Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 31

  But except on these public occasions when he wished her to be by his side, he did his own thing, almost ignoring her as was his habit. He had come to London with plenty of plans of his own, although this was supposed to be a holiday with her. But then, she knew how much he hated to ‘waste’ his time, even during holidays. He had, in fact, come to England fully prepared with a scheme that he was sure would topple Gandhi from power by splitting the Khilafatists away from his side. And since this involved getting the British government to grant a few sops to Turkey so that he could lure the Khilafatists away from Gandhi, he was bent on cultivating parliamentarians and newspaper reporters who could put the necessary pressure on their government. Then there was, of course, his old friend, the secretary of state for India, Montagu, to pursue as well; and if there was any time left from all this running around, there were all his newspapers to read.

  It certainly gave her plenty of time alone to brood on their differences, which now seemed to her unbridgeable. It was not really the age gap that bothered her, as others thought, as his old-fogey habits, all the more glaring in this new post-War culture sweeping across Europe, with young people making a swift, clean break from the past and its inhibitions. She, of course, took at once to the new age, recognizing bits of herself in its new culture and embracing the new licence to freedom with all her usual ardour. But Jinnah was by no means ready to give up all that he had worked so hard to cultivate within himself. Having groomed himself with such diligence and persistence during the puritanical Victorian times, he would not give in to the free and easy new age. He refused in his stubborn way to change anything, not even his high, stiff collars or his now quaint habit of an elaborate change of attire for different hours of the day. He was especially horrified by the new craze for dancing and would have forbidden Ruttie from ever taking to the floor if his liberal principles would have permitted. At one gala they attended, for instance, at the residence of a rich Muslim admirer of Jinnah’s, he had to be led away to the billiards room downstairs as soon as the band began to play and couples took to the dance floor, because he could not hear himself talk, and sat in the basement the entire time with a young man for company, talking politics, while Ruttie, who loved to dance, was left in the lurch.

  Going shopping with him was equally exasperating. He had a fussy habit of turning everything over without picking up anything even after spending hours in a shop. He either complained about the poor quality of the cloth or demanded to be shown clothes made before the War. And if he did find a shirt or a collar from pre-War times, he snapped it up, gloating over the bargain price that he had got it for, not caring how hopelessly dated it was. It took enormous effort on her part to make him switch over from his bargain-conscious dressing mode to the fabulously expensive tailor in Paris, at Charves, although she did have her way in the end. She had a hard time even persuading him to keep his hair the way she had insisted he wear it, long and backswept. He grumbled about wanting to cut it short until she had to remind him that it was the condition on which she had accepted him. She, on the other hand, maybe partly because he insisted on being so tiresomely staid and middle-aged, wanted to go to the other extreme, and began to dress in a style that was over-emphatically modish—bare back, a bob cut, paint on her face, long cigarette holder and all—as if to prove that she at least was still young and with-it.

  They were both, in their own ways, lovers of drama, and if he liked to play the ageing Victorian gentleman with his old-world quaintness and his paternal ‘my boy’ and ‘young man’, she too relished her new persona as chic, young, eccentric, gay and frivolous as the fashion demanded. It took her no time at all to convince everyone around her that she was indeed ‘Mad Little Ruttie’, someone who, as Leilamani admiringly put it, was ‘always so unique’. No mean accomplishment, incidentally, in an age when everyone was vying with each other with competing eccentricities in order to be noticed.

  She had met Leilamani when she went to Oxford with Jinnah for his talk at the Majlis. Sarojini’s younger daughter, now studying in a women’s college at Oxford, was overjoyed to see her former idol. Leilamani, of course, could see no trace of that sadness within Ruttie that had disturbed her mother a few weeks earlier. Instead she wrote to Padmaja, saying, ‘Ruttie has arrived looking so childish, naughty and beautiful!’

  Ruttie too was glad to have found a friend to lessen the chill of ‘this marriage ice’, as she later put it. Not content with spending all their holiday in Oxford hanging out with Leilamani and trying not to mind Jinnah’s preoccupation, Ruttie then carried Leilamani along with them to London. The Jinnahs had taken a suite at the Ritz for their two months’ holiday and Leilamani was only too glad to leave her student digs for a while and enjoy a holiday in London at their expense. Jinnah did not seem to mind the new arrangement at all. He went about pursuing his own interests, hardly noticing Ruttie and her friend as they went to town spending his money. As was expected of a surrogate older sister, Ruttie indulged the homesick college girl. ‘She gives me delicious food and stuffs me with lovely things,’ Leilamani exulted. They went shopping together and Leilamani could once more enjoy the thrill of walking on the street with her strikingly beautiful friend. As she wrote to Padmaja on 15 July 1921: ‘Yes, Ruttie is Naughty still but even more charming and lovely than before. It is one of the most amusing and charming occupations to walk down Piccadilly and Bond Street with her and all the dowdy Duchesses and all the young Dukes, all the Nouveaux riches flashing in brilliants and diamonds gaze in delight at this lovely thing and turn and crane their royal necks to see and see her again!’

  The threesome continued even when the Jinnahs moved to Paris on the last leg of their holiday. Ruttie had once again urged Leilamani to join them and all three stayed together in the same hotel, the Claridge’s, with Leilamani only returning to her college when it was time for the Jinnahs to board a steamer back to Bombay. And far from feeling left out, Jinnah found a better way to occupy himself than going around Paris with Ruttie: he sat in their hotel room to write to Montagu, reminding him to set up an appointment for him with the new viceroy, Lord Reading.

  Nor did the journey home bring them any closer. Ruttie, as usual, was confined to her cabin by her violent seasickness, while Jinnah, who had never had any patience with any form of illness in himself or others, promptly left her to her own devices, and stayed absorbed in his future plans. He could see himself playing the mediator’s role in the political crisis he saw looming ahead of them all and the prospect of meeting the viceroy to discuss his scheme made him so eager to reach home that they landed in Bombay a whole week earlier than Ruttie had expected.

  Absence had not made her any fonder of their child. It had been five months since she had left home and child, but on the very day they landed in Bombay, she felt the need to get away again. She fled to the Taj Mahal hotel, planning to spend the day with Sarojini in her suite. But Sarojini was not in. Undeterred, Ruttie decided to come back the following day, expecting to find Sarojini in her suite as usual and taking her welcome very much for granted. She left Sarojini a note, which the latter described dryly as ‘characteristic’. It said: ‘I have come. Tomorrow with just me here at 11 am. Woe to any intruder, man or Mahatma.’

  She didn’t know it as yet but everything had changed while she had been away, including Sarojini herself. Gandhi’s mass movement of non-cooperation had its ups and downs politically, but he had performed a miracle on high society, transforming them both spiritually and culturally. Friends and acquaintances whom Ruttie had known from her garden party days had given up their homes and cars and gold to be auctioned for national funds, and were now filling up jails, considering it an honour to be arrested by the government. Women who used to spend their days partying or shopping had given up their silks and chiffons, making bonfires of their foreign clothes and going from door to door ‘begging’ for funds to run Gandhi’s campaign. Even old Mrs Dadabhoy made the rounds with Mrs Mohammed Ali for collecting funds, as Sarojini proudly reported in
one of her letters. There were other elegant ladies and gentlemen who now prided themselves on running khadi shops or attending spinning classes. Even Lady Petit had succumbed, ‘torn between her accustomed pearls and embroidered georgette and a white khadi sari to attend the national meeting’, as Sarojini put it. So had Ruttie’s friend, Kshama Row, whom she had never rated very highly either in intelligence or commitment. It was as if, unbeknownst to her, everyone she knew had embraced a new faith while she had been away. Sarojini, of course, was among the first to take Gandhi’s ‘Swadeshi vow’ to abjure mill cloth and had switched over to unbleached homespun cotton. Usually the first to poke fun at her beloved idol, the ‘little tyrant’ as she fondly referred to Gandhi, refusing firmly to follow any of his fads and become like the rest of his devotees, she had given up her colourful silk saris and went about looking, in her own words, either like a ‘dhobi’s bundle’ or ‘a wind-blown balloon of white khadi’.

  But the outer change was nothing compared to Sarojini’s inner transformation. Inspired by Gandhi and filled with a new sense of purpose and meaning, she was no longer the easy, laid-back hostess who had turned her hotel rooms into a salon and sanctuary for lost and vagrant souls, welcoming with open arms anyone who turned up at her door, with meals and gossip sessions. For the last five months, Sarojini had been thrust into the centre of Gandhi’s political struggle and her responsibilities now ranged from mediating between the Khilafat and Congress leaders, presiding over public meetings across the country, raising funds to the tune of several million rupees for the Congress, organizing a women’s wing of non-cooperators and holding khadi exhibitions, besides leading marches and boycotts of foreign cloth. She was kept so busy working ‘night and day without food, without sleep’, that, as she wrote to her daughter, the only thing she could be certain about in her day was her morning bath. But she was loving every moment of it, ‘proud and grateful’, as she said, for the ‘privilege to share in the great work’. It hardly made for a frame of mind to receive Ruttie back into her life. Sarojini had, in fact, been dreading Ruttie’s return, as she told Leilamani in a letter dated 10 August 1921: ‘I am glad that Ruttie has been so good [to you]. She is returning here on the 7th September and I am wondering if I shall ever get any work done when she returns!’ As it turned out, much to her dismay, Ruttie landed up even earlier than she was expected, as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja: ‘Ruttie returned last week [28 August 1921]—a whole week earlier than she was expected. And of course she came the very day . . .’

  Another week went by before they could meet. And while both found each other much altered, it was Sarojini who put her feelings down in a letter to Padmaja (undated but obviously written in the first week of September 1921), saying that Ruttie ‘is looking lovely but not in the same radiant and touching fashion. There is something hard and cold about it all—paint, powder, bare back and the rest of it.’ But under the paint, she could still discern the loving Ruttie of Petit Hall days, making her add: ‘And yet at the core of her, she is a wonderful flame of purity and nobility. She loves you, my little girl—and she understands you.’

  It was that core which Ruttie had not quite rid herself of that made her so uneasy with herself. Unable to bear her isolation from the others now absorbed in the national struggle, and tied to Jinnah inextricably by her love and loyalty, she fled every morning to the Taj for some relief from her rising anxiety. To Sarojini’s increasing dismay, Ruttie arrived at her suite every morning at eleven, soon after Jinnah left home for the courts. She hung around there for the rest of the day, refusing to leave until it was time for Jinnah to return home from his chamber. ‘Ruttie takes up her abode here between 11 and 5 regularly and prevents me from doing any work,’ Sarojini complained to Padmaja in a postscript of a letter dated 3 September 1921.

  What made her even more annoyed with the way Ruttie casually dropped in and spent her whole day in her room was that she now had so little time for herself, serving not only as the chief of the Bombay Provincial Congress, which was the hub of all Gandhi’s activities at this stage, but also heading the Swadeshi Sabha that had started dozens of new activities, including as she said in the same letter, ‘Today the Dadabhoy Jayanti . . . [which] for my sins of course I am deeply implicated in the celebrations. Next week I have endless Ganapati puja festivities; and I have been receiving simultaneous “urgent” calls from UP, Punjab, Bihar, Bengal, Central Provinces, Berar, Surat, Gujarat, Kandahar, Maharashtra and Andhra! I leave out Assam and Madras because I have regretted them both!!’

  With that much happening in her own political life, it was easy for even someone as friendly and sympathetic as Sarojini to become somewhat sententious about Ruttie’s idleness, enforced though it was because of being married to Jinnah and sharing the political exile he had brought upon both of them. ‘The Jinnahs are back,’ Sarojini wrote on 9 September 1921 to Syud Hossain, their common friend now living in London, ‘and very out of place in the India of today where there is no room for any kind of slacker. Ruttie spends most of her time here as usual.’ As for Sarojini herself, as she makes a point of mentioning in her letter: ‘I am desperately busy and rather ill—or should I say very ill, but I cannot afford to be a slacker even for an hour. Things are very grave . . .’

  In this new work environment that Gandhi had created even in Bombay’s high society, suddenly giving their lives a new meaning and purpose, even to fall sick was to be guilty of being a ‘slacker’, as Sarojini sternly pointed out to Padmaja when she heard of her illness. ‘No man, no woman today can dare to be a coward, a backslider, a self-centred self-pitying weakling when the very soul of India is at stake,’ she wrote, adding, ‘I know you will do your best to get quite strong and take your share of the work as other girls of your age and your own friends are doing.’

  Given that punishing environment, Sarojini’s suite proved to be the worst place for Ruttie, making her feel resentful and excluded. ‘Ruttie comes nearly everyday,’ Sarojini complained again in her letter to Padmaja the following week, on 19 September 1921, ‘and laments all the people who come to see me. She is in a very restless, hysterical frame of mind and her manners are becoming intolerable.’ And then the unkindest cut of all—‘Poor child,’ Sarojini added condescendingly, ‘she has nothing but her beauty to interest her and how to clothe, or rather, unclothe it artistically!’ It was a measure of how desolate her life had become that she still landed up at Sarojini’s suite every mid-morning, putting herself through the daily torment of watching others bustle about with purpose and importance in Sarojini’s suite which had become the hub of party activities, while she whose passion had been political work from the age of fourteen was forced to stand by, out of it all.

  Understandably, it made her a little insecure, wanting to establish her proprietorial rights over Sarojini, the one friend remaining from her once full life. But Sarojini, instead of understanding, seemed to be running out of patience, and was almost peremptory with her. One day, for instance, Ruttie brought her a gift of an exquisite statue. As a solace perhaps or a cure for her boredom, Ruttie had been tapping her Petit gift for beauty and had become a discriminating collector of antique statues, with an impressive collection of jades, and wanting to give Sarojini something truly exquisite but knowing her habit of carelessly passing on any gift she received either to one of her daughters or a friend, Ruttie made her promise that she would keep this gift for herself. It was a simple thing after all, a young friend yearning in her loneliness for some special connection with her mother figure, and yet, Sarojini, with an insensitivity that was so unlike her, promptly brushed it away, forwarding the gift to Padmaja, with a casual line in her letter saying: ‘You will be wondering at my sudden affluence in statuary. Ruttie gave it to me with the express injunction—which I promptly ignored—that I am not to give to you, Papi, Umar [or] Syud because it would be an insult to her gift and herself.’

  Yet, Ruttie clung to her, despite Sarojini’s severity, needing her desperately in this time of her utter isola
tion. Sometimes, especially when one of her children came to her on a visit, they unwound enough and Sarojini once more caught a fleeting glimpse of the Ruttie she had once adored. ‘Ruttie is getting more and more self-centred and self-worshipful,’ she began in her by now usual tone of disapproval, but suddenly changed tack, recalling Ruttie’s other aspect, which she was apt to forget. ‘And yet she is full of childish charm.’ Her letter to Padmaja, dated 4 October 1921, went on to say: ‘She and Mina play together like two babies and she is altogether natural and simple when she is here . . .’ And Ruttie, as if to establish her claim to somehow become part of the Naidu family and lose her orphaned state, could then make simple demands on her, as one makes at home with one’s own family, without it being misconstrued: ‘By the way Ruttie wants,’ as Sarojini added, ‘one dozen bottles of the tomato sauce to be sent VP to her address.’

  To other people, she could come across as bold and daring and different, ‘a complete minx’, as Lady Reading sniffed, playing the ‘vamp’ in real life. And she could be cutting when she wanted, able to put even a viceroy in his place with her quick-tongued retorts that she had no doubt learnt from that idol of her youth, Oscar Wilde, whose witty epigrams she had been so fond of throwing about, just as Jinnah had sedulously cultivated the speeches of his role model, Edmund Burke. Grown fearless now in the art of inspiring disapproval, and with her impish need to unsettle the sanctimony of the devoutly khadi-clad women around her, she had taken to dressing even more daringly than before, arriving in Sarojini’s suite in transparent gauze saris and backless and sleeveless blouses that she had specially tailored at Emile Windgrove’s, the exclusive European-owned tailor’s shop on Hornby Road. But with Sarojini and her children, she could be her real self, dropping all her armour of paint and camouflage.