Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  Once home, Jinnah showed the same firmness in dealing with his own parents, insisting that Emi Bai not cover her face as was the custom when she came in the presence of her father-in-law. ‘Mohammed Ali had his own views on such matters. His wife was like a daughter of his parents, a full member of the family, and it was unnecessary to cover one’s face, just because one’s great-grandmother had been doing it.’ Once again, Jinnahbhai followed his son’s lead and agreed that Emi Bai discard ‘the age-old custom, which had been running in the family for generations’.

  Was it this ease with which he was able to impose his will on his family even as a boy of fifteen that gave him his extraordinary self-confidence? Certainly, it was the most remarkable quality about him even before he reached England. The combination of his youthful appearance and ‘the self-confidence of a person much beyond his years’ was striking enough to impress at least one stranger on the ship to England. The unnamed Englishman, on his way home from India for his annual holiday, ‘took to him like his own son’. His fellow voyager took it upon himself to coach the young Jinnah on the life ahead of him in England. ‘Everyday he would spend much of his time talking to my brother, giving him such information about London as he thought might be useful to him,’ writes Fatima, and ‘before disembarking at Marseilles, gave my brother his London address and asked him to see him occasionally. During the next four years, whenever this Englishman came back to his native land from India, he would call my brother to his house and ask him to have a meal with his family.’ At least one piece of advice his shipmate gave him, Jinnah was never to forget. Congratulating Jinnah on not losing his wallet in Port Said to the pickpockets who operated there, the Englishman made a remark that must have reminded Jinnah strongly of his own father: ‘That’s it, my boy. It is best to be very careful with everything in life.’

  It was advice he was to put to use almost the moment he disembarked in Southampton. He needed a hotel room for the night before catching the train to London the next morning, and asked the cab driver to recommend a suitable place—inexpensive but comfortable. It was not in his nature to betray the nervousness he felt, but when he walked up to the reception desk of the hotel, demanding a modest room, he must have looked awkward enough for the receptionist to ask: ‘Young man, will you be able to afford the charges?’ But even at sixteen and just off the boat, Jinnah refused to be intimidated by the hotel staff’s manner. ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ he replied firmly. ‘But I hope they will be reasonable.’ All the fear and loneliness he had to deal with on his first night in England, he kept hidden until he was safely locked within his hotel room. Almost half a century later, when he was able to tell the story, it was with his usual dry humour, taking great care to strip his narration of all the emotions he must have undergone, and it was one of the few funny stories he ever told of himself, although he did pass it off as happening to somebody else: ‘He was out late and when he returned and slipped into bed and felt the warm (hot water) bottle near his feet, he thought it was an animal and threw it out. As he peered at it in the dark, he could see water oozing out of it, which he was quite convinced, was blood. “I have killed it,”’ he screamed, but there was no one to hear him.

  It could not have been easy—so far from home, reaching London alone in the depths of winter and discovering that the only two persons his father had asked him to get in touch with were out of town. But it had ever been a point of honour with Jinnah, even at that youthful age, not to show any outward sign of distress. Besides, there were things that had to be done—find a hotel room for himself and report at the office of Grahams Shipping and Trading Company the next morning, where he was given a small table and chair and asked to join the other office hands. He trudged daily through the damp, chilly London streets to his office, struggling with the cold strangeness of it all. By the time he got through the first few months, the silent stoicism he began to cultivate was on its way to becoming a lifelong habit. And except perhaps for his lasting horror of the London fog, which always reminded him of what he had undergone in those first few months, he was able to shrug off the pain and any trauma he might have felt, as if it were no more than the homesickness of the average boarding school boy. And when, over half a century later, a biographer wrote to ask him if he’d been happy in those early years as a student in Britain, Jinnah was able to condense the whole awful experience in one brisk, no-nonsense sentence which he dictated to his secretary: ‘During [the] first few months he found (a) strange country and surroundings, not knowing a soul, and [the] fogs and winter of London upset him a great deal, but he soon settled down and was quite happy.’

  It was not really so far from the truth. Jinnah certainly appears to have had an easier time adjusting to the new world than his Indian counterparts, perhaps because he refused to give in to the usual insecurities that made Indian students so miserable when they first set foot in England. He was certainly better prepared for his new life than most of them. His father, for all his parsimony, had deposited sufficient funds in the London office of Grahams Trading Company to ensure that his son could live in modest comfort for at least two years, which Jinnah then prudently managed to stretch to last for an additional year. More than providing him the money, Jinnahbhai equipped his son for this life with his rigorous training in living as frugally as possible, keeping account of every penny he spent. The habit of saving was so strongly ingrained in Jinnah that he had even saved enough money out of his travelling expenses to take care of his initial expenses in London until the first transfer of cash came through. He decided to walk the long distance to work in order to save on cab fare, and searched for paying guest accommodation as soon as he could, because living in a hotel room seemed like an unnecessary expense. His other expenses were minimal: even if his pride had allowed him to go in at once for a sartorial makeover as the other Gujarati young man, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had done when he came to study in London a few years earlier, Jinnah was probably not in as urgent need of it as Gandhi. In fact, despite the myth of him sailing for England in a ‘funny long yellow coat’, his mentor in Karachi, Leigh Croft, was too much of a dandy—‘with a freshly picked carnation in his buttonhole each morning’, as Bolitho put it—to send Jinnah away ill-dressed for the occasion.

  Nor was Jinnah the type of young man who yearned to impress English girls with his smartness. In fact, it was his stubborn refusal to impress them that was probably the secret of his charm, using the cold hauteur that he could turn on and off at will to squash all unwanted attention from girls. His landlady’s daughter, an attractive girl his own age, was particularly persistent, pursuing him at parties she organized in the house, with games that required kissing as a penalty. After standing out of these kissing games for as long as he could, Jinnah was caught unawares under a sprig of mistletoe at a Christmas party, embraced against his will and asked for a kiss. Fed up of trying to keep her at a respectful distance, Jinnah gave her the cold snub that was to become his most effective weapon in later years: ‘I reprimanded her and said that this was not done nor was it permissible in our society,’ he recounted many years later to Fatima. And although he was rarely discourteous to women, he refused to feel any remorse: ‘I am glad I behaved that way with her,’ he said. ‘For, after that day I was saved the daily embarrassment of her coquettishness.’

  Once he settled down, he found that there was little about his new life that he wanted to change. He began to even like it, as he confessed later to Fatima. Far from missing the spicy food that his mother cooked—Gondal, his parents’ native state in Gujarat, was famous for its chillies—Jinnah took at once to the bland English food, counting roast beef and fruit tart as the best things about his student days in London. Even the bitter cold of London he began to regard as yet another challenge, forcing himself to take cold baths; sometimes he would fill the tub overnight, just for the pleasure of breaking its frozen surface the next morning, and jump into the icy water. There were other habits of the indulged son that he was glad to drop. As a boy
in Karachi, for instance, he was accustomed to throwing his things about the room, knowing that everything would be neatly arranged for him by the time he returned home in the evening. Now with no one to tidy up after him, Jinnah learnt to be orderly, putting things back neatly in their place for the first time in his life.

  Even the solitude that he had found unbearably oppressive in the early days, he now began to savour. He found a freedom in it that he had not experienced before. And knowing ‘not a soul in London except for some employees at Grahams’ proved to be a blessing, forcing him to turn to newspapers for consolation. He soon adopted ‘the typically English habit of carefully reading his morning paper as he awoke and to complete reading it before finishing his breakfast’. It was through the newspapers that he discovered a stimulating new world of politics. It was the era of the Liberals in English politics and to make it even more exciting, an Indian was contesting for Parliament for the first time. He may not have reached London in time to take part in Dadabhai Naoroji’s election campaign as Fatima claimed in her biography, but his later biographers agree that Jinnah was likely to have participated in the public meeting to celebrate Naoroji’s victory in London, in which ‘fully two thousands of friends and admirers of India’s own number were present’. The public meeting was instrumental in generating Jinnah’s first lively interest in the question of freedom for his country: ‘Jubilation among Indian students in London was tremendous,’ as Jinnah later told his sister. ‘As I sat in the galleries, listening to the maiden speech of the Old Man in the Commons, I felt a new thrill within me.’

  The public meeting was instrumental in another way: it put Jinnah in touch with the Indian students of law in London who attended the meeting in large numbers. It was after this meeting that Jinnah began to rethink his career prospects: ‘Wherever he went, he heard conversation revolve round the utterances of these political leaders, whom the people looked upon as men of destiny . . . And here he was buried under the drudgery of office routine at Grahams from morning to evening, and the only prize that might in the end crown his patience, industriousness and devotion would be to join his father’s business and make it more prosperous and flourishing than when he took over. This appeared to him to be such a sordid and narrow prospect.’ And ‘as he began to waver between two alternatives—to continue to work as an apprentice with Grahams, or to qualify himself for the entrance examination in order to obtain admission to one of the Inns in London and become a barrister’, he learnt that this would be the last year when he could get admission without being a matriculate, by passing an entrance examination called the ‘Little Go’. The rules were going to change the following year, Jinnah told Fatima, ‘and it would take me two additional years to be called to the Bar’. Away from the weight of his parents’ expectations, the choice was not hard to make. Jinnah decided to give up his apprenticeship and to devote himself to getting through the ‘Little Go’ exam, taking care to inform his father only after he had quit Grahams and joined Lincoln’s Inn as a student of law.

  Was it his fear of parental pressure or of failing the entrance exam that made Jinnah keep his plans a secret from the father he had once adored? Neither fear was unfounded. Passing the ‘Little Go’ exam was by no means an easy task—the written exam alone consisted of three papers: English language, English history and Latin, after which he would be subjected to a thorough grilling by a board of Masters of the Inn. For someone who was a dropout from a high school in Karachi, never particularly bright academically or very fond of reading, and never having passed a public examination in his life before, Jinnah’s confidence seemed foolhardy. Yet, with less than three months to prepare for the exam, Jinnah had no doubts about giving up his apprenticeship. In fact, he was so sure that he could clear the exam by sheer hard work that he even began making advance inquiries on which of the four Inns of London he should join once he passed the ‘Little Go’. Even the fact that one of the three papers that he had to pass was Latin, a language he had never studied before and which would take at least two years of intensive study to familiarize himself with, did not daunt him. He managed to plough through half his Latin textbook, making meticulous notes and writing down the meaning of words—and fastidiously correcting one or two typos in the text—before someone told him that he could seek an exemption from Latin on the grounds that, as a native of India, he had never studied the subject before. He was granted the exemption, but there were whole passages of the English translation of the Latin text which evidently etched itself on his mind—passages like ‘It is fitting that all men who are eager to excel [over] the rest of living creatures should strive with the utmost energy not to pass through life in obscurity, like cattle, whom nature has made stooping and slaves to the belly.’ The words, so laboriously culled from a foreign tongue, appear to have fired Jinnah up like nothing else in his life before. ‘A complete transformation seems to have come over him, and he sat glued to his books,’ writes Fatima.

  The unswerving faith he had in himself—a trait that his peers and colleagues found either the most endearing or exasperating aspect of him—apparently paid off. The selection committee at Lincoln’s Inn was certainly favourably impressed by this earnest young man’s unusual self-confidence when he appeared before them after clearing the written examination. But beyond his deep conviction that he could not ever fail at anything so long as he worked hard enough, there was a deeper faith that he had inherited from his mother and could not quite shake off, no matter how often or loudly he declared himself to be a rational, modern man with no belief in superstitions. It was a part of him he kept well hidden, admitting it only years later to Fatima. Jinnah confessed to his sister that before clearing the ‘Little Go’ examination, he visited the various Inns in London and met students studying there in order to make up his mind which Inn he would join when he passed the exam. ‘My inquiries and discussions made me decide for another Inn than Lincoln’s,’ Jinnah told Fatima. ‘But then I saw the name of our great Prophet engraved on the main entrance of Lincoln’s Inn among the greatest law-givers of the world.’ So he did something that his mother would have done—and did, in fact, when he was an infant. He took a mannat, or a silent vow, to join Lincoln’s Inn if he passed the ‘Little Go’ exam. And when he did clear the written papers, he took it as a sign that he must join Lincoln’s Inn, even though it had not been his first choice of the four Inns of London where students were admitted to prepare for their Bar examination.

  It was only after joining Lincoln’s Inn, paying a princely sum of 138 pounds and 14 shillings for his admission, that Jinnah informed his father of his decision. There was not much Jinnahbhai could do now to stop him—Jinnah had already withdrawn the 200 pounds that his father had sent through Grahams for his expenses and deposited it in a newly opened savings account in his own name—but he was frantic enough to send his son a ‘strongly worded’ letter, ordering him to stop wasting his money and time in ‘this unprofitable pursuit’ and to return home immediately. Unwilling perhaps to offend his father by openly disobeying him, Jinnah tactfully resorted to pleading, using the one argument he knew would work with his father: he would not ask his father to send any more money for him and would somehow manage to stretch his two years’ allowance to last for four years. Having watched his son do flip-flops throughout his academic career, Jinnahbhai had no reason to feel reassured, but he knew his son too well to force a confrontation of wills. ‘He reconciled himself to the situation and hoped and prayed for the best,’ according to Fatima.

  As it turned out, Jinnahbhai would have been better off worrying about the state of his own finances instead of his son’s. Within a year of his son’s departure, Jinnahbhai Poonja’s trading company went bankrupt, taking down along with it all his other business ventures. Clearly, he was in no position to bankroll his son’s legal studies even if he had wanted to. But the training he had provided his son in living as frugally as possible now came in most handy. So thoroughly had he indoctrinated his son in his measures of econ
omy that Jinnah not only effortlessly stretched his modest funds to last double the number of years, but even managed to return home four years later with savings of 70 pounds. And this, after paying for his passage to India—around 40 pounds, inclusive of meals. This miracle—certainly a record of sorts—he seems to have accomplished partly by earning some money from odd jobs, but mostly by a careful management of his budget. Thus, with one exception when he drew out an extra 5 pounds from his bank account soon after appearing for his ‘Little Go’, Jinnah stuck firmly to living within the tight budget of 11 pounds a month he imposed on himself—6 pounds of which he paid for his board and lodging, leaving him 5 pounds for his other expenses. But despite the surface resemblance, Jinnah had little in common with his father when it came to their attitude towards money. For Jinnahbhai, money was everything—or very nearly so; he became a broken man the day he stopped making it. But his son, for all the penny-pinching ways he seemed to have inherited from his father, had no miser’s obsession with accumulating money for its own sake. He liked to consider himself above it, and sometimes demonstrated his apparent indifference by throwing away quantities of it without batting an eyelid. The aim evidently was to ‘make his packet’, but only as a means to meet his ends.