence of her involvement in gory Maoist killings. They interrogate her, hoping that she will reveal valuable information about the activities of her extremist group. But the woman remembers nothing — not her name, not her past, nor how she got her head injury which knocked her out and erased her memories.
One man becomes unusually interested in her case. Psychiatrist Ashok Patnaik, who is tasked with examining her, realises that she has a strong moral compass, which, he feels, runs counter to the allegations against her. He decides to help her and requests his uncle Govind Patnaik, a successful advocate who has recently retired, to represent her when her case comes to trial.
The most rewarding part of the book is the way Jasmine’s memories (she remembers her name at one point) unfurl bit by bit in her mind. A fragment here, a scrap of conversation there — slowly, agonisingly, the pieces of the puzzle that is her dark past fall in place. For Jasmine, remembrance is at once a relief and a terrible trauma since she must now acknowledge her violent former life.
The story is told chiefly through the alternating first-person narratives of Jasmine and the elderly lawyer Govind Patnaik. And it is here that the author falters. Patnaik’s ruminations and conversations become a vehicle for airing his newfound disillusionment with the Indian state’s legal and executive apparatus, both of which seem designed to hinder rather than help the common people. He expresses his thoughts on law, justice, society, free speech, the scriptures, and so on, but his commentary is neither exceptional nor particularly illuminating.
Clearly, Warrier wants to use Patnaik’s narrative to point to the imperfections in the “system" and juxtapose it with the story of an outlaw who began her life as a victim of state apathy. But he makes Patnaik’s first-person account so didactic in its theorising and philosophising that it simply does not work. Littered with such apparently meaningful phrases as “The purpose of the system is more important than the system”, it drags the entire novel down. The many editing errors do not help, and nor does the frequent repetition of the question “What do you mean?” to Patnaik.
The reader is tempted to ask the same question.
Shuma Raha is a journalist and author
My Name Is Jasmine
By Shashi Warrier
Simon & Schuster
pp. 320; Rs 499
