Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  But in Ruttie’s case, the doctor could fall back on her ‘biliousness’, the medical term then for excessive secretion of bile leading to nausea and vomiting. Bilious and other liver complaints had become part of the medical lexicon by the mid-nineteenth century, encompassing any illness doctors could not specifically diagnose; it would be attributed, among other things, to ‘intemperate habits of drinking and gluttony’. And the cure seemed just as vague, requiring, as the doctor prescribed for Ruttie, an immediate change of air from the presumably ‘unhealthy tropical clime’ of India. In short, a lengthy sojourn in Europe.

  That was news to gladden her heart. Or so Sarojini imagined. ‘Ruttie will be going to England in March,’ she wrote to Leilamani on 2 February 1922, literally the instant after hearing from Ruttie. ‘How she must rejoice that she has been ill enough lately to make the change necessary for her. She is coming here now. She has got out of bed for the first time after a month or so.’

  But Ruttie’s hidden conflict between desire and duty continued. Still bent on ignoring her instinct to flee, she struggled instead to get out of bed in order to stand by Jinnah’s side. Politically, it was going to be an exciting time. Just three days after the doctor’s visit, Gandhi had called off his non-cooperation movement and retreated from politics, leaving his colleagues in the Congress and the Khilafat Committee seething. His abrupt withdrawal was because of a stray incident of violence involving a few supporters who attacked a police station in Chauri Chaura, burning to death twenty-one constables and a sub-inspector of police. With such a stirring political situation before them, it was easy for Ruttie to convince herself that things would be better now. And summoning all her depleted energy, she got down at once to her old business of pleasing him, organizing one of her little potlucks. It was just Kanji, and the two of them—discussing what lay ahead for the country. And in the excitement and plans for the future where Jinnah seemed once again poised to rise to the helm of affairs, she stayed up talking again all night with the two of them. It almost seemed like old times.

  But this proved costly, and the very next day, she collapsed again. This time there was no bouncing back any time soon. While lying ill in bed, the thought of fleeing the marriage that was making her sick—at least for a short break—seemed the sensible thing to do, even if it hurt Jinnah deeply, as she knew it would. In England, Leilamani was looking forward to her arrival by spring. ‘O! Cheers!’ she exclaimed in her letter from Oxford to Padmaja on 22 February 1922. ‘How Ripping it will be to have little Mad Ruttie here again in spring—she is always so—unique, if nothing else, and a most welcome diversion after college work!’ But Ruttie’s body seemed unable to rise to the ordeal of breaking free.

  A whole month went by with her lying prone in bed, too weak to even go calling on Sarojini at the Taj. ‘Ruttie is still ill,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 20 March 1922, and in her concern for Ruttie, so cut off from all family and friends, she added: ‘Do write to her.’

  Usually, Padmaja did not need pushing from her mother in these matters. At nearly twenty-two, she was as empathetic as her mother when it came to meeting the needs of her large circle of friends and relatives, including her own parents. But it was a busy time for Padmaja, now that she was also managing a spinning and weaving centre in Hyderabad besides her father’s home. Her handloom ‘factory’ had been keeping her so busy supplying Bombay’s fashion-conscious with khadi saris that even her occasional visits to Bombay to see her mother had stopped for the present.

  Sarojini, too, had been swamped with political work. She had been ordered by her ‘slave driver’, Gandhi, to undertake an extensive tour of riot-hit provinces, leaving her with scarcely a moment to herself. Alone and unable to escape her feelings any longer through her usual frenzied activity, Ruttie’s condition became worse, as Sarojini discovered when she saw her a fortnight later. She was, by now, on the verge of madness. ‘I am so desperately anxious about Ruttie,’ Sarojini wrote in her next letter to Padmaja, on 26 March 1922. ‘She is very ill—and I fear not quite normal. She has taken to getting out of bed and coming to see me about midnight every night, hardly able to stand.’

  It lasted over a month. And throughout those weeks when she wandered about at midnight in her mental anguish, Jinnah apparently took no notice of her, going about his own work. It was the time when he was trying to persuade the viceroy to renew his offer of a round table conference that Gandhi had rejected, and it kept him occupied to the exclusion of everything else. Sarojini, though made of less stern stuff, was also forced to put politics over personal concerns and it was almost another month before she met Ruttie again. Even then, there was little she could do for her except to feel some concern. As she wrote to Leilamani on 20 April 1922, the day after the Jinnahs’ fourth wedding anniversary: ‘Ruttie is very, very ill, but she gets out of bed at midnight to come and see me in black draperies and a mad look, poor, suffering, pitiful child!’ But there seemed no way for Sarojini to help her, as she wrote six days later: ‘Ruttie is very, very ill and yet no one can do anything for her, poor child!’

  In April, Sarojini’s younger son, Ranadheera, came on a brief visit to Bombay. He was attached to Ruttie, like most of his family, and called on her. He was in for a shock. He got ‘a fright’ when he saw her so ‘pale and drawn in the face’, as he wrote to Leilamani on April 25 1922, telling his sister that ‘Ruttie is still in bed and much worse than before’. Then, as if her illness reminded him of something unrelated, he suddenly brought up news of an acquaintance of theirs in Hyderabad: ‘I wonder if you know that Hadi (Khan’s brother) created quite a sensation in Hyderabad by suddenly marrying “Chinu Begum”.’

  Only Padmaja, who had not seen Ruttie since the end of last year, still believed that Ruttie was soon going to leave for Europe. ‘Perhaps Ruttie will get to England before your holidays are over and then you are sure of a great time,’ she wrote to Leilamani on 20 April 1922, completely unaware of Ruttie’s state of mental and physical distress.

  A month later, Ruttie was still no closer to resolving her issues. In May, she was lying prone in bed, while the world around her became even more absorbed in politics. Communal riots were erupting everywhere and Sarojini had been sent by Gandhi on a peace mission that kept her away from Bombay for over a fortnight. Jinnah was in town but may as well not have been. Still refusing to acknowledge that she was really ill, or perhaps he felt she was not trying hard enough to get well, he ignored her. Many years later, incidentally, when he himself was very sick, Jinnah told the story of a woman who could not be persuaded to get out of her bed even though there was nothing wrong with her, until her doctor put a flaming stove under it to drive her out! Apart from his impatience with any illness, his or hers, and his well-known aversion to doctors, Jinnah was busy now with the new party he wanted to start with his high court colleague, the politician M.R. Jayakar, and it was left to Sarojini, who had just returned from one of her political tours, to find out how Ruttie was doing. Not good, as she wrote to Padmaja on 16 May 1922: ‘Ruttie continues [to be] desperately and defiantly ill, poor child.’

  All through June it was the same. ‘Ruttie is still mysteriously ill and in bed,’ Sarojini wrote in a letter to Leilamani on 2 June 1922. And twenty days later, returning from an official trip to Lucknow, she wrote again, this time to Padmaja, on 22 June 1922, saying: ‘Ruttie is still ill in bed—I am very anxious about her.’

  She was not the only one, as it turned out. Kanji, who until then had hovered on the periphery of Ruttie’s circle of friends, felt an urgent need to go and see her after a disturbing dream he had of her. As he later recounted in his memoir of Ruttie, he had not seen the Jinnahs for a few months, being too tied up with his legislative work in the Bombay Council. But three months after his last visit to South Court, Ruttie suddenly appeared in his dream, calling urgently to him: ‘Kanji, help me!’ The dream recurred the following night, and her evident distress affected him so deeply that overcoming his inhibitions and the fear of appearing overf
amiliar, he called on her the very next day while Jinnah was at work. Told she was ill, he almost turned back and was about to drive away when the servant asked him to wait until he took his card to her. Starved as she was for company, he was invited in and found her lying down exactly as she had appeared in his dream, reclining on a ‘peculiarly shaped’ sofa in a verandah she had converted into her day room. Kanji could tell, of course, that she was sick but either did not see, or deliberately omits to mention, the acute emotional distress that had called to him so urgently in his dream. Even though she was so unwell, she was apparently still her usual charming and hospitable self, and they talked non-stop for two and a half hours, with Kanji only leaving after Jinnah returned from work, at 7.30 p.m. Jinnah was as glad as Ruttie to see Kanji and pressed him to stay on for a drink. And although Kanji did not stay that evening, it set the trend for the future. After this visit, he felt free to come and go as he pleased, marking the beginning of an extraordinarily close and triangular friendship, with Kanji becoming a close friend to both Jinnah and Ruttie.

  It was, of course, Ruttie who drew Kanji to South Court, although Kanji does not say it in so many words. It was her he wanted to serve in any way he could, bringing her books to read and writing reviews of books that might interest her when she was too ill and tired even to read, and talking of mutual friends—anything to keep her spirits from sinking too low. In return, she took an interest in his work as a labour leader and drew him out and gave of herself. Jinnah was eager to share in the friendship, unwilling to be left out. They hit it off well together and it is not hard to see why. Kanji was a well-turned-out, amiable young man, married with a baby son, but he socialized—in the custom of those purdah-ridden times—as a bachelor. He was an acolyte of Jinnah’s, very loyal, and an excellent listener; what is more, he had a fund of good stories about all the important leaders in the country, including Gandhi, which made him a popular dinner guest with Jinnah, who loved a ‘good gup’, as he called it.

  Adoring her as he did, and putting her on a pedestal, Kanji was certainly not the friend with whom Ruttie could lay down her defences and share what was troubling her. Instead, in his lively presence, it was easy to go with the flow and love Jinnah for what he was and repress that sinking feeling that she had made a terrible mistake in marrying him, as she later confessed to Sarojini. When Kanji was around, they both joined in teasing Jinnah either about his arrogance or his quaint touches of miserliness, and he good-humouredly put up with it. Those moments were a joy to share and it’s not surprising that Kanji’s was such a rosy picture of their marriage, seeing only her tender, teasing solicitude for Jinnah and how he leaned on her for everything. He did not see the Jinnah who lacked understanding and ‘the spirit of the joy of life’, as she later put it to Sarojini, which was unknowingly stifling her soul and making her yearn to break out of this ‘marriage ice’.

  But if she could not open her heart to Kanji about Jinnah—and this was surely as much because of her own natural rectitude and loyalty to J as her reluctance to end Kanji’s illusions about her—Kanji’s adoration and friendship nevertheless helped to pull her out of her depression. It even seemed to melt the hardness in her heart towards the child. For the first time, she made an attempt to reach out to her little girl, now almost four but still nameless, offering her the ultimate token of her love—a newborn kitten from her beloved cat’s recent litter. But it was not a success. The child took the kitten away and promptly ‘drowned’ it, according to Sarojini, with a bottle of expensive cologne that she stole from her father’s dresser.

  For Sarojini, who heard the story either from Kanji or Ruttie herself on the phone, the episode was only an entertaining titbit to pass on to her children—and to take a sly dig at Jinnah. ‘Here is an amusing story for you,’ Sarojini wrote in the postscript of her letter to Padmaja on 1 July 1922. ‘Ruttie (she’s very ill) gave Jinnah a very expensive bottle of eau de cologne and a kitten to her baby. The baby got hold of the scent and drowned the kitten in it. Jinnah was so upset at losing his scent that he sent for the baby—of three!—and reasoned with it. How characteristic of Jinnah!’ But, for Ruttie, this was no joking matter. It gave her another reason not to reach out to her child. And to sink a little more into her spiral of despair and sadness.

  But hope, or at least some validation for her feelings which gave her the courage to hope, arrived unexpectedly. It came in the form of Sarojini’s younger son, Ranadheera, who arrived on a longish visit to Bombay. Ranadheera, who was a couple of years younger than Ruttie and the black sheep in the Naidu family because of his drinking problem, knew better than most young people of his time what it felt like to cope with the high expectations of others. With him, Ruttie could be herself, as childish as she wished, with no need to put up a show. She turned to him now for all kinds of advice. And to Sarojini’s amusement, Ruttie began to lean on Mina for everything, from consolation for the kitten’s death to making its funeral arrangements, and even advice on living abroad with her cats on a shoestring budget—something that she was notoriously poor at. ‘Mina’s functions are very varied,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 28 July 1922, six days after ‘a very untidy and travel-stained Mina’ arrived at her hotel. He had been sent to Bombay expressly to look after Sarojini who had just had a heart attack and had been advised to rest for some weeks. ‘He is supposed to be looking after me but Osman (Umar Sobhani’s younger brother) needs him for business advice and Ruttie for consolation because her kitten died. He is also her counselor apparently on economy and has been counseling her about taking an electric cooker with her to Paris and the Riviera so as to cook her cats’ food because meat is so expensive at hotels!! How I laughed when I heard that.’

  Sarojini might laugh, but Mina’s visit did Ruttie untold good, and was more beneficial than the doctors and medication. Ruttie now turned to him for everything, instead of leaning on his mother as she used to do. Sarojini, with her tact and sympathy, could be the ideal confidante and often was—all sorts of people took their personal problems to her for advice and kind words. But with Ruttie, as with her own children, she could be a harsh disciplinarian sometimes, unable to stop herself from trying to shield them from what she considered their headstrong and foolhardy ways. Anyhow, Ranadheera’s regular visits to South Court for lunch and pep talks made such a difference that within days of his arrival, Ruttie was able to shake off her apathy and actually book her passage to Europe. As Sarojini wrote in the next mail to Leilamani in England on 29 July 1922: ‘Ruttie is better but very weak and cannot go out as yet. She is going with Fatsy (Umar Sobhani’s sister Fatima) on the Kaiser-e-Hind on the 23rd September and will stay in Paris and the Riviera and get to England next year.’

  It was not that the voice within her head urging her to stick to her self-assigned duties as Jinnah’s wife and caretaker had been silenced for good. Having set out across the sea to Europe, she was still worrying about Jinnah and feeling guilty about leaving him to the servants’ care. Writing to Kanji the very day after her ship left Bombay, with at least another week before it docked at Aden where she could post her letter, she begged him to ‘go and see Jinnah and tell me how he is’. Adding, ‘He has a habit of habitually over-working himself, and now that I am not there to bother and tease him he will be worse than ever.’

  The forwarding address she sent Kanji was in London—‘C/o Messrs. Henry S. King, London W’. But she was in such a hurry to get to Paris that she did not stay in England long enough even to visit Leilamani in Oxford. It was Paris that had been calling to her so insistently, with its promise of unfettered freedom and gaiety and excitement, and the hope of starting a new life without her ‘shackles’, as she called this feeling of being closed in by her marriage, in a disclosure she made to Sarojini only several years later.

  At first, the freedom was heady. After the War, Paris had become the meeting ground of the disenchanted everywhere, fleeing the fetters of their own societies in search of artistic freedom, and was a refuge from the old value
s. While the city had its little circle of Parsis, all well connected and with business interests there, including members of her extended Dinshaw Petit family, she turned her back on all of them and sought out the Paris of her dreams. There was nothing to stop her now from plunging headlong into its pleasures—the fashionable world of art and jazz and soirees and nightclubs. And it was not long before the beautiful ‘Madame Zhinna’, living in dashing style with the funds Jinnah uncomplainingly provided, found her feet among the idle rich set, including several exiled royalty and French aristocrats, throwing herself into the social whirl with as much zeal as Jinnah back at home was trying to rebuild a political platform for himself.

  But there was still something holding her back. It was apparently not possible to wipe away the last four years, or even her love for him. And when she met someone connected to her past, it again touched off those mingled feelings of guilt and shame. In her inchoate longing for home, she had sought out the exiled Parsi revolutionary Madame Bhikaiji Cama. Bhikaiji’s home in Paris had become a sort of pilgrimage for both Indian revolutionaries as well as curious visitors from India. She was also a friend of Ruttie’s aunt Hamabai Petit. And even knew or at least had heard of Jinnah and evidently admired him. Ruttie went to see Bhikaiji but the visit was not a success. Ruttie’s flippant way of talking did not go down well with the old firebrand, in her sixties then. According to Cama’s biographer, Khorshed Adi Sethna, she took instant umbrage to a story that Ruttie recounted, thinking it would amuse her. The story, of a marquis who had taken Ruttie out to a nightclub but crashed his car on the way back because he had too much to drink, brought out the puritan in Bhikaiji. Despite being a fiery rebel who had separated from her husband in Bombay and was now settled abroad on her own, Bhikaiji had not lost her Parsi roots. She became so enraged by the deracinated Ruttie that she apparently burst out in a tirade: ‘When such a remarkable man has married you, how could you go to a nightclub with a tipsy man?’ Nor did she ever forget the incident, as Sethna recounts in her book, erupting into rage when Leilamani, who visited her much later, brought up the beautiful Ruttie in her conversation with Bhikaiji. As Sethna writes: ‘Only Bhickoo could have ticked off Mrs Jinnah with such spirit—no one else would have dared. And it is doubtful if the aristocratic Mrs Jinnah would have accepted such a stricture and scolding from anyone else.’