Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  It helped, of course, that Sarojini knew her so well and refused to be shocked, even willing, to Ruttie’s great delight, to join her in making fun of the great Mahatma who had taken over both their lives, in such different ways, casting one as his loyal but still healthily sceptical lieutenant and the other into the lifelong perdition of exile, bringing out all her spirit of defiance.

  By October 1921, both Ruttie and Gandhi seemed to have perfected their sartorial style, meant equally to shock and to set standards. As Sarojini put it with her unique mixture of reverence and irreverence where the Mahatma was concerned: ‘Bombay has another epidemic on at present—an epidemic of leaders. They are pouring in today from all parts of India because Manucci [Sarojini’s nickname for Gandhi] the Greater than Buddha is here and has summoned or summonsed us to an informal gathering of the Clan to plan our future work and play. He is a heroic and pathetic figure,’ she wrote in her letter to Padmaja on 4 October 1921. ‘He arrived minus cap, coat and half his dhoti. He has only a big piece of loincloth around his waist tied on with a string,’ and added dryly: ‘I told him that the only fit companion from the point of view of quantity not quality of clothes was Ruttie!!’

  But there was no denying Ruttie’s sense of style, no matter how much they might sniff at her, covertly measuring her up, fascinated by her originality and unerring good taste. They envied her, especially in an era when Gandhi was conspiring, as Sarojini once complained, to impose ugliness and drabness on the whole world, with only Ruttie standing out, defiantly stunning, amidst the dowdily khadi-clad or frumpily over-clad ladies of her time. So admired was her style and beauty, especially among the royalty, that one admirer among them—the Spanish-born rani of Kapurthala—openly sought Ruttie out to ask for tips on what to wear, even giving Ruttie a free hand to give her a complete makeover, including sharing tips on how to wear jewellery to create her unique style—using elaborate nose ornaments, for example, as earrings or a diamond necklace as a tiara, adding an exotic ‘oriental’ touch that was especially appreciated by the artists and photographers roaming Bombay in search of the picturesque and aesthetic. In fact, Ruttie even lent her own sari and jewellery for a photo shoot the rani had for the English magazine, the Tatler, even though the rani’s own collection of jewellery, specially ordered from Cartier’s by her doting husband, the maharaja of Kapurthala, was said to be fabulous, even by royal standards. ‘By the way,’ as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 19 September 1921, ‘I am sending you a copy of the Tatler with the Spanish Rani’s picture in it, dressed in Ruttie’s black and gold embroidered sari and jewels.’

  It was an odd friendship for Ruttie to strike up with this ‘Spanish Rani’, a low-born, almost illiterate flamenco dancer called Anita Delgado who at the age of sixteen bewitched the maharaja, Jagatjit Singh, of Kapurthala. The prince then pursued her for another two years, had her groomed in Paris at his expense, and at the age of eighteen, brought her home as his fifth wife. But she, after bearing him a son, felt increasingly stifled in the marriage and cast adrift in an alien world, eventually managed to make her escape sixteen years later. If there was any call of a kindred spirit, it did not seem to have struck a deep chord, and apart from lending her sari and jewels, and occasionally playing her stylist, Ruttie did not feel she shared anything in common with the rani and they never became close friends. Except, they were once again thrown together three years later at the Savoy Hotel in London, when according to at least one biographer of Delgado, Jinnah was obliged to be the mediator between the enraged prince and the rani because of an adventure she had the previous night, leading to their separation.

  Playacting as a vamp or not, as the mood took her, and regardless of her disenchantment with Jinnah’s staid habits of mind and temperament, Ruttie’s sense of loyalty and duty to him never wavered. In November, when Jinnah finally got his appointment with Lord Reading as Montagu had promised him, and he was invited to Delhi to explain his scheme to the viceroy, Ruttie went along with him regardless of what she might have privately felt about such formalities, and calmly endured Lady Reading’s disapproval, however unexpressed—‘she had less on in the day time’, as the vicereine later observed in a letter, ‘than anyone I have ever seen’. Nor was she overly deferential to the viceroy, in fact, a little too irreverent. But in this their temperaments—Jinnah’s and hers—were in perfect consonance. He, too, was temperamentally disinclined to try too hard to please. At lunch where she was seated next to the viceroy, she proceeded to snub him in her insidious way. According to their friend Kanji, who wrote about it later in his memoir of Ruttie, Lord Reading raised the subject of how much he wished to go to Germany but couldn’t go there. Then she asked him, ‘Your Excellency, why can’t you go there?’ Reading replied, ‘The Germans do not like us, the British, so I can’t go.’ Ruttie then quietly asked him, ‘How then did you come to India?’ Reading is said to have immediately changed the subject. It would have been the kind of thing Jinnah would have said—or at least wished he had.

  It turned out to be a waste of time for all concerned. While the viceroy was just as keen as Jinnah to end Gandhi’s non-cooperation, he was neither willing to trust Jinnah to be the go-between nor willing to make substantial sacrifice to achieve what Jinnah proposed.

  Mercifully, it was a short trip and when she reached home, there was some good news that seemed to make up for all the wifely duties and constrictions of the past few months. Padmaja was coming to Bombay for a few days, on her mother’s suggestion, taking a break from her duties in Hyderabad as a birthday treat to herself. It was a chance, at least for a few days, to forget all the political divisions and bitterness and be herself at last. What excitement, what planning! ‘Ruttie is planning all sorts of things for you when you come,’ as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 8 November 1921, reminding her again to ‘bring Ruttie’s tomato sauce also!’

  But it was not to be. Duty called again. Padmaja arrived in Bombay in the same week that the Prince of Wales landed for his month-long visit. And with his arrival, politics seized them by the throat again. The prince was greeted by a big bonfire of foreign cloth as the Congress held a demonstration as planned. But the plans went awry, with riots erupting on the streets, and some of the protesters targeting Parsis and anyone else dressed in foreign clothes. The rioting and violence embarrassed the government but it affected Gandhi even more, devastating him with the failure of his call for non-violence. To his political rivals, including Jinnah, this was the moment they had been waiting for all these months, when Gandhi would be forced to admit defeat and retreat from the political scene. Sarojini tried to stop some of the protesters and got hit on the head with a stick, and Padmaja was hastily recalled to Hyderabad by her concerned father, while Ruttie took her place next to Jinnah at the round of official receptions held for the prince, putting paid to their innocent holiday plans.

  Jinnah, bending over backwards to prove that the Congress boycott of the prince’s visit served no useful purpose, made a point of attending every official function connected with the visit, of course, taking Ruttie along with him. It was the sort of thing that her mother would have enjoyed, to not only meet the prince on so many occasions but to actually sit next to him and even exchange a few words with him. But to Ruttie, that irreverent soul who liked ‘to offend genteel proprieties’, as Bolitho put it, it meant nothing more than enduring the tedium of long evenings spent in exchanging meaningless words and courtesies, but so strong was her sense of duty that she did not cry off from any of those many functions, even earning herself a favourable mention from the historian of the royal tour. ‘. . . I was interested to see how quickly Mr Jinnah and the Prince came to understand one another,’ the historian, Rushbrook Williams, later recalled. ‘Mr Jinnah and his beautiful wife, Ruttie, met the Prince on many occasions; I am sure that the Prince learned much from them, while on their part they were impressed by his unfeigned interest in India and her people.’

  But that too mercifully was eventually over and the following month t
here was another fleeting moment when she could forget that she was Mrs Jinnah and be herself. Once more it was when one of Sarojini’s children was visiting her, this time not Padmaja, but her younger brother, Ranadheera. Mina had always been a favourite with Ruttie and on this visit she was in particularly high spirits, perhaps feeling unconstrained for the first time in months. Sarojini, who was in the middle of writing her fortnightly letter to Leilamani at college in Oxford, left a graphic description of the scene of Ruttie cavorting around the room in an old sari, mimicking the Mahatma in a loincloth. ‘The little wretch Ruttie half-clad in one of my cast-off garments, eating cake, is using abusive language and preventing me from writing to you,’ Sarojini says in the letter dated 14 December 1921. In her general exuberance, brought on by the rare joy of spending time alone in Sarojini’s rooms with no others except Mina and Sarojini’s younger brother, Rana, Ruttie snatched the letter away from Sarojini before she could complete it and added her own postscript: ‘Your mother is begging me to return the sari which she gave me two years ago—but since it is sufficient to cover but half of my sacred being—it would hardly be worthwhile to make the sacrifice, since it wouldn’t do for an All India Khaddar to gag around with nothing to cover her co-operation.’

  But there was no more horsing around after this. Political events took over their lives entirely, leaving no room for any personal indulgence—or that is what Jinnah would have liked her to believe. He himself had ignored the humiliation he had faced in the last Congress session at Nagpur and decided to attend this year-end’s session in Ahmedabad. He felt he had to intervene in the political impasse between the non-cooperators and the government. The government, in its anxiety to avoid any embarrassment during the prince’s visit, had sent a feeler through the former Congress president Madan Mohan Malaviya, offering to hold a round table conference to discuss all political demands if Gandhi called off his agitation. And Jinnah, unable to sit still and watch as Gandhi squandered a golden opportunity, took himself to Ahmedabad for the party conclave, regardless of how he felt personally about Gandhi or the rest of the Congress leaders. And, of course, she went along, eager to be of some use to him.

  Once they got there, there was not much for her to do except stand by and watch Jinnah get down to the business of persuading the Congress to deal with the government. What this, in fact, meant was trying to get Gandhi to the negotiating table, since after his non-cooperation movement, there was no more Congress, only Gandhi. In his eagerness not to lose this opportunity, Jinnah even went along with Malaviya to Gandhi’s ashram, something he had never done before, only to try and persuade Gandhi to see sense. But Gandhi, beneath his gentle demeanour, could be just as obdurate as Jinnah when it came to giving up his dearly held principles, and having failed to bring him around to their ways of thinking, Malaviya and Jinnah then focused their energy on the other Congress leaders, getting them together for an informal meeting to discuss the developments. It was a hectic time, with the Muslim League Council meetings to steer as well, and it seemed on all those four or five days they spent in Ahmedabad that any moment they were about to make a significant breakthrough.

  This breathless sense of anticipation that something crucial was just about to happen pursued them to Bombay. Jinnah had come up with a plan he thought would help resolve the political impasse that Gandhi had thrust them all into with his impractical programme. There was suddenly a new energy around, not just in Jinnah but in their home as well, buzzing with the plans that Jinnah was making to call an all-party meeting in Ambalal Sarabhai’s home in Bombay. His plan, as he told Ruttie and their friend Kanji, was to rope in leaders of various fractured groups of nationalists to bring pressure to bear on Gandhi so that he would agree to make peace with the government.

  All through this period of renewed hope and activity, Ruttie was there, by his side, effortlessly filling in as sounding board, organizer of potluck dinners to facilitate his plan, enthusiastic participant of all-night political sessions, his cheerleader and acolyte rolled into one. And then suddenly, as if in reprisal for not heeding that restlessness and wistfulness within her that Sarojini had noticed six months ago, she collapsed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  For two nights in a row, she was the young Ruttie Petit again, eager to merge into him, share his passion, sitting up all night smoking and drinking and talking politics.

  He was excited now that he had something concrete to do; she was carried away, seeing freedom at last from the British yoke, not in some dim future but around the corner, in the next few months. At last he could see his way out of the mess that Gandhi had made for all of them. He must gather all the nationalists together and they would force the viceroy to call a round table conference, putting an end to this political impasse once and for all. Gone were the irritations of the last three years, his cold withdrawals and refusal to engage and her chafing at his fixed, old-fogey ways. He was the old J once more, eager to talk, and she listened with all her heart. They were at last one, on the same plane, not two widely disparate temperaments that she had despaired of ever bringing together.

  And best of all, there had been an outsider, someone young and charming and male, to bring out all that was best in J, keeping him talking all night. It was Kanji, who dined with them two nights in a row. The first evening he had dropped in uninvited, wanting to be the first to give them the stunning news: that the government had offered Gandhi what any politician in India would have killed for—a round table conference to arrive at a political settlement. But incredibly, Gandhi had turned down the offer without consulting anyone. Jinnah was astounded at this new instance of Gandhi’s idiocy and the discussion on why and what this meant went on till three in the morning. And the next day Kanji came back again, this time on both their invitation, and the three of them talked once more till four in the morning.

  But on the third day, Ruttie collapsed. Her stomach caved in without warning. As a child she had been prone to bilious attacks, occasionally gripped by stomach cramps and nausea, unable to stir out of bed. But in Petit Hall there had been nurses and nannies and governesses to keep an eye on her, along with her overanxious mother, restraining her from eating too many sweets or fried and spicy food and even from getting too highly strung. But she had always been impatient of their restrictions and for the last four years had thrown all the old restraints away, living exactly how she pleased, making do, like J, with three or four hours of sleep a day. But lacking his iron control over himself, her body collapsed, unable to take the abuse any more, retaliating against the chain-smoking, drinking and serial late nights and eating the spicy food that she craved, sometimes even making Jinnah climb out of the car to fetch her a plate of chaat from a roadside eatery or going by herself to dubious shops selling kababs.

  It was bad timing. Jinnah’s conference, which was going to bring together nationalists from all over the country, was less than two weeks away. Worse, it was going to be held in their own house and she was not well enough to take part in it. Her body simply refused to move, overcome by sudden fatigue. All through the two weeks leading up to the conference and during the conference itself, while Jinnah was caught up drafting the agenda and sending letters to the viceroy’s secretary and trying to keep the conference going, Ruttie was lying upstairs in her bed, too ill to stir. It was the beginning of an illness that puzzled everyone, including the doctors, having no known cause but devastating in its effects.

  At first, neither she nor Jinnah took it seriously, thinking it would pass. It was Sarojini who was the first to grow alarmed at Ruttie’s state. Accustomed to seeing her every day, spending the hours while Jinnah was at work in her suite at the Taj, Sarojini began to miss her constant presence that she had so often chafed at. ‘Ruttie is ill,’ she wrote to Padmaja on 9 January 1922. And four days later, on 13 January, a day before Jinnah’s conference was about to start: ‘Ruttie has been very ill, poor child! I have not seen her for a week.’

  The conference ended in a fiasco, with Gandhi pla
ying hot and cold, raising his demands so unreasonably high that the viceroy withdrew his tempting offer. But even after that, Jinnah stubbornly refused to acknowledge that all his efforts had come to nothing even after weeks of the conference ending: it had collapsed on the last day under the weight of its own contradictions. He continued to bombard the viceroy with official letters, sending him the minutes of the conference, chasing Gandhi at his ashram, anything to get the government to renew its round table offer. Her illness was the last thing on his mind; he, who hardly remembered to eat or sleep and was impatient of all weakness, even in himself, how could he even pretend concern for what seemed to him mere self-indulgence? Outwardly at least, there seemed little wrong with her other than what he took to be her lack of willpower in not overcoming that restlessness and fatigue and lack of appetite or whatever it was that was keeping her from resuming her duties by his side as she would have surely done. It took a whole month before it even occurred to him to call a doctor.

  Not that the doctor really knew what was ailing her. The symptoms—sleeplessness, restlessness and a deep, utter fatigue when she could hardly lift herself up—were common enough, afflicting thousands of well-to-do women like her, judging by the advertisements for ‘liver tonics’ splashed in leading English dailies of the time. In addition to these mysterious ‘women’s disorders’ to which doctors could not quite fix a name and yet were unwilling to admit ignorance of, there was Ruttie’s acute abdominal pain and bouts of high fever to confound the doctors further. Depression, though common enough, especially among the young and idle, was not something that doctors in India had as yet learnt to take seriously or knew how to handle. A few years ago, for instance, when Sarojini’s older son, Jaisoorya, finding himself unable to cope with the pressures of his parents’ high expectations of him and his own sense of worthlessness, had suffered from mysterious attacks of fever and blindness. He consulted a doctor for depression; the doctor’s response had been one of bewilderment and helplessness: ‘Why are you depressed?’ It took another decade and a half and several months’ stay in a sanatorium in Europe before Jaisoorya could even begin to answer the doctor’s question.