Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  But to those few who knew him closely—and Jaisoorya’s mother, Sarojini, was one of those whose admiration for Jinnah was so great that some even misconstrued it as an infatuation on her part—it was easier to understand why a romantic, impressionable young woman could fall in love with Jinnah. ‘Never was there a nature whose outer qualities provided so complete an antithesis of its inner worth,’ was how Sarojini felt about Jinnah, drawing an unusual portrait of him in a collection of his speeches published a couple of years later. ‘Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emaciation, languid and luxurious of habit, Mohamed Ali Jinnah’s attenuated form is the deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance. Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and imperious of manner, the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve but masks, for those who know him, a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman’s, a humour gay and winning as a child’s. Pre-eminently rational and practical, discreet and dispassionate in his estimate and acceptance of life, the obvious sanity and serenity of his worldly wisdom effectually disguise a shy and splendid idealism which is the very essence of the man.’

  And no one thrilled to this hidden side of the real Jinnah more than Ruttie, who had not only known Jinnah well since she was a child but had nursed a calf love for him at least since she was twelve or thirteen. He was only three years younger than her father and, like Sir Dinshaw, belonged wholly to the Victorian era both in his dress and manners—but there the resemblance ended. Unlike the stocky and very middle-aged baronet, it would have occurred to no one to describe Jinnah as an old man. With his slim, graceful five-foot-eleven figure, neatly combed black hair, silvering at the temples, his quick, sharp movements and a classically handsome face with sharply etched features and Grecian profile, he too was a head-turner, like Ruttie. ‘If you came across him on the street, you were bound to be mesmerized. It was the way he carried himself, the way he walked, the immaculate manner in which he dressed, his handsome face,’ as a young man who met Jinnah years later, K.H. Khurshid, put it. And then there was the personal charm and the dry sense of humour with which he could hold a drawing room captive when he was in the mood. His stories of arriving in England, hopelessly adrift in an alien culture, which he had never shared before, would have especially delighted Ruttie. The story, for instance, of finding a hot water bottle on his bed on his first night in an English boarding house and, when his feet touched it in the dark, how he flung it out of the bed, terrified. ‘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.”’ Others had experienced the hypnotic effect that Jinnah could have in the company of those he liked—that ‘stretching of his long legs to the full limits of comfort’ as he prepared to launch on an anecdote ‘in slow, measured and dramatic tones’; the surprisingly sweet smile, the dry wit and the fund of good stories. And given her sheltered life, Ruttie was even more susceptible than most.

  It’s harder to tell what spell Ruttie cast on him. She was enchanting, of course, and delightfully informal, lively, high-spirited and full of jokes, and the toast of high society for her beauty and breeding, but she was hardly Jinnah’s type. That is, if he had a type at all, for he had so far been immune to feminine charm of any kind, preferring to spend his time at parties talking politics with men. He did not ignore them, of course, paying them elaborate and formal courtesies, especially the older women who seemed to him less threatening. Despite his popularity, with his dashing good looks and elegance of dress, he was never as easy in their company as he was with men, having grown up in an environment where men and women did not mingle with each other unless they were family. Added to that was his habitual coldness and reserve that made even men like his junior Chagla dislike him intensely. ‘But these obvious outer qualities are like a crust hiding the real man of which (or should it be whom? Being so impersonal an entity my grammar gets rather mixed in relation to him!) you may never get a glimpse,’ Sarojini once wrote to Chagla in Jinnah’s defence when the former wrote a newspaper article portraying Jinnah in an unflattering light. ‘I think you have done a capital impressionist sketch of him—monocle, audacity and all. Someday I hope you will find yourself being a friend of the “lonely man who habitually breathes the rarefied air of the colder regions”. There you will find, as those of us who are fortunate enough to know him intimately have discovered long ago—that the spiritual flower that blossoms within colder regions have [sic] a beauty and charm denied to the flora that flower in the warmer valleys of the common human temperament. But I confess you do need a fur coat now and then in the course of your botanical expeditions in these frigid regions!!’

  Fortunately for Ruttie, she never felt the need for that fur coat, even in her early girlhood. Sensing perhaps her adoration for him, Jinnah had always let down his guard with his friend’s young daughter. No one else in his life could draw Jinnah out as effectively as Ruttie, using her entrancing mix of ‘coaxing and teasing’ to make him talk, and even laugh at himself. Many of the personal details of his life that were to soon find themselves in the short biography Sarojini wrote as an introduction to his maiden book, a collection of his speeches, was stuff she had got second-hand, from talking to Ruttie, personal details like being raised ‘in careless affluence and adored by his family’ in Karachi; sent to England as ‘a tall thin boy in a funny long yellow coat’; his lack of a university education; his family’s financial ruin and how he ‘set out to conquer the world equipped with nothing but the charmed missiles of his youth, his courage and his ambition’. He had not shared these with Sarojini, despite her affection and admiration for him. Sarojini, of course, did not reveal how she got to know so much about Jinnah which he had never once talked about to any of his friends, but she did acknowledge that the verse on the opening page of the book, Mohammad Ali Jinnah: An Ambassador of Unity, published in the same month that he got married, in 1918, was chosen by Ruttie, and not her. Ruttie felt these five lines by William Morris best described Jinnah, being both his motto and his song, and Sarojini, who admired him almost as much as Ruttie, could not help agreeing:

  By thine own Soul’s law learn to live

  And if men thwart thee take no heed,

  And if men hate thee have no care,

  Sing thou thy song and do thy deed,

  Hope thou thy hope and pray thy prayer.

  But the gossips seemed to have got their dates and places a little mixed up. It was true that Jinnah had asked Sir Dinshaw for his daughter’s hand in marriage and was rejected most rudely, but it did not happen in the summer of 1916, nor in Darjeeling, as rumour had it. In the summer of 1916, Ruttie was indeed at a hill station with her parents but the place they were at was Mahabaleshwar and not Darjeeling. And Jinnah did spend that summer in her close vicinity but never once tried to meet her or her parents. He was caught up instead in Poona where he spent the bulk of his summer holiday appearing in court on a defamation case filed by his close friend, Benjamin Guy Horniman, the editor of the Bombay Chronicle, who had been accused by a rival paper of homosexual relationships with the young lads in his employ at his home. Horniman being an important political associate and close friend since his student days in London—they had, in fact, even worked together once briefly in a drama troupe—Jinnah had readily sacrificed his entire summer vacation to appear in the Poona court on his behalf. But he did not take advantage of being within driving distance of Mahabaleshwar to go meet Ruttie or call on her parents. This was hardly surprising because his friendship with Sir Dinshaw had abruptly terminated over a year ago, following close on the heels of his romance with Ruttie, just as the gossips said.

  The romance had, in fact, blossomed in Poona in the Christmas holidays of 1914 when Jinnah spent the winter with his great friend, the Parsi nationalist and lawyer Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who owned a second home in Poona. Jinnah and Horniman often spent their holidays with Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who though older than them, enjoyed t
heir company. All three of them being bachelors then, who loved to have a good time drinking and talking, were somewhat envied by those outside their close circle, with one contemporary, K.L. Gauba, even describing them as ‘painting the town red’ as a threesome. That winter, the Petits also spent the Christmas holidays in their home in Poona, their ‘monsoon resort’, as Ruttie called it, not as large as Petit Hall but where they entertained equally lavishly. And where Jinnah had plenty of time and opportunity to fall for Ruttie. She was then nearly fifteen, just coming out of her schoolgirl phase and already a celebrated beauty in the exclusive circles her parents moved in. What would have made her even more irresistible to Jinnah was the way she ignored her many young admirers and wanted to spend time only with him. She was unlike any other young lady in their fashionable Parsi circle, with her wide reading, her poetic temperament and passionate interest in politics. And Jinnah undoubtedly was a different man on this holiday, giving Ruttie a chance to see him at his most human and charming. The Petits, being extremely fond of amateur dramatics, would have surely tried to rope Jinnah into their performances, with his talent for dramatic reading, and he would most likely have joined in gladly, giving Ruttie a glimpse of this other side to him which people rarely saw. The Petits were also enthusiastic riders, taking their horses with them on holidays, and this was another area in which Jinnah outshone everyone, horse riding being the only outdoor activity he enjoyed and the only other sport he played besides billiards. All this holiday activity gave them plenty of opportunity to meet both indoors and outdoors, without rousing any suspicions on Ruttie’s parents’ part. And it is quite possible that it was his older Parsi friend, Sir Pherozeshah, who was a liberal through and through, unwilling to recognize the realities of communal and age divides—he himself married very late, in his fifties, in fact just six months before his death—who may have encouraged Jinnah to approach Sir Dinshaw with his proposal. For, Jinnah, for all his vaunted self-confidence, would probably have not had the temerity to go to Sir Dinshaw on his own, unaccustomed as he was to giving in to his feelings.

  Jinnah had known Ruttie from her childhood, of course—on the day she was born, 20 April 1900, he was appointed a magistrate in the Bombay Presidency and at least since then knew the Petits, and moved in the same circles. But so far he had treated her in a strictly avuncular way, winning a large place in her schoolgirl heart with his charm and total lack of condescension when talking to her, as if she was his equal. And even as his fame grew as a lawyer and politician, he continued to engage with her in discussions about politics and national matters that she was passionate about while growing up. And influenced by him no doubt, she preferred to accompany her aunt Hamabai Petit, the famous philanthropist and millionairess and her father’s only sibling, to all his public lectures instead of more standard girlish pursuits; she would sit patiently through the hours-long speeches that would have scared away most people her age. It was what made her so fascinatingly unlike any other young lady just out of the schoolroom, with little or no interest in dressing up or flirting with her many admirers. Unaffected by the attentions of a long line of young suitors, Ruttie could laugh at them and put her interest in politics and national developments over them. She read the newspapers carefully and was better informed about the world than most men double her age. ‘She was a great nationalist, intensely interested in the political developments in the country and in the personal element of the political life in India,’ as her lifelong admirer, Kanji Dwarkadas, was to discover a few years later: ‘Ruttie was a great intellectualist, well informed, well read and balanced in her judgement of men and women and events but gifted with the curiosity of a research student.’ Jinnah had always been attracted to young persons who stood up to him, and in Ruttie he found a fierce sense of independence matching his own and a charming irreverence all her own, able to take on princes and viceroys as her equals.

  The aftermath of that winter holiday seems to have had its impact on Ruttie’s health. Nine months after Sir Dinshaw practically kicked Jinnah out of his house, Ruttie was back in Poona, laid up in bed recovering from an unnamed surgery, as her letter to Sarojini’s daughter, Padmaja, shows. The letter, datelined—true to Ruttie’s characteristic fuzziness about dates—‘Eagle’s Nest, Poona ??th Sept.15’, is evidently Ruttie’s belated reply to a letter Padmaja wrote inquiring politely after Ruttie’s health, post surgery. It was the sort of thing Sarojini insisted her daughters do—reach out to persons they had never met, especially if they were around the same age. Sarojini had, in fact, tried to encourage the two girls to write to each other regularly because, apart from being the same age, she felt a pen friendship would benefit them both, giving Ruttie someone her own age to talk to instead of constantly being in the company of people who were double her age or older. And giving Padmaja, the most dearly loved of her four children, some much-needed exposure to high society through a friend as cultured and kind as Ruttie, and helping her emerge out of her shell. The two girls were only eight months apart in age but with very different temperaments. Unlike the self-assured and well-travelled Ruttie who felt perfectly at home in her parents’ cosmopolitan circle of friends and was accustomed to being treated as an adored beauty with a mind of her own, Padmaja was a shy and retiring girl, attending a boarding school in Panchgani with her little sister, Leilamani. At first, the enchanting heiress from Bombay and the shy, plain schoolgirl exchanged the occasional desultory letter, polite and distant with each other as etiquette demanded. But around the time of Ruttie’s surgery, when she was fifteen and a half, Ruttie began to show a little more interest in this unknown daughter of her friend. How much this may have had to do with her being laid up in bed in their monsoon resort in Poona, cut off from the social whirl of Bombay because of the surgery, and how much with Ruttie’s yearning to find someone to whom she could confide her heartache, is difficult to guess. She was certainly closer to Sarojini than to her daughter, even though Sarojini was around her mother’s age.

  Ruttie had taken instantly to Sarojini since the day the poetess came to stay with them as a house guest in Petit Hall when Ruttie was only thirteen. She had never before met anyone like Sarojini: unconventional, with an utter lack of prejudice, and playful and curious, and a famous poetess at that. Overruling her mother, Ruttie insisted that their eminent guest sleep in a bedroom next to hers rather than in one of the suites in an independent wing of Petit Hall where guests were usually put up. Already reaching the height of her fame as a published poet and a fiery public speaker, Sarojini had a lively sense of humour and a deep sympathy for the young. What made her even more fascinating for Ruttie was that Sarojini had also fallen in love at fourteen with a young man who was a doctor in the Nizam’s army but whom her parents had disapproved of because he was not a Bengali Brahmin like themselves, but came from a non-Brahmin Telugu family. To understand how mature teenaged Indian girls were compared to their British counterparts, English poet Edmund Gosse had this to say about Sarojini at sixteen: ‘She was already marvellous in mental maturity, amazingly well-read and far beyond a Western child in all her acquaintance with the world.’ At nineteen, having endured her father’s fury, a nervous breakdown and three years’ exile in England, Sarojini was finally allowed to marry the man of her own choosing. Whether it was Sarojini’s unconventional life story, or the fact that she too was a warm admirer of Jinnah, or her poet’s empathy with the young and rebellious, the friendship between the mother of four (then in her thirties) and the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Petits was instant and mutual. On that first trip itself, Sarojini wrote home to her daughters in such high praise of Ruttie that they for quite some time both overawed by and resentful of Ruttie and the special place she had won for herself in their mother’s heart. ‘God bless her, when does Mother think of coming, I should like to know!!’ exclaims Leilamani in one letter to Padmaja, resenting being left alone in Hyderabad while Sarojini is in Bombay staying with the Petits. ‘I suppose she is too taken up with Ruttie’s lips—or is it
her low necked satin blouse—and her “mummas” and “aunties”.’

  But in this letter, marking a departure from the polite distance they had kept till then from each other, Ruttie seems eager to reach out to the schoolgirl she had not met yet. Making light of her surgery and the attention being lavished on her post surgery—with several doctors, nurses and a governess dancing attendance on her, but no mention of either parent being there—Ruttie writes: ‘I have been having rather a dull time of it owing to “my operation”, doesn’t it sound swanky, Eh! The old doctors and wise grown-ups with all their experience take very great care I don’t strain myself in any way possible. I have quite a number of ’em keeping “an eye” on me, the other is at the owner’s disposal.’

  Ruttie’s mother only crops up in the letter when Ruttie mentions her plans to accompany her to Simla after recovering from her surgery: ‘Mamma and I are going with Aunty Bhickai and a friend to Simla. We leave on the 30th and return by the 1st Nov. to Bombay.’ So far, Ruttie has shown no disinclination to trail behind her mother, part of Bombay’s perpetually partying fashionable circle, travelling in a flock from one fashionable spot to the other, depending on the season. But for the first time, Ruttie seems wistful for a girlfriend her own age. She had her three brothers to whom she was quite close, leading them in boisterous games and playing jokes on the grown-ups, and going riding with them. But now that she was grown up, she felt the need for a confidante and a friend her own age. ‘I would really very much like to see you and I hope that you will be with your mother on her next visit to Bombay,’ her letter says, adding: ‘I wish you would send me a photo.’ And then afraid of scaring off her friend by her unconventionality, she asks with a touching eagerness to please: ‘Have you a very very strong objection to slang? I hope not, for I might shock you.’