Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  And even when he did spend the evening at home, he was accustomed to retreat to his library with his newspapers. His sister was content to be left to her own resources, or at least rarely complained. And except for occasionally slamming a door or locking herself into her room in a sulk, she seldom demanded his attention.

  But now he began to return home early, looking forward to spending the evening alone with Ruttie. But she missed going to the theatre and clubs, and it felt strange having no plans for the evening other than sitting down quietly with him over a drink while he pored over his newspapers. She had never before come across someone as devoted to the newspapers as Jinnah. In the first flush of home improvement, she had redone the room that Jinnah used as his library, stocking it with rare books and priceless first editions that made it a personal library any gentleman could be proud of. Jinnah had paid the bills without a murmur but he barely glanced at the new books she had added to his shelves. He had no time to spare from his newspaper reading.

  If it was anyone else, she would have probably despised him for reading nothing else. It was like those diligent Indians who struggled to master the English language by poring over a newspaper, the sort of people who bought the Aids to Newspaper Reading, a popular dictionary of newspaper words—‘choice words, phrases, idioms and proverbs as well as Latin and other foreign expressions’—that was forever being advertised in the Bombay Chronicle. Even her father, who never claimed to be a reading man, was acquainted with the major English poets and novelists, but Jinnah, in his blunt, honest way refused to pay even lip service to them. It both amused and exasperated her as she watched him come home every evening to sit down with his pile of newspapers, like a little boy poring over his stamp collection. He subscribed to everything, from the London Times to remote provincial newspapers and gazetteers, which he read from the first page to the last, not missing even the ads. And after that, instead of throwing the old newspapers out, he kept them aside to cut out items from them, which he then annotated and stuck into books. She did not have the heart to tell him how lonely she had begun to feel.

  She had almost no one to talk to all day long. Sarojini was the only friend they shared in common but the poetess-orator was missing from Bombay all through those early months. Sarojini’s second career as a popular political speaker was just taking off in that year and she had embarked on an extensive speaking tour across India, which took her from Madras to Sind, then to Baluchistan and Punjab. And when she did eventually return to her hotel suite in the Taj Mahal hotel, she was far too busy brokering peace between the leaders of the Congress to spend more than a hurried hour or two with Ruttie in her hotel suite and that too with dozens of other friends always dropping in.

  Neither were Sarojini’s two daughters available to her at this crucial time. Padmaja and Leilamani would have certainly helped her to cope with the current isolation from her own family and relatives, but they had been packed off from home once again, this time to a boarding school in Mussoorie, instead of Panchgani. At seventeen and a half, Padmaja’s parents considered her as yet too young to be running a home for her father in Sarojini’s absence and it was decided that she would go back to a boarding school at least until the War was over and a decision could be taken whether to send her abroad to college, or let her remain in Hyderabad as she wanted.

  It was not as if the Parsi social boycott had isolated Ruttie completely. There were her friends from the princely set, for example. Or Kshama Row, a girl of her own age and from the same affluent background, but married several years before her and already the mother of a young daughter. They had many friends in common, including Padmaja and Leilamani, and shared the same tastes in travel and literature. Like Ruttie, Kshama too wanted to make something more of her life than merely run a fashionable home and raise children. She aspired, in fact, to be a writer of plays and novels, an ambition she was not afraid of telling her friends about, much to their amusement. The friendship had been sustained so far by Kshama’s unalloyed admiration for Ruttie’s beauty and style and wit, and on Ruttie’s part by a good-humoured tolerance for her friend’s conceits. But now with the balance of power suddenly shifting, Ruttie felt even less inclined to seek Kshama’s company.

  Instead, she decided to throw herself fully into Jinnah’s life, determined to make it ‘in all its aspects, pleasant, carefree and well worth living’, as Kanji writes. It was a struggle. She took charge of planning his meals, but Jinnah found no joy in food, eating sparingly and sometimes not at all. Coming from Petit Hall, where every meal including breakfast was a multi-cuisine feast, this was difficult for her to take. When he was a baby, Jinnah’s mother had agonized over his refusal to eat and although he had outgrown that phase and even cultivated a taste for roast beef and apple pie while he was in England, for the most part, he didn’t care if he didn’t eat at all. It was the least important thing in his life. Dinner or lunch would be announced but if he was busy in a discussion or dictating a letter, he took no notice. If he was reminded that the food was getting cold, he would politely reply: ‘Just a few minutes more.’ Or, ‘Go and start and I shall join you in a little while.’ But the little while often turned into a long while, and Ruttie had to coax and tease him into joining her at the table. And even when he did come to the table, it was impossible for Ruttie to tempt him into eating more than the quota he had fixed for himself. It was difficult even to make him try anything new.

  It was even harder to change his reclusive habits. For Ruttie, who had rarely sat down for a meal in her previous life without at least a few guests at the table, it seemed unthinkable not to have people over at South Court. But Jinnah was at first adamant. He had long ago cut out all unnecessary socializing as a way of disciplining himself for his political destiny. There was no form of socializing that he did not consider unnecessary, including the garden parties and at-homes—the glittering outdoor and indoor receptions with live music and entertainment that fashionable Indians called by these misnomers. There were others, especially busy professionals like Sarojini’s husband, Dr Naidu, who complained of whole days and even weeks being swallowed up by an endless round of breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner parties, music parties, theatre and picnic outings, at-homes and visits to each other’s houses, not to speak of weddings and other festivities. It seemed as if nobody in the fashionable India of the new century ever went to bed at all, let alone do any work. But few dared go against the social trend except for Jinnah. He stoutly refused to either entertain or be entertained, not caring if he was called a miser by almost everyone he knew.

  He even refused to call on anyone unless it was for work, even if the person was a close colleague who happened to be sick or dying. Because, as he explained to some of his youthful acolytes, ‘if he took to visiting the sick and ailing once, he would have to devote most of his time to this duty and would not have enough hours in which to do his important work’. One of these admirers, M.A.H. Ispahani, was ‘rudely shocked and tongue-tied’ when he first heard Jinnah expounding such views, but was nevertheless awestruck by his idol’s ‘inexhaustible store of will power’: ‘Once he decided on a course of action, no persuasion would detract him from that course. If, for example, he decided to go somewhere, or not to take more than a quantity of food or other refreshment, no amount of persuasion and no temptation would wring a change in his resolve. He had so disciplined himself that he could, without stress and strain, resist all temptations and pleading.’

  But Ruttie’s coaxing and her subtle rearrangement of his life began to have some effect. Jinnah yielded but without actually giving up his principles. She wisely did not attempt to throw parties in the conventional sense of the term, certainly not the lavish extravaganzas of her mother’s set, with music and dancing that he would have abhorred. Nor did she try to impose her own friends on him, knowing that apart from Sarojini and her daughters, none of them would be able to hold their own in a political discussion, which was the only dinner conversation that Jinnah could tolerate at his own ta
ble.

  But she could, and did, collect a select list of guests that would be welcome in South Court. They were either his young associates or an occasional visitor from out of town like Motilal Nehru or the Raja of Mahmudabad. Jinnah’s notion of entertaining so far had been to have a couple of his male friends over for an informal meal so that they could sit up until the early hours of the morning discussing politics over drinks and cigarettes, undistracted by the presence of ladies or the ceremonies of a splendid, multi-course dinner.

  And now that she was there to arrange things for him, she began to not only invite his friends but also his young political associates in the Home Rule League, keeping it deliberately casual by renaming these gatherings as ‘potluck’. She took care to invite only two or three of them at a time, issuing her invitations in her own handwriting, asking them to ‘come and dine with us—quietly—perhaps another friend or two’.

  Rarely were her invitations turned down. They looked forward to meeting Jinnah in his own home but it was she who dazzled them. Jinnah was adored no doubt, but they could always meet him in his chamber where they were welcome at any time. But an invitation to South Court meant spending a few hours in the company of Mrs Jinnah. For the young men especially, who came singly, even those few who were married, Ruttie was a source of the utmost fascination. They were mesmerized, not just by her beauty and style and charming informality but because they had never before come across a young and beautiful woman from the highest society who could stay awake all night discussing politics with them in a haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol. All of them went away a little in love with her, and at least one of them—Kanji Dwarkadas—was enthralled for life.

  But she had eyes for no one other than Jinnah. To see him as he sat there—at his relaxed best, stretching out his long legs as he made a telling point; to catch him in one of those rare moods when he talked in a personal way, hearing him recount anecdotes from the past with his dry, sharp wit and dramatic flair, to listen with everyone else, with the same rapt attention, as he held forth on politics, demonstrating his quick grasp of political intricacies—was to fall in love again with the J she used to know before her marriage. And they both were at their best at these small gatherings—she, because she never felt so cherished by him than when he included her in his political plans, listening to her in all seriousness and good-humouredly taking the way she teased and pulled his leg in front of their guests. It gave her a secret sense of her own power over him, able to say aloud to him all the irreverent things that no one had dared to say to him before. The young men certainly were awestruck by the liberties she took with the great man famed for his haughtiness and reserve. And Jinnah too blossomed under her adoring attention, with his conversations at the dinner table becoming a virtuoso performance. She was seldom so happy as when there were one or two friends present and she could show how happily married they were.

  Her other innovations in his life did not go down so well—not so much with him personally, but in the eyes of the censorious world outside South Court. She had taken to dropping in at his chambers every evening so that they could drive back home together. It was a harmless thing as far as she and even Jinnah were concerned. Everyone in England was doing it—in fact, after motor cars had taken over from carriages, the women drove themselves, ‘returning triumphantly with their husbands by their sides’, as the newspapers put it. Ruttie had not learnt to drive, but it was just as much fun to go to Jinnah’s office in their chauffeur-driven car and come back with him, sitting side by side on the back seat with the top pulled down. It was the one thing Jinnah didn’t baulk at, not letting his ever-present rationality get in the way. He didn’t see the harm in it, and in fact prided himself on taking her everywhere with him.

  But others didn’t think the same way, especially Jinnah’s colleagues in the court. They had never heard of any wife, let alone one as striking as Ruttie, walking in unannounced into her husband’s office. And it shocked them even more that Jinnah of all men, with his reputation of being a ‘lion of the court’ should say nothing to put a stop to it, especially when she walked in while Jinnah was in the middle of a conference with a solicitor and other lawyers.

  Even the most progressive youth of this legal circle, M.C. Chagla, who at this stage was very much under Jinnah’s spell, considering him his ‘beau ideal both in politics and law’, disapproved of what he construed as Mrs Jinnah’s very provocative conduct. ‘I remember her walking into Jinnah’s chambers while we were in the midst of a conference,’ Chagla later wrote in his memoir, Roses in December, ‘dressed in a manner which would be called fast even by modern standards, perch herself upon Jinnah’s table, dangling her feet, and waiting for Jinnah to finish the conference so that they could leave together.’

  Any husband ought to have been enraged at such ‘uninhibited’ behaviour, according to Chagla, but to his astonishment, Jinnah showed absolutely no reaction. ‘He never uttered a word of protest, and carried on with his work as if she was not there at all,’ Chagla recounted, adding: ‘One can well imagine how the patience of a man of Jinnah’s temper must have been taxed.’

  But in truth it had not occurred to Jinnah to be ashamed of anything Ruttie did, and certainly not where her clothes were concerned. He trusted her judgement on aesthetic matters so implicitly that he had even surrendered himself into her hands for a thorough makeover. She not only insisted on him getting a sleek new haircut, but also got rid of the woollen suits with the stiff collars and cravat that was still the trend, especially in the older generation. She picked out new jackets for him, made of light silk and worn open-necked without the constricting bow tie, which suited his slim, graceful form to perfection. It was a subtle change she worked on him, understanding his need to impress as well as escape the contempt of the British by outdoing them in sartorial elegance. It ended up lending him a new air of easy and graceful informality, much admired by British and Indians alike. ‘Nobody knew how much Jinnah owed in this matter to Ruttie,’ as Kanji was to write later.

  Her own style, however, sprang from a different way of looking at the world. With her upbringing and self-assurance, she had none of his need to impress. She dressed as the new generation in England was learning to dress—‘creating ever new and fantastic styles and imagery of their own with which to astonish the world and amuse themselves’. In her own circle, it was a style much admired, making her ‘the daintiest, naughtiest, darlingest of the swish set, smarter than them all’. But it did not go down so well in the eyes of Jinnah’s conservative circle of acquaintances, both British and Indian.

  She had evolved by now her own unique style, combining Indian dress with the latest fashion from England, producing an effect so striking and aesthetic that nearly everyone in her previous circle of friends and female acquaintances had tried to copy her clothes. But it was a difficult style to imitate, needing a sense of immense self-assurance to carry it off. Her saris were no different from what every fashionable Indian girl of her age wore or at least coveted—gossamer-thin gauze in rainbow hues. The fabric was even more transparent than what women of Lady Petit’s generation wore at the beginning of the new century—diaphanous chiffons and georgettes with intricately embroidered borders stitched on to it.

  Although Ruttie would have hated to admit it, her style was, in fact, an extension of her mother’s taste, rather than a departure from it. Both were discriminating in what they wore, shunning loud colours and anything elaborate or fussy. Rutty had an even more refined horror of anything flashy, especially gold zari work. And for this reason, she refused to buy anything off the shelves, believing that it was only possible to get the right sari by ordering it from the traders who came home with their tin trunks. She was prepared to wait for months for the sari to be specially woven for her in the plain, pastel colours she preferred, ‘without vulgar tinsel marring it’. And among her friends, including Padmaja, her taste in clothes was considered so exquisite that they trusted her to buy their saris for them without even goi
ng along with her. ‘Regarding your saris,’ Ruttie wrote to Padmaja in a letter dated only 3 March (no year is mentioned), ‘It is difficult to get the kind of thing that you would like. A friend of mine sent me a very beautiful purple shot a couple of days ago—it was on sale as having ordered it she didn’t care for it when it came. It was ruined by some vulgar tinsel worked all over the surface, and as it was not a thing that I would have chosen for myself, I didn’t select it for you. I suppose you know that most of my saris are made to order. Sometimes however it happens that the sariwallas have some really pretty things. But at present for some reason or other their trade is very slack and they have hardly any stock worth mentioning . . . Trust me however to do the best I can for you.’

  Her blouses were also part of the new style much admired by the younger set. Parsi women of Lady Petit’s generation imitated the English memsahibs’ dress as closely as they could, adapting it creatively to suit Indian norms. Careful not to embarrass their English hostesses by baring too much flesh, fashionable Parsi women of Ruttie’s mother’s generation wore their chiffon saris with long-sleeved, waist-length European-style blouses. They thought nothing, for example, of paying 10 or 15 pounds for a trendy Parisian blouse which would anyway be hidden behind their sari folds. The style was universally regarded as ‘Parsi’. But for most of the younger set of Indians among the top circles, there was nothing so ‘hideous’, as Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit described these Victorian blouses worn with saris. Instead, they dared to tailor their blouses in a new style that had become all the rage, close-fitting and cut low in the back and front, in imitation of the neckline which was the current fashion in wartime London but passed off as ‘Indian’ wear.

  But the new style, while it had caught the fancy of the younger set, had not yet invaded the official set. The wives of British officials were especially shocked by the new trend. Of course, it was another matter altogether how much their disapproval had to do with their own racial prejudice, their ‘silliness’, as Bolitho puts it, undoing the good work of their husbands ‘and responsible for our losing India’. After all, even twenty years before Ruttie made the Indian blouse a fashion statement, there was Lady Curzon writing home about one ‘huge lady’ at a purdah party in Hyderabad who ‘amused us’ in her ‘green plush trousers, and above her waist was a broad expanse of nakedness, then a short transparent green lace coat, and over all a transparent gauze sari. So very little was left to the imagination . . .’