Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 13

  But although she had turned eighteen only two months before her marriage, Ruttie was not the child that Sarojini imagined her to be. Loving Jinnah with all the passion of her romantic soul did not blind her to the fact that he had grown even more remote in the last eleven months. At the height of their courtship, she had found him elusive, with his unsentimental and silent ways, leaving her with a deep yearning, ‘this medley of wild excitement and cold depression’, as she described it. And the court injunction had not only ended their casual meetings in clubs or at the races, when they could exchange a few words, even if it was under the public gaze, but he insisted on sticking strictly to the letter of the law, refusing to write to her. He loathed writing letters anyway, keeping them brisk and practical, filling them with bare and unvarnished facts, in answer to her own letters of ardent longing, running into several pages. He was not demonstrative but his heart was, of course, hers. But she could see, not as clearly perhaps as Sarojini that it would not always be easy. She had her moments of self-doubt although she was too deeply in love to want to look deeper: either into that feeling of ‘emptiness’ and ‘hollowness’ that he was already evoking, or that ‘longing’ and ‘dread’ that she could not rid herself of, despite her trust and her devotion to him.

  There were others no doubt, sensible friends and relatives, to advise her to forget a man who was not just unsuitable because of his age and religion, but also because of the mismatched temperaments: he, universally admired but liked by very few; politics his only and ruling passion; and she, with her spirit of freedom and passion, yearning for she knew not what. But she would not hear a word against him. ‘When you are given a flower,’ as she rather sternly advised Leilamani the previous year, ‘you do not think of the thorn. You revel in its beauty and feast on its fragrance.’ It was in her temperament to love. And with the English Romantic poets and novelists having formed her only reading from before the age of ten, she exulted in her feelings, as if nothing else mattered: ‘I revel in the storming passions which burn and tear the fibres of my being till my very spirit writhes in an agony of excitement,’ she proudly confessed to Padmaja when she was still sixteen. And in another letter: ‘. . . it is a melancholy in which I rejoice for I feel that it always leads me towards greater perfection and finer sympathy’. She was learning, even then, at the height of their courtship, to look inwards at her own passion rather than towards the man she had chosen, at such cost to herself. ‘Who shall satisfy your quenchless thirst but yourself?’ as she wrote to Leilamani the same week. ‘If ever you desire to realize an ideal, it must be within yourself and then you attain what is known as self-realisation.’

  And who was there to pour her intense, troubled feelings out to, even if she were able to express this inchoate longing for a man she had really glimpsed just once, that summer when they fell in love, when he let down his guard long enough in the holiday spirit, ‘told her the secret of his colours and faded’, as her poem said, leaving her chasing ever since for that elusive man behind this distant other, almost a stranger? There was only one thing to do: she hid behind her vivacity, with her wit and jokes and smart clothes and daring make-up, hardly daring to examine her mix of emotions, let alone confessing them to anyone. Jinnah, of course, had no suspicion of the state of his beloved’s heart. He too was in love for the first time in his life, and almost despite himself. But he had no time for sentiment, and even less patience with anything he considered woolly-headed. With him, one had to be always brief and clear. Perhaps he too didn’t want to look too deep, and once he was assured of her adoration, and more importantly, her loyalty, he threw himself into his political activity with more energy and passion than ever. It was his tribute to their love, as was his resolve to marry her, despite all the fuss and trouble it entailed.

  But girls her own age, wary of her surface sophistication and brittle vivacity, could make little of the strange passion of this mismatched pair. That a vivacious, witty, sophisticated girl like Ruttie, an icon already for her generation of young women, should choose to fall in love with a Muslim came as no shock to her friends; no English-educated person would ever admit to labelling their friends as Hindu or Muslim or Parsi, that was left to the lower classes. In fact, it was not uncommon for very anglicized girls, including Motilal Nehru’s daughter, ‘Nan’ or Sarup, to regard it as ‘perfectly natural to marry outside my religion’. But Jinnah, despite his youthful good looks and perfect manners, was, after all, twenty-four years older and it was that which Ruttie’s friends found unpardonable. For them, it was almost as if by choosing to marry a man more than double her age, she was ruining the image of educated Indians in the eyes of the British. There was enough contempt from them already about the shameful disparity of age between a traditional Indian bride and her bridegroom without her adding to that stereotype. There was, too, her sense of entitlement, her casual assumption that she could do what she pleased with her own life—that shocked even the girls educated in the most anglicized of Indian homes.

  It was inconceivable, for instance, for Nan, who too had been in love with a Muslim, not to back down when her parents demanded it of her. And although the same age and from the same affluent background as Ruttie, she was convinced that Ruttie could not have ever really been in love with Jinnah and there was some other, hidden motive for her wanting to marry a man so much older than her. As she writes in her memoir, The Scope of Happiness, under her married name, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit: ‘Ruttie was a friend of mine. We were the same age but brought up very differently. She was spoiled, very beautiful and used to having her own way. She was much younger than Jinnah and it was certainly not a “love match.” But Jinnah was a Muslim, and the Parsis were, in those days, a very conservative group. This in itself seemed reason enough to Ruttie to shock the community—“wake it up”, as she was fond of saying. Besides, he had made a name for himself at the Bar, was very much in the news, and a coming political leader. All these things appealed to her. In spite of the opposition of her parents and the Parsi community, she married him.’

  Certainly, even for someone with Ruttie’s singular lack of personal conceit, to have made a conquest of someone who was not just ‘a coming political leader’, as her so-called friend rather grudgingly put it, but increasingly regarded by the British and both Hindu and Muslim nationalists as the rising political star, was profoundly flattering. It would have justifiably turned any woman’s head, no matter what her age—a man of his charm, powerful, handsome, elegant, with his dry humour and affability; mesmerizing to both men and women; a man who had disdained the attention of every woman who had so far thrown herself at him, to be now so clearly besotted with her. Anyone could see the power she held over him; he made no attempt to conceal it from anyone, not just her. He even changed his face to please her, shaving off his thick walrus moustache and wearing his hair longer, brushed sleekly backwards in the style favoured by the more fashionable young Parsis. She had demanded it playfully as the price of accepting his proposal. It meant giving up the last trace of his Muslim identity—there had always been a sort of visual grading of Muslim-ness by which people placed you: moustache, beard, turban, cap, sherwani. But he complied readily, shaving it off without a second thought, as if her answer depended on it.

  But, of course, she would have married him, with or without his moustache. Whatever misgivings she might have had were less to do with his vestigial Muslim-ness but with marriage itself. And how could she not have any doubts, growing up during the War, exposed fully to the new ideas, especially that of marriage no longer being the only mission in a woman’s life. Too much had changed with the unending Great War for Ruttie to be comfortable with the idea of immersing herself forever in domesticity or living in Jinnah’s reflected glory, as her friends suspected was her real motive in marrying a man more than double her age. There were the suffragists, for one, tilting constantly at the old notions of marriage as the only aspiration for a woman. And if her intensive reading of Emmeline Pankhurst’s autobiography faile
d to impress her sufficiently about the need to find better reasons to marry a man other than running a good home for him, the English novelists of the period were equally bent on disillusioning women about the institution and its ability to fulfil a modern woman’s life. Both of Ruttie’s favourite English authors, H.G. Wells and George Moore, were among the early writers bringing down the edifices of Victorian marriage and morals, with their novels showing women conflicted between the old ideas of living happily married ever after and searching for meaning in their lives outside the home. Ruttie devoured all their writing, leaving her generous pencil underlinings in her copy of George Moore’s short story collection, Celibates, with one of its female protagonist rebelling against marriage to the man she was engaged to. But if she ever gave in to her misgivings, she had only to think of the alternative. Her education, wide and impressive though it had been, fitted her for no profession other than a brilliant marriage to someone from her own community, to follow in the footsteps of women like her mother, running a lavish home and throwing fashionable parties for people like themselves while she outsourced her maternal duties to an army of foreign nannies and governesses. The very prospect of settling forever in such a ‘polished, civilized world’ made her ardent young spirit rebel, longing even more to break away to Jinnah’s side, into his world of pure and passionate politics. And how could it ever be a sacrifice to leave behind a home where she was treated like a child, sent to bed at the slightest sign of having caught a chill, for a life where she would be able ‘to fight side by side’ with the man she loved, to ‘gain India back her own crown of Freedom’. Her romantic heart thrilled at the prospect. She yearned for what Jinnah seemed to stand for: an exciting life of intense political discussions extending late into the nights, the camaraderie, the fervour of a shared mission to liberate the country, the sacrifices. It was, in fact, Jinnah’s very austerity and loathing for her fashionable world that called to her most deeply, not his celebrity status or political power, as Nan so wrongly assumed.

  And the real struggle in her mind was not with the sacrifices involved in renouncing the old life, with its wealth and luxury and the security that her parents provided; it was whether, when it came to the test, she might fail to break free of her shackles. She had always prided herself on her ability to plunge headlong into things, never looking back or heeding the consequences, finding it ‘too tame and calculative’ to even reread her letters once they were written. It was unlike the Ruttie everyone knew, but she was a secret worrier. ‘But what is the use of saying these things and dreaming a life I can never fulfill?’ she had admitted wistfully to Padmaja three months before her seventeenth birthday. But now, having given her consent to Jinnah to make plans for her escape, almost begged him to liberate her from that world, she had to muster the courage for it without breathing a word to a soul, least of all to the man to whom she had pledged herself. She needed inspiration and, as usual, she found it in a book she was reading. ‘I dare do all that may become a man, who dares do more, is neither more nor less’ were the lines she marked out in William Thackeray’s Novels by Eminent Hands. It was to be her motto in those last few months she spent in Petit Hall, before walking out forever, with only her umbrella under her arm.

  And yet her heart must have quailed as she stepped out of the familiar tall gates of Petit Hall, and entered what was now to be her new home. Perched midway up Malabar Hill, Jinnah’s bungalow was a mere 100 yards’ climb up Malabar Hill from Petit Hall at its bottom. The uphill route she took from Petit Hall to Mount Pleasant Road, with its flowering trees of pluming pink cassias and flaming gulmohars, would have been a familiar one for Ruttie, and at this evening hour, with the summer heat lifting and a cool breeze blowing from the Arabian Sea, a pleasant walk of five or ten minutes. She had never entered Jinnah’s home before but her aunt, Lady Petit’s younger sister and only surviving sibling, Cooverbai ‘Coomi’ Powallah, lived on the same road, facing Jinnah’s house. She had taken that walk countless times, sometimes with one of her three brothers, perhaps even alone—for her parents were more liberal about dispensing with chaperones, especially when she was within the neighbourhood. Malabar Hill in April was a colourful sight even when the temperature was a simmering 72 degrees Fahrenheit, as it had been that morning—‘gulmohars and flame of the forests dyed like life blood . . . crimson oleanders, scarlet lilies, vermilion of the blossoming dhak trees, surpassing the splendour of all Nature’s pageant of the seasons, April month is an ecstasy of such width and luminous colour, neither red nor rose nor orange but a commingled glory stolen from the land of Poetry and Romance,’ as the lyrical Sarojini put it. But for Ruttie, indifferent at the best of times to natural beauty, the chief attraction of Malabar Hill had always been her aunt’s house perched midway on it. For both herself and her siblings, Aunt Coomi’s home was almost an extension of Petit Hall. They’d been there at least once or twice a week since early childhood, either to play with their three cousins or call on their grandmother, who lived with Coomi. But now, entering for the first time the house on the opposite side of the road, hidden from view even without the high walls and gates of the Powallahs’ imposing mansion, it seemed another world away.

  If Ruttie had ever spared a thought from her romantic flights of fancy to consider what her future home would be like, she probably assumed it would be more or less like Aunt Coomi’s—not comparable, of course, to Petit Hall in grandeur, but stylish and modern, like all homes on Malabar Hill. Jinnah’s bungalow was on the same road, after all, and if the Powallahs were one of the richer landed families among the Parsis, Jinnah was no less affluent or lacking in taste or aspiration to live up to Bombay’s most fashionable address. She had never been to Jinnah’s home before, having always met him either at one of the clubs or the races, or in her own home or in the homes of others. But this house she was just stepping into had nothing to do with people like herself; it belonged to an earlier time, at least fifty years ago, when Malabar Hill was still a jungle and had not become the fashionable place it now was, when rich people occasionally came up for a weekend of hunting and sea air. It was undoubtedly the most dreary home that Ruttie had ever stepped into. Hector Bolitho, the author from London commissioned to do an official biography of Jinnah three years after his death and long after the old house had been razed and rebuilt, described it as ‘a Goanese bungalow’. But whatever it may have originally been, it had served in the last half-century to accommodate British civil servants, one of the last remaining old houses on the street that had yet to give way for the fortress-like white marble mansions of the new century. However, it wasn’t so much South Court’s austere refusal to conform to the luxurious norms of the neighbourhood that disturbed Ruttie so much as its air of sad, unlived dinginess, so unlike the owner with his youthful energy and taste for motor cars and horse riding and elegant clothing. ‘A fun-forsaken house’, was how Ruttie later described it to Padmaja.

  Not that Jinnah had ever hidden anything from her, but how was she to suspect that his taste for luxury ended at motor cars, clothes and cigars. Few people had ever entered his home. Although he was one of Bombay’s top ten leading barristers, he did not believe in entertaining like the other successful lawyers. While he sometimes condescended to attend their extravagant garden parties and at-homes with hundreds of guests, exotic refreshments and live bands, he never felt obliged to return their hospitality, offering at best a cup of tea to a visitor if he turned up at teatime. And the only two receptions he ever threw in his long bachelor life were exclusively for men, and both were held outside his home— in a rented flat in Colaba, not far from Apollo Hotel where he lived when he first moved to Bombay. Jinnah had bought South Court from a departing Scottish civil servant six years earlier as both a wise investment and a good address for a successful barrister, but without any intention of living there. As long as he remained a bachelor, it had suited him to go on living in his rented house, despite its more unfashionable address and size. These things didn’t matter to him—�
�So long as the house did not leak, he did not mind’ where he lived, as his architect was to later say about him.

  Besides, it was more convenient than moving to Malabar Hill. The house was closer to the high court, where his real life was. His chamber in the high court was, in fact, his real home, one of the two great political centres in Bombay—the other being Lokmanya Tilak’s house, Sardar Griha. Jinnah’s rooms at the court was not only a place to meet his clients but the centre of political discussions and a gathering place for his young admirers, with Jinnah holding court there sometimes till late into the night. He was popular with young men who admired him both for his dashing appearance with his well-cut suits and monocle and his sense of humour, considering him the only one of his generation with the courage to be himself without counting the consequences. With them, he dropped his guard, all his hauteur gone, letting them come to him with their problems. His Saturdays, especially, were reserved for his young friends from every community when he devoted two or three hours exclusively to talking politics with them, talking to them as equals, allowing them to contradict him and throwing out anyone who came to him with a brief during that time, so precious was this time both for him and them.