Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  Funnily enough, neither of them seemed overly concerned about her leaving the baby behind, although it was only five months old. Having installed her from the day they returned from London in her own nursery, they seemed to have almost forgotten her existence. It would take at least another year before Ruttie’s unnatural lack of attachment to her baby would attract comment, but even in these early months there was less than the usual weak connection that seemed to exist between infants in well-born modern households and their otherwise busy parents. So little did either of them involve themselves in the baby that it had not even occurred to either of them that she would soon require at least a name of her own.

  It was a puzzle why Ruttie, of all women, who even as a child could not bear to see a suffering creature without rushing to its aid, turned her face away so resolutely from her own infant daughter. Could it be perhaps her resentment, hidden so far under her guise of careless insouciance, but chafing nevertheless at this ‘slavery’, as she later put it—this double bondage of wife and mother that she had not bargained for in her passionate eagerness for life, not yet daring to spill out into open rebellion, but still unable to resist her heart’s stifled cry of ‘Let me be free. Let me be free’? Panicked suddenly that ‘her youth is going and she must live’, that ‘life is passing her by’, she was determined to try and recover her old self, ‘longing to be free of all her shackles’. She needed some time alone with her friends, to immerse herself once again in the old life that she had so foolhardily turned her back on. Of her family, Lady Petit, at least, was eager to make up with her daughter, yearning to see her little granddaughter but Ruttie, with a pride as stubborn as Jinnah’s, wanted to have nothing to do with her, turning instead to her friends in Hyderabad as if they were her one and only family.

  But while it was easy, even imperative, to leave behind both Jinnah and the baby, Arlette, her precious dog, had to go with her because she could not bear to part from her, even for a fortnight. And although the Naidus’ home was already overcrowded with a menagerie of pets, including several dogs, cats, a squirrel, deer and a mongoose, she insisted on not just taking Arlette along but its attendant as well and the boxes of its special food, watched mutely by Jinnah, his face giving away nothing as she set out on her first holiday without him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The quarrels started as soon as she returned. Of course, there could be no quarrels between them in the ordinary sense, no raised voices or scenes, or slamming of doors, or such venting of tempers. At least that would have been a relief, because then one could hope for it all to end soon, the making up compensating for the sulking, with a clearing of air that she longed for as one way of getting closer to him. But with Jinnah, there could be no slanging matches. Losing his temper would have been beneath him; he did not even raise his voice against a servant. With her, he just withdrew, retreating into a cold silence which not all her teasing and coaxing could penetrate, leaving her wondering whether he was really angry with her and, at the same time, what she could have done to offend him. That he was displeased with her from the moment she returned from Hyderabad was apparent enough to her, but what she had done to deserve his cold treatment she could not quite figure out. It certainly made it even harder to reconcile herself to getting back to her own home, especially after the warmth and hospitality of the Naidu household.

  Padmaja had not exaggerated the charms of her native city, and the Naidus’ wide circle of friends had taken her to their heart at once. She was not just included in all their schemes of fun and entertainment but sought after in a way that made her oddly grateful after months of being ostracized. Most Hyderabadis who met her were immediately bewitched by her beauty and glamour, making no secret of it, and she blossomed under the adulation, becoming her old, friendly, open self all over again. The persona she had recently adopted—the mocking, chain-smoking sophisticate who was beyond being hurt and existed only to shock others—dropped away effortlessly, revealing that sympathy of soul that was her most attractive quality.

  She went riding with Padmaja and her friends, drawing them out in intimate conversations that they would not have dared to initiate with her. She showed such tact and discretion that they warmed to her, overcoming their awe of her. Many of them were unused to the sophisticated world she came from, but they were so warm and affectionate that she could not help being touched, taking great pains to hide her amusement at some of their gaffes, and all along putting them at ease. After being starved all these months of the company of young people and having felt a pariah in her own city, it felt good to be sought after again. Her defences crumbled under their simple adoration and she felt eager to please and be pleased, as she used to be as a young girl. They insisted she visit them in their homes, and they treated her with such old-world hospitality and affection that she was in a mood to be charmed by all that she saw—recklessly ordering replicas of everything that caught her eye, from furniture to brass urns and clay palm stands and even a horse, to take back home with her. In short, she made more friends and dined at more homes in the eighteen days she was in Hyderabad than she had in the eighteen months of her life in South Court. She revelled in the freedom to be entirely herself and to be loved and admired for it—instead of the sidelong looks and notoriety that was her lot in Bombay. And though she always put up a spirited defence against such tactics, the way she was treated in Hyderabad made her feel more at home than she had felt since her marriage.

  And what perhaps did her more good than meeting Padmaja’s friends was the chance at last to unburden herself, at least a little, with Padmaja. There had been few secrets between them, especially on Padmaja’s part, who trustingly confided her private concerns, mostly about her romantic attachments and the proposals she had received, to all her girlfriends, including Ruttie. But now it was Ruttie’s turn to open up, trying to convey her very mixed feelings about marriage and Jinnah, and the half-exasperated pride of having him so dependent on her that he could not bear even this short separation from her.

  The house itself, ‘The Golden Threshold’, named after Sarojini’s first book of poems, was, as a visitor described it, ‘a quiet bungalow set in the midst of a walled-in compound and nestling in the shade of noble trees . . . in the verandah a huge swing common in South Indian homes . . . [it] combined eastern tastes with western comforts’. There was something magical about Ruttie in its ambience. It was not just its ‘delightful unconventionalism’, as she put it, but the sense of freedom and warm spontaneity that was all-pervasive. The girls, now that they were out of school, were free to do what they liked with their day, waking up when they liked and following their own pursuits. There were no set times for meals, the servants were free and easy in their manners, the garden was charmingly disordered, books lay carelessly about, pets ran around with no leash, and visitors dropped in at any hour, sitting down informally to eat with the family, making plans on the spur of the moment and carrying them out instantaneously. The contrast to the rigidity and formality of her own home must have struck her, making her wistful for the life she had so carelessly walked out of, unmindful of the consequences.

  Even the garden with its delightful unkemptness—‘well filled with the most beautiful flowers and shrubs and then allowed to run into wildness’, as the Naidus liked their garden to be—was such a pleasing contrast to South Court, with Jinnah’s passion for tidy flower beds and everything in straight rows, unable to bear what he called ‘a jungle’.

  She felt drawn to each member of the family, especially Dr Naidu whom she was meeting for the first time. He was a quiet man, almost silent, but she had always prided herself on being able to read people’s souls through their eyes and now she felt she had divined his true spirit, telling the two sisters that he had the most remarkable pair of eyes she’d ever seen on a man’s face. Although he was rarely at home, his devotion to his children, especially his two daughters, was apparent to even a stranger like her. They, in turn, worshipped him for assuming the role of a single p
arent, setting free Sarojini from her domestic responsibilities to enable her to pursue her rising career as a poet and politician. It made Ruttie wistful and she spun stories in her head of the sacrifices he had made for the family; when back in Bombay, she fed her gullible friend Kshama with fanciful tales of how he was, in fact, the real genius in the family, composing all of Sarojini’s poems for her and generously letting her take the credit for them.

  Her interest in him would have surprised Dr Naidu had he been aware of it. He had barely been home while she stayed with them. As a military doctor, he usually worked long hours but in those weeks while she was there, he had to keep even longer hours because of a flu and plague epidemic that erupted simultaneously. Whatever might have been his opinion of his house guest, he kept it strictly to himself. He had always been a little wary of Sarojini’s smart friends, and the fact that Ruttie had chosen to make a pleasure trip on her own, leaving behind her husband and infant daughter, made him even more aloof than usual. He said little, only observing carefully in a postscript to a letter to his son in Bangalore that ‘Mrs Jinna [sic] arrived today and is a guest in our house.’ Nor did he say much more in the letter he wrote the following week; the only sign that he was better acquainted with his house guest being a correction in the spelling of her name: ‘Mrs Jinnah is still here.’

  The burning topic in the Naidus’ home that fortnight was the question of sending the two girls to England for further education. It was something that both Dr Naidu and Sarojini had set their hearts on since they were little girls. True liberals, they had long decided that their two daughters would be provided the same opportunities for further education as their two sons. And now that Padmaja had passed her Senior Cambridge examination, they had begun preparations to send her abroad. An English acquaintance, a missionary in Hyderabad called Mrs Wigel, was approached to make the necessary arrangements for Padmaja’s admission into Oxford. But while the arrangements were being made, the usually gentle and biddable Padmaja inexplicably refused to leave home. One reason possibly was the financial strain she knew this would put on her father. Dr Naidu’s salary as a military doctor under the Nizam was certainly handsome by Hyderabadi standards, but would certainly not stretch to cover the costs of putting four children through university abroad. Either that, or a secret romance with a young officer in Hyderabad may have made Padmaja decide to turn down her father’s plans for her, and nothing or nobody could change her mind, forcing Dr Naidu to give up the arrangements being made for her admission to Oxford.

  But Leilamani had no such qualms and readily seized the chance to go in her sister’s place. A self-willed, boisterous girl of fifteen and a half, Leilamani certainly did not dwell on the financial burden she might be imposing on her father, especially as she would have to spend an extra year in an English boarding school preparing for her university entrance examination. With Sarojini still in England recovering from her surgery, she was easily able to persuade her father to send her in Padmaja’s place. And with his progressive ideas of women’s emancipation, far ahead of his times, and no Sarojini around to veto the scheme, he made no objections, allowing Leilamani to have her way. It was at this poignant point in the Naidus’ lives that Ruttie descended on them, plunging herself at once into the family discussion as if she was indeed a member of the family she had always longed to belong to.

  Ruttie had always been a vocal and impassioned believer in women’s equal rights, particularly on their right to equal education, inspired by suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s autobiography, My Own Story. Having bought a copy of it soon after it was published in 1914, and signing her name in her fourteen-year-old hand, ‘Rutty Petit’, in ink on the front page that has leaked and stained on to the next page, she embarked on an enthusiastic reading of the autobiography, heavily underscoring entire passages of it with pencil, particularly on the discrimination daughters faced in education compared to sons, including a sentence on page six—‘I didn’t want to be a boy’—and writing next to it on the margin an enthusiastic ‘bravo!’ It’s not hard to understand why a young and ardent Ruttie at fourteen would have set Emmeline Pankhurst up as her role model. Emmeline, like herself, had married a barrister twenty-four years her senior in age and a believer in women’s equal rights. (Richard Pankhurst believed so deeply in a life of public service that he had decided to remain a bachelor until he met and fell in love with Emmeline.) And she, after flouting her mother’s injunction ‘to stop throwing herself at him’, toyed with the idea of living with him outside marriage, had eventually married him, and despite five children, had embarked on a life of public service along with her husband. But now, when Leilamani had got the chance that Ruttie had wilfully denied herself by choosing to get married rather than wait for the War to end and go abroad to study further, Ruttie surprisingly found herself on Padmaja’s side of the family tussle, trying to dissuade Leilamani from making something of her own life. Could it perhaps be a twinge of envy—not wanting the younger girl to have what she herself had opted out of? A little envy would only be natural considering her current chafing at her own ‘fetters’, while there was the young and brash Leilamani with her freedom stretching before her, unobstructed, and with her father’s full support behind her. Without stopping to examine her own feelings too closely, Ruttie seems to have used her considerable influence on the younger girl to give up her plans, and was, in fact, quite confident of having succeeded by the end of it. As she wrote later to Padmaja, ‘By the bye, was I right in my surmise or is she still talking about going to England quite seriously?’ But Leilamani, far from being scared off by the prospect of spending four years in a cold, distant country with no home comforts or family support and depriving herself of the privileges that girls of fifteen or sixteen enjoyed in India—allowed to freely enter the adult world of drawing rooms and parties and even secretly indulge in romantic pursuits that their purdah-free environment enabled—proved Ruttie wrong.

  The fortnight passed all too soon, even though Jinnah did not think so. Abandoning his usual stance of resolute detachment, and letting her decide when she wanted to return home, he gave in to an irrational impulse and wrote to her at least two or three times during the fortnight, urging her to come back home soon. She, however, was in no mood to oblige, stretching her fortnight’s holiday by yet another three days before she reluctantly decided it was time to go back to her ‘fun-forsaken’ home. ‘Ruttie has been staying here for over a fortnight,’ as Padmaja wrote to her younger brother, Ranadheera, from their home in an undated letter, ‘and how the poor kid has been enjoying herself.’ And since she was now part privy to Ruttie’s marriage, was able to add: ‘Jinnah has been writing and begging her to return and she is leaving on Saturday, only because she is afraid that otherwise she might not be allowed to come again here.’ Meanwhile, Ruttie was bent on squeezing every last drop of fun out of these remaining few days of her holiday without him. ‘Just now,’ Padmaja wrote in the same letter, ‘she and Papi [Leilamani’s pet name] and Toufik [one of their many friends in Hyderabad] are out for their morning ride.’ Ruttie managed to pack in so much partying that even Padmaja was quite sick of it by the end. ‘We have been very busy with parties and lunches and dinners etc. and I am so tired of it all.’

  The highlight of Ruttie’s trip, however, was a dog that she found and adopted, planning to take it home with her. As Padmaja recounts, ‘The other morning a crowd of them rode to Golconda and Ruttie bagged a lovely Banjara dog that she saw. Since it came she has spent I don’t know how much over soaps and brilliantine for the dog—but he is very beautiful and Arlette hates him.’

  Jinnah, too, seems to have taken an instant dislike to it. Or perhaps it was a vent for his pent-up resentment against her for abandoning her responsibilities, always a touchy subject with him. But at any rate, he now put up a brief show of husbandly assertion, so unusual for him that it left her unnerved. It had to do with the dogs. He had so far suffered in silence the two dogs that Ruttie had already introduced into the hous
ehold—besides Arlette, a replacement for Fido, the lapdog who used to accompany the sixteen-year-old Ruttie to parties dressed in a bow matching his mistress’s sari, there was another dog, Bolsh or Bolshie, short for Bolshevik, who also had the run of the house like Arlette, petted and indulged and not allowed by their mistress ever to be leashed, let alone disciplined in any way. Till now, he had shown exemplary forbearance towards her overindulged pets, but Loafer-ul-Mulk—that was the name the new dog had been given by Ruttie as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement, presumably, of his gypsy Banjara antecedents—seems to have triggered his extraordinary bout of aggression. It was possible that the scene was the result of the natural mayhem that must have ensued with Loafer’s admission into the household where Bolsh already reigned as the alpha male. But Ruttie does not refer to any doggie battle for turf, only writing to Padmaja the next day to complain of the severe shock to her nerves as a result of Jinnah deciding to teach her dogs a lesson. ‘Although I had fully intended writing to you yesterday, I couldn’t find the nerve to settle to it,’ she wrote in a letter, datelined Bombay, 9 February 1920, ‘as J insisted on keeping Loafer-ul-Mulk and Bolsh on either side of him with a cane between his knees.’

  To most people, the incident which she scathingly called ‘J’s super training’ would hardly have seemed worth getting so upset about, but clearly it perturbed Ruttie deeply, bending helplessly, and worse, silently, to his will. As a child, Ruttie had flown into a rage, on separate occasions, at both her governess and her mother for even lifting a cane threateningly at one of her dogs, so passionately did she believe in her dogs’ rights to have the run of the house and not be restrained in any way. And it was a measure of how much she had changed in the last eighteen months that she could sit by and watch without intervening while J had his way with the dogs. In her frustrated fury, she wished the dogs would attack him but that was impossible—they instinctively bent to his will. As she wrote: ‘Of course I was hoping that they would make him the common foe—but in vain!’ And with a submissiveness that would have surprised her family in Petit Hall, she closed the painful subject with: ‘The result of all this super-training is that Bolshie is limping and Loafer evincing his strong dislike to the chain by howling.’