Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 30

  What would have touched her the most was that somewhere inside that icy hauteur, there was his boyish determination to prove that he wasn’t beaten yet. The fight had by no means been squashed out of him. In less than three weeks after his Nagpur mauling, he was back for more, literally walking into the lion’s den. He descended on a public meeting addressed by Mohammed Ali and took his seat among the audience, as if he was a nobody. Seeing him, Mohammed Ali took a few potshots at him, making suggestive remarks about people who refused to join Gandhi’s movement because they were afraid to ‘leave law and suffer for the country’. But his courage was never on better display than when he had to stand up to a hostile crowd. It was impossible, of course, to try and cow him down—his very presence, with its natural sense of power and authority, made him impervious to intimidation. In fact, it was he who assumed a tone of condescension, even though he was addressing Mohammed Ali up on the stage while he sat in the audience, calling him ‘young man’ and asking him searching questions on how exactly they proposed to bring in Swaraj within eight months as they were promising to do. Of course, it did not make him any more popular with the crowd but he affected not to care.

  Four weeks later, he was once again inviting the crowd’s wrath upon his head, trying to reason them out of their blind faith in Gandhi. This time he was on the platform, one of the main speakers at a public meeting to commemorate national leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale on his death anniversary. As a well-known friend and admirer of Gokhale’s, the audience was ready to overlook his differences with Gandhi and even gave him a generous round of applause when he took the stage. But it was Jinnah who would not let matters rest. He was bent on bringing up Gandhi’s non-cooperation resolution, trying to explain yet again how disastrous it would be for everyone. He felt it to be his duty to enlighten them, to explain how Gandhi was ‘taking the country to a wrong channel’, and he ignored them when they got restive and broke into cries of ‘No! No!’ Something seemed to drive him on. Nothing mattered more than the public’s love and acclaim, and yet he had to shake them out of their ‘hysteria’.

  At least no one tried to beat him up this time. Other leaders who took on Gandhi, even though they were much more circumspect than Jinnah, were facing a rough time from the public. Annie Besant, whose Home Rule League had started bringing out pamphlets and leaflets against Gandhi’s programme, was not allowed to speak at a public meeting in Bombay. She stood mute on the platform for one whole hour while the crowds shouted, booed and hissed at her and she had to eventually withdraw without being able to say a word. At another anti-non-cooperation meeting held at Bombay’s popular venue, the Excelsior Theatre, the pro-Gandhi crowd got so violent that the main speaker, the Liberal leader Srinivas Sastri, had to escape by the back door. Kanji Dwarkadas, who was then secretary of both Annie Besant’s League and the ‘Anti-Non-Cooperation Committee’ set up by some anti-Gandhi leaders, had the clothes torn off his back in an assault by Gandhi’s supporters.

  Even Jinnah was forced to curb his usual forthrightness when it came to denouncing Gandhi. Public sentiment would simply not allow him to speak out openly against their idol, their ‘Prophet of Ahimsa’, but in his heart, he was seething. In less than twelve months, the political career that he had built up so assiduously over twenty-three years had unravelled in a way he had never thought possible, reducing him to virtually a nonentity. He had been forced to resign his seat in the legislature, walk away from the Home Rule League he had helped build up and quit the Congress as well. He didn’t entirely blame Gandhi for all of it—that would be giving him too much importance. But he did blame the British government, convinced that it was their blunders that were making people desperate enough to fall into Gandhi’s hands. What frustrated him was that between Gandhi and the government, he was stuck in a bind. He could now neither contest for the newly reformed councils—because that would make him look as if he was more pro-British than the other Congress leaders—nor could he take his rightful place in the struggle because he would have to submit to Gandhi’s crazy ideas. There was no way out for him now except to wait until Gandhi’s movement collapsed under the weight of its own absurdities and people lost faith in him. But that was the hardest thing—to merely sit around and do nothing. He had never had a hobby and hated wasting time on holidays.

  It wasn’t easy for Ruttie either. All around her, friends and acquaintances were getting swept away by Gandhi’s movement, galvanized by his call to boycott schools and colleges and government jobs, and join up for national work. It left her feeling more isolated than ever. Within weeks of Gandhi’s call, students were leaving Bombay’s colleges by the hundreds to join up for national service. Her friend Padmaja’s brother Jaisoorya was one of them. ‘Baba [Jaisoorya’s name within the family] has written a pathetic letter of his mental struggle with the wave of non-cooperation that is sweeping over the students of Bombay,’ Padmaja’s father Dr Naidu wrote to his younger daughter in England. ‘He feels that he must give up his college and I agree with him.’ Padmaja herself was so fired up by Gandhi’s programme that she was determined to take up ‘some national work in Delhi or anywhere else’, despite her father’s misgivings about her fragile health. And even though he was afraid for his children, Dr Naidu was equally carried away by the patriotic fervour that had reached everywhere—except South Court, it seemed to Ruttie.

  It made her restless—this sense of a new national spirit stirring up everywhere and the deadness within their own home. She longed to get away from it all, go away somewhere far away where politics would no longer matter, this cruel reminder of what they’d been through already—so resonant of that first expulsion, this sudden inexplicable plunge from Bombay’s most popular political couple to its most reviled. At least then, when both the Parsis and Muslims were up in arms against them, they had their friends; now there was no one, just the two of them it seemed against the whole world which had gone over to Gandhi’s side. And unlike Jinnah, Ruttie had no stomach for more fight; she preferred, indeed dreamt, of starting afresh somewhere far from here, a new life among people who did not know them and wouldn’t judge. But, of course, Jinnah would not hear of it—had he not spent twenty years diligently creating this space for himself in public life, and now to give it up for one man. Others were ready to give up, either falling in line behind Gandhi’s strange new agitational politics, whatever their reservations, or dropping out and returning to their private practice. But not him; he was even more obsessed with the political scene now that he had no part in it, trying to figure out some way of fighting his own insignificance. There was really nothing to keep him in Bombay, with even the high court closed for its two months’ summer break. But he wouldn’t budge; the last thing he wanted was to leave the field wide open to his detractors, unchallenged, while he spent the next four months doing nothing more stimulating than accompanying her on an extended tour of Europe that she had been dreaming about ever since the War ended. Eventually, realizing perhaps that even her coaxing and teasing was not working, she decided to go away by herself, leaving him and the baby.

  Of course, tongues began to wag almost at once. Except for her closest friends, everyone she once used to know in Bombay had been expectantly awaiting news of their inevitable split. Perversely, she wanted to keep them guessing. Her plan, as she airily informed anyone who asked her, was to make her leisurely way via the French Riviera and Monte Carlo to England. ‘Ruttie will be in England soon,’ Padmaja wrote to her sister, Leilamani, in a letter dated only April 1921, by which time Ruttie was already living it up in Monte Carlo, as Padmaja goes on to add: ‘That is, if she does not become penniless at Monte Carlo.’ Nobody knew when Ruttie would return, if at all, and her plans for herself seemed grandiose. As Padmaja wrote: ‘I hear she has great ambitions of acting for the cinema and has some plutantophoric scheme of supporting Jinnah by her earnings as a “vampire”.’ ‘Plutantophoric’, incidentally, is Padmaja’s invented word, a spontaneous creation she came up with by ingeniously welding ‘
plutocrat’ to ‘philanthropic’—a combination word that oddly enough best describes Ruttie’s whole attitude to wealth, or rather, her sudden lack of it, that is, if only she could somehow become rich enough to support Jinnah rather than be dependent on him and suffer his disapproval, voiced or unvoiced, on her excessive spending. But apart from that, Padmaja’s rather elliptical statement is interesting for another reason: why, of all roles in the world, is Ruttie drawn to that of a vampire which is not, as one would assume nowadays, a monster who sucks human blood but the liberated woman of the early 1900s reviled for a similar sin—a man-eating home-wrecker and painted flirt, the irresistible ‘vamp’ of later years, the prototype of the bad girl in the silent film era? Did the role fascinate her, or was there inside her still, the good little girl of Petit Hall fame struggling against this new image of herself as the ‘flapper’ of her time?

  Nor would she say how long her trip was going to last, giving the impression that she was a free woman, unfettered by her marriage. In June, when Ruttie had finally reached England after her long trip to the Riviera and Monte Carlo, Padmaja asked Leilamani: ‘How long is Ruttie going to be in England?’ Presumably for another two months at least, as Padmaja pointed out in her letter: ‘Leila told me that she was going to write and ask her to stick on until she went in August so that they could have a rare old time together—they have become violent chums evidently.’ And adding, because being around Ruttie was always fun, as the two Naidu girls well knew, ‘It will be great luck for you. Give my love to her.’

  But behind her mischievous playacting of a would-be screen vamp, inspired perhaps by the American star Theda Bara, who had already made by then more than three dozen films that made her the world’s most famous ‘vampire’, Ruttie was still very much the devoted wife. She made sure she left Monte Carlo and arrived in London on time to join Jinnah there for his much shorter visit of a few weeks. He had, of course, followed her, as they both knew he would, giving himself a brief respite before resuming his struggle to regain his political clout. Things had only got worse after she had left, forcing him to resign his last public position, as chairman of the board of directors of the Bombay Chronicle. He had to sever all connections with it following a conflict with the Bombay Chronicle’s editor, a certain Picthall, who had been picked personally by Horniman to succeed him, but with whom Jinnah now had sharp differences over his coverage of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, compromising, according to Jinnah, the Bombay Chronicle’s policy of ‘neutrality’. Having sent in his resignation letter, it seemed a good time for Jinnah to take a break. Besides, the trip would give him a chance to reconnect with his political contacts in London. But more to the point, although he could not bring himself to admit it, he missed Ruttie. He had not spent this much time apart from her since their marriage, having, as Kanji later put it in his memoir of Ruttie, ‘no separate existence away from his wife’.

  So effortlessly was she able to slip into her accustomed role as his supportive wife that he had no clue of her growing discontent. Nor did he want to know, happy in his belief that they were, as an old Parsi acquaintance later said of them to Bolitho, ‘two sweethearts’, devoted to each other in their own peculiar way. He could refuse her nothing, no matter how extravagant and unreasonable he thought her demands, although he did grumble about it; and good-humouredly put up with all her teasing, especially about his parsimony. He could be cold and stand-offish with everyone else, but around her he suddenly blossomed into something else, warm and expansive—‘almost human’, as Sarojini put it. She bossed him around and put him down in front of others, teased and cajoled him and indulged her vanity by showing everyone how she could twist him around her little finger, but she too was more attached to him than she let on, attentive in every detail to his comforts in a way that was quite contrary to the emancipated times, especially for someone from her high-society upbringing. She would get up and leave, for example, from wherever she was at exactly five in the evening so that she could get home in time to receive him when he got back from court. And they always had a drink and dinner together, no matter what social engagement she had to skip in order to fall in with his rigid routine. In innumerable ways, she looked after him and made his life comfortable, including choosing his clothes and perfume because she was the only one apart from himself that he could trust to meet his fastidious tastes. He leaned on her, took her everywhere with him and cast little looks at her whenever he made a winning point, as if it was an offering to her. Sometimes her adoration shone out of her eyes, especially on the rare occasions when he relaxed, stretched out his long legs and launched into one of his anecdotes, full of dry humour.

  It was different with the baby, though. With this infant, she felt no need for putting up any show. She simply ignored its existence, as if she was done with playing roles and couldn’t be bothered keeping up appearances. She did her duty by it, as Jinnah expected of her, setting up a nursery for it in a separate wing of the house and assigning its care to a retinue of servants. After that, she never went anywhere near it, leaving the infant entirely to the servants’ care. And although the child was now twenty months old, she refused to even give her a name. In her letters to Padmaja, which were quite frequent at least for the first year of the baby’s birth, there was not even a passing reference to the child although she took care to send Padmaja greetings from all her three dogs in each letter she wrote to her. This was all so incomprehensible, so unlike the Ruttie before her marriage that no one, not even a friend as loyal and sympathetic as Padmaja, knew what to make of it. Padmaja dropped in at South Court after Ruttie had left on her grand tour, and her heart went out to the lonely child for whom neither of its two parents seemed to have any time. ‘Her little baby is one of the most pathetic, heart-breaking things I have ever seen,’ Padmaja wrote to Leilamani in her letter of April 1921. ‘I simply cannot understand Ruttie’s attitude—I do not blame her as most people here seem to do, but whenever I remember the little dazed, scared child, like some mortally hurt animal, I come very near hating Ruttie in spite of my great affection for her.’

  Jinnah was still around in Bombay then, not yet having left to join Ruttie in London. But his presence could have made little difference to his infant daughter even when he was home, considering his own preoccupations. Nor did he spare his time for her dogs that she had left behind, including Arlette who she usually took with her no matter where she went. The thought of caring for a dog in a hotel in Monte Carlo, and that too without an attendant, had probably deterred her from carrying Arlette along. But they were missing her even more than her baby, as Padmaja wrote: ‘Loafer and Arlette and Bolshie were delirious with joy and excitement at seeing a friendly face and nearly overwhelmed me with greetings when I went there,’ adding: ‘Poor little Arlette has grown quite matronly and has quite lost her slim figure.’

  But this daring attempt to unshackle herself from her domestic fetters hardly seems to have helped. After having got her own way and apparently living out her life’s dream of the free and modern woman—travelling around Europe without husband or baby—Ruttie seemed no more at peace than before. ‘I had a brief and wistful letter from Ruttie,’ as Sarojini wrote to Leilamani on 11 June 1921. ‘She seems so hungry and restless and I think she needs me as much as Bebe does, only in a different way.’ But with Gandhi keeping Sarojini so busy that she had no time to visit her dear ‘Bebe’, as Padmaja was called by her family and friends, or even call her to Bombay, where was she to find the time for Ruttie’s angst, inexplicable as it seemed to her impatient soul. Having grown more pragmatic with age, Sarojini was almost in a fever of irritation with Ruttie’s ‘clamouring for freedom’, as she later put it, especially the way she had abandoned her baby for it.

  Sarojini had hardly seen Ruttie since the baby’s arrival. When the Jinnahs returned from England with their two-month-old, Sarojini had remained stationed there for another year and a half, taking on the role of a political and cultural ambassador for the Congress. She had re
turned to India only around the time Ruttie was setting off for Europe again, shockingly ‘minus Jinnah and Baby’, as she put it. But with both Ruttie and Jinnah now away in Europe, Sarojini dropped in at South Court to see how it was doing in their absence. The baby had just returned from Ooty where Jinnah had packed her off for the summer with the servants. And had returned to Bombay that very day with her retinue, as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja to say. ‘I went to see the Jinnah baby this morning,’ she wrote in her undated letter. ‘It returned from Ooty in its pathetic servant-fostered loneliness. It looked so sweet, fresh from its bath. I stayed and played a little with it, poor little pet.’ Then she added: ‘I could beat Ruttie whenever I think of her child.’ But in another letter, dated 5 July 1921, to Leilamani, evidently written on the same day as her previous one to Padmaja, she was a little more reconciled to what Ruttie had done: ‘I went to see Ruttie[’s] baby today. She has just returned from Ooty. She was looking sweet and happy. The dogs too are well.’ And in a curt message to the errant mother, she added: ‘Tell Ruttie I’d love to beat her but that I love her in spite of all her wickedness.’

  But with Jinnah, there was no abandoning the role Ruttie had so lovingly and conscientiously donned since her wedding day, the ever-dutiful wife, accompanying him wherever he spoke. There she was, by his side, silent and approving and beautiful, just as he liked her to be—first on 20 June, at the Connaught Rooms in London where Jinnah was the chief speaker at a public meeting organized by the ‘India and Near East Bureau’. Their friend Horniman, still waiting patiently for the government to return his confiscated passport, was there too, in a show of solidarity that must have pleased Jinnah. And she went with Jinnah to Oxford too where he addressed the Indian students’ debating society, the Majlis. And also to the reception held in his honour by the Indian community. Evidently his unpopularity at home had not affected his image abroad.