Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 27

  But it came at a price. Since the only match they could find for the overaged Rahmat was a widower from outside their own Ismaili sect of Khojas, it meant risking excommunication for the whole family and also reduced Jinnah’s chances of finding a second bride among the Ismailis. Jinnah’s maternal uncle, a close aide of the Aga Khan, who had been of much help to the family during Jinnah’s absence, had, in fact, intended giving his daughter in marriage to Jinnah, now that he was single again, but he warned Jinnah’s father that he would go ahead with the marriage only if they did not insist on marrying Rahmat outside their own community.

  Not that Jinnah paid much attention to his uncle’s threat. In fact, he may have even rejoiced secretly. Jinnah had married the first time against his own inclinations because of his mother’s insistence. But now that both his mother and bride had passed away—his first wife, Emibai, died in a cholera epidemic a year before his mother—he was certainly not disposed to shackle himself with a wife again.

  There were other ways in which his decision to get Rahmat married to a Sunni Khoja set him free. He could now afford to discard his past and reinvent himself, just as he had done in London, discarding his old clothes and beliefs, and assuming the mind and manners of a pucca Englishman. But this turning of himself into a modern, rational Muslim above all sects and castes was an even more daring transformation because it had to be done in spite of the stink it raised. But with Jinnah, as he was fond of saying, once he decided to do something, he simply did it. And it was not long before everyone, even the most orthodox Muslims, accepted him for what he was. His success as a barrister and his wealth certainly silenced any reservations that his community might have had. Besides, as if to hammer home the point that he wanted nothing more to do with the Ismaili community, he soon enrolled himself and his father in a new reformist Islamic organization called the Isnaasharis who set themselves apart from all sectarian divisions.

  The change came in handy for his other sisters’ marriages as well. He could now look for suitable matches based on his own criteria of affluence and background, casting the matrimonial net further than any Muslim had done before him. And such was his standing within the community that when he arranged a marriage for his second sister, Maryam, with the well-known merchant family of Bombay, the Peerbhoys, not a single eyebrow was raised, even though the Peerbhoys were Khoja Sunnis like Rahmat’s in-laws.

  But besides arranging his sisters’ marriages and paying his father’s rent and living expenses, Jinnah kept his life apart from them all. He lived away from them, visiting them occasionally. When he returned from London, his father had already shifted from Karachi to Bombay and they were living in a small rented apartment in the crowded by-lanes of the city’s Khoja neighbourhood. Instead of moving in with them or moving them out of there to live with him, Jinnah decided it would be better for him to live separately. And despite being desperately short of money, he moved into an English-run hotel, the Apollo, in Fort Bombay, which was across the city from them.

  But he did pay them regular visits, dazzling the neighbours and his own siblings whenever he dropped in with his immaculately tailored suits and tie and stiff collar, and shoes and socks which he refused to take off even within the house. Even when he eventually shifted out of the Apollo to his own apartment, the family was not invited to live with him. He was able to somehow juggle this double existence—the dashing, single barrister in his bachelor apartment, cutting a figure in Bombay’s high society with an ageing parent and siblings tucked away in a hidden corner of the city. This double life of sorts continued for the next six years until his father died.

  His father died in April 1902, saddling the debonair Jinnah with three minor siblings—Ahmed Ali, who was sixteen, and two sisters, Shirin and Fatima, fourteen and nine respectively. His first instinct must have been to get them all off his hands as quickly and efficiently as he could manage. Ahmed Ali was packed off to the Anjuman Islamia School as a boarder. Having attended the school himself as a young boy, Jinnah probably felt it was the best place to lay the foundations for a future professional career he had in mind for his brother.

  But there was little he could do about Shirin. At fourteen, she was at the lawful age to be married but he was yet to begin the matrimonial hunt for her. Meanwhile, he was forced to keep her at home with him, however much it inconvenienced him—conveying her in his carriage to his sister Maryam’s house every morning on his way to work and picking her up in the evenings on his way back. But mercifully, he soon found a suitable match for her. When Shirin married into the eminent merchant family of Bombay, the Currimbhoys, he was finally relieved of all responsibility for her.

  That left little Fatima. With Jinnah’s English training and habits, it seemed the most logical solution was to put his orphaned little sister into a good boarding school. Keen to give her the best English education his money could buy, he picked a convent school in Bandra, St Joseph’s. It was a rational decision based on his understanding of what kind of education was required for a modern girl. But little did he anticipate its personal repercussions on himself.

  Till then, no Muslim girl had ever been admitted to a Christian missionary school, and that too as a boarder. It set tongues wagging both within his extended family and among other Muslims. They were scandalized—even for someone as rich and indifferent to orthodox opinion as him, this was carrying things too far. He would, of course, have been aware of the risks. And if he was not, there would have been plenty of people to point them out—that a convent-educated Muslim girl was likely to become a huge liability when the time came to arrange her marriage within the community. Bandra being nine miles away from Bombay, and at least a couple of hours’ journey by horse carriage, the child would be virtually isolated from all her relatives for the next seven or eight years except during her holidays, brought up by strangers and unable to speak or relate to anyone in her own community—who would marry her then? Until two decades ago, Muslims were so suspicious of Christian missionaries that they refused to send even their boys to English-medium schools. And here was Jinnah daring to propose sending his sister to a convent school as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. But by now, he had become immune to all criticism, especially when it came from orthodox Muslims. It only made him more determined to do what he thought was best for her.

  He couldn’t, of course, be so peremptory with Fatima herself. The little girl was terrified of being sent away so far from home. Having been raised by a succession of her older sisters ever since their mother died, Fatima was a shy, repressed child who shrank from strangers. She was born a few months after Jinnah went to London and even when he returned, she had been too small and insignificant for him to take more than a perfunctory interest in her. But now Jinnah needed to calm her fears. And he did it with a patience and tenderness that would have surely surprised his other siblings and relatives—he usually had so little time to spare for the personal touch.

  But here he was now, taking time off from his own schedule, driving his little sister in his carriage to Bandra, and showing the timid girl around the school. Then taking her aside to reason with her, just as their father had done with him at her age—he asked her to choose for herself between school and the life of liberation it offered or that of a conventional woman’s life behind purdah. But Fatima was no strong-willed Jinnah capable of thinking for herself; she chose him, or rather his approval, agreeing to join the boarding school only because her brother wanted her to.

  By wilfully changing his sister’s destiny, he had bound her to him forever. He took to giving up his precious Sundays to go and visit her in school. He rode the nine miles back and forth to Bandra on horseback, carrying gifts of chocolates for her. He started taking a keen interest in her schoolwork. And insensibly, although they were nearly sixteen years apart, he was drawn closer to her than to any of his other siblings—or any other person in his life.

  Fatima, in turn, was lonely and isolated. She had no friends, she played no sports and
hardly anyone else in the family visited her. By the time she left boarding school eight years later—four years in the Bandra convent before she shifted to St Patrick’s School in Khandala from where she passed her matriculation exam—she needed no one else. Her handsome and clever brother had become everything for her.

  It was taken for granted that once she was done with school, she would move in with him. He now lived in a larger house, on the first floor of a building in Colaba, having shifted there from an apartment on Bandstand, and she fitted in unresistingly into his rigid daily routine. He had suggested to her to study for the Senior Cambridge examination under his tutelage and she did some desultory reading for it, starting with a book of essays, painstakingly underlining difficult words with a pencil, just as he had done as a student in London. The arrangement was the same as he had with Shirin—after breakfast together (always at the same hour), he dropped her off in his carriage on his way to court at their sister Maryam’s, to be picked up by him on his way back. But the difference was that he made no attempt to find her a suitable husband. Nor did she ever hint to him or anyone else in the family that she would have preferred to leave him for a home of her own. It was, in fact, a family myth, well established in the years after Fatima finished her matriculation and came to live with her brother, that she meant to devote the rest of her life to him, and she did nothing to dispel it. Her choice of a life as her brother’s keeper satisfied her, not only because of her devotion to Jinnah but also because of the enhanced prestige this undoubtedly earned her from the rest of the family.

  There would have been the usual pressure, of course, especially from her sisters, to marry. At seventeen, despite a matriculation degree and her fluency in English weighing her down, there was still a chance of finding someone suitable. But living with her handsome and famous brother, any suitor would have paled in comparison.

  They were good companions. They went for walks, had dinner together, and occasionally she accompanied him when he went riding. It was the only sport she ever took to. And since she was such a willing listener, almost adoring, he could hold forth at the table whenever he felt like it. They quarrelled only occasionally, usually when his cavalier treatment became too much for her to take. There was the instance when she opened a window in the house without his permission and he ticked her off for it, telling her shortly to go to the other room if she needed some fresh air. Fatima flounced out of the room and banged the door shut in the other room, locking herself in and refusing to come out even at dinner time.

  Opening the windows while he was around was always something of an issue between them—Jinnah was bothered by the noise from the street below and in one rare burst of temper had even thrown down a bucket of water to stop the ruckus. But her tantrum made him anxious. He went up to the locked door, pleading with her, ‘Fati, open the door.’ Fati was his name for her and she called him ‘Jin’. She emerged out of the room eventually but he was not quite forgiven. They ate their dinner in silence and were not on talking terms until he finally bought peace with a piece of jewellery. She loved baubles and he knew exactly how to placate her.

  It was this hidden and unspoken bond that Ruttie had stumbled upon, making her strangely uneasy. And instead of backing off, something drove her to keep prodding the silent Fatima. Everything about her—her ‘deadly reason’, her ‘deep grave eyes’, her self-sacrifice, and now her show of piety—annoyed Ruttie. The last was something of a recent development. Despite her expensive convent education—or perhaps because of it—Fatima had turned by now into a devout Muslim. Her staple reading was the Quran. And she had taken to arriving at South Court with her own copy of the Quran, sitting down to read it at all times instead of picking a book out of Jinnah’s vast library as she once used to do. Having endured it all these weeks, Ruttie had suddenly snapped, making that remark about the Quran—that it was a book ‘meant to be talked about and not to be read’.

  It was a remark that Jinnah ordinarily wouldn’t have even blinked at. Apart from whatever religion he had imbibed as a child (mostly his mother’s blind faith in the miracles of saints), he seemed to have a purely intellectual interest in the Quran, having studied closely the orientalist D.S. Margoliuth’s Mohammed and the Rise of Islam. He openly flouted Islamic tenets against drinking and smoking even in the presence of moulvis, and the first time he ever entered a mosque to pray was nearly two decades later.

  But his sister was quite different—she and his other siblings had been reared by their father when he had changed considerably, having taken in his later years to gathering his children around and reading aloud to them from the Quran.

  So, with Fatima taking umbrage, daring for once to speak up in front of her brother and taking on Ruttie frontally, Jinnah found matters getting out of hand.

  In the next few days, friction within South Court had risen to such a pitch that Ruttie was even threatening to leave him. She made plans to go to London with Padmaja’s sister Leilamani, who was preparing to sail the following month. That she was in earnest became clear from the agitated letter Sarojini wrote back to her daughter from London, complaining of the ‘shock’ she had received when she heard that Ruttie was planning to come to London ‘minus Jinnah and Baby’ and taking only her beloved Arlette with her.

  By now, Jinnah was learning the hard way, as he once feelingly put it, ‘never to argue with a woman’. Instead, he directed his energy into persuading Fatima, who at least was more susceptible to his reasoning. It was at his prodding that Fatima agreed, however reluctantly, to enrol herself in a dental college in Calcutta. It was the sensible thing to do, considering how few professional courses were available to women at that time—it would take another two years for the legal profession to open its doors to women, and a medical degree meant at least five years of study abroad. Her brother was ready to fund her studies as well as her stay in Calcutta (even though her eldest sister lived there, Fatima had no intention of staying with her), and by July, Fatima was out of the scene—at least for the next two years.

  Ruttie celebrated her victory by taking Jinnah on a holiday to Ooty. She was in excellent spirits. ‘I have insured myself quite an “exciting” time having sent up two horses and a car,’ she wrote triumphantly to Leilamani from Bangalore, on her way up to the hill station.

  Chapter Sixteen

  But getting Fatima out of their lives seemed to bring them no closer to each other. Instead, Jinnah spent their holiday in Ooty obsessing about a thin, half-naked man with a weak voice and the habits of a crank who was keeping him awake at night with his unpredictable moves. The man who was threatening his political survival was a fellow Gujarati whom everyone called Mahatma Gandhi.

  Gandhi had not impressed Jinnah to begin with. In this, Jinnah had been no different from most of Bombay’s high society. He had arrived in India five years earlier in 1915 with a huge reputation made in South Africa, and people had been eager to meet this world-acclaimed leader. But he had cut a poor figure at the receptions hosted for him in Bombay, arriving barefoot, dressed in a short dhoti, an angarka and sapha in Kathiawari style and speaking in Gujarati. They had not taken to each other right from the start. At the very first reception given to Gandhi in Bombay, a garden party thrown by the ‘Gurjar Sabha’, or the Gujarati Society of Bombay, Jinnah, who was presiding over the function, voiced his doubts about Gandhi’s intention to devote himself to the Indian cause, saying, ‘what a pity it was that there was nobody in South Africa to take his place and fight their battle’. In his turn, Gandhi offended Jinnah by labelling him a Muslim, saying, he was ‘glad to find a Mahomedan a member of the Gurjar Sabha and the chairman of the function’. After that first flurry of receptions held in his honour, Gandhi then disappeared off the political radar for almost a year, making a brief appearance at the Congress session held that year-end in Bombay where he disappointed his admirers once more by dressing in the same peculiar fashion and delivering a speech that was almost inaudible.

  While the War lasted, Gandhi scru
pulously kept himself out of politics. He refused to take part in any demonstration against the government and offered the British his full support, even volunteering to recruit soldiers for them. He dismayed young people who came to him for advice by coming up with the most hare-brained of solutions. For example, when the British government clapped Annie Besant into jail, he suggested to her supporters that the best way to secure her release would be to march peacefully all the way from Bombay to Coimbatore, a distance of over a thousand miles. And to others interested in political work, he suggested they work in rural Bihar as carriers of night soil. As a result, he was dismissed as a political maverick, although he soon began to be worshipped as a saint by ordinary people. To Jinnah, he remained something of an enigma. He could not tell if this former barrister was an astute Hindu politician or a genuine social reformer with no interest or talent for politics. On the one hand, Gandhi made a show of being disinclined to join politics, and on the other, he deftly turned any social reform programme he led into a high-voltage political drama that got him maximum publicity. As an experienced lawyer, Jinnah could hardly take Gandhi at face value.

  As for his personal habits, there was no dearth of stories floating about him. He heard from his young associates how Gandhi received his visitors sitting on a mattress on the floor; his strange austerities, including shaving ‘with a broken blade and without using soap, only water’. But his habits were not half as shocking as his political views—his ‘vague philosophical absurdities’, as Jinnah put it. Jinnah first became acquainted with Gandhi’s peculiar views the day he urged Jinnah, in all earnestness, to turn his Home Rule League into a recruitment centre for soldiers for the War, assuring him that the British would reward Indians with self-government for this unconditional support.