Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  This odium, whether expressed so openly or not, no doubt worked its insidious effect on Ruttie, especially now when she was at her most vulnerable, struggling with the conflicting pulls of modernity and duty without anyone to turn to. It was true that other English-educated young Indians of her generation were finding themselves similarly adrift in a confusing new post-War world, severed with a brutal suddenness from their own past and unsure of how much of it to retrieve from the debris. But most of them, if they were either sensitive or lucky enough to be drawn into his movement, had found Gandhi. His movement, as Jawaharlal Nehru was to say later, was as much about rescuing the spirit as about politics. But Ruttie, without sharing Jinnah’s animus against Gandhi, turned away from the one man who might have saved her.

  Paris was exactly the wrong place for her, especially now. Although she did not lack either funds or friends, it simply did not have the environment to nurture someone like her. Coming from her privileged hothouse existence in India, Ruttie was plunged, without training or temperament, into the ferment that was the Paris of her time, with its drugs and bohemianism, in a Europe gone mad in the aftershocks of its collapse.

  She herself could feel it, and like someone drowning, reached for the only support she could think of—Sarojini, the friend whose judgement she had once totally trusted. Somewhere in her lost, confused wandering around the Riviera or Paris, seeking solace in new friends and excitement, and finding none, she at last reached out to Sarojini for help. But, of course, none was forthcoming. As Sarojini later admitted to Leilamani, Ruttie’s letter left her feeling both anxious and helpless. ‘I wonder if you ever come across Ruttie at all,’ says the letter from Sarojini to Leilamani, dated 5 June 1923, from the Taj in Bombay, nine months after Ruttie’s departure. ‘I am dreadfully sad and anxious about her. Because, poor child, she is passing through a very tragic time and is desperately lonely and restless and tries to find relief in mad excitement and sensation.’ But Sarojini’s deep anxiety for Ruttie only made her angry, wanting to knock some sense into her stubborn head, and roundly blaming her for her own unhappiness: ‘She has everything—beauty, youth, wealth, love, intellect but not the power to live a natural life true to herself, poor little Ruttie. Unless one lives true to one’s ideas—and out of oneself—happiness and content[ment] are mere words of ironic mockery and emptiness. I love Ruttie but I am powerless to help her. She will not accept reality but crave for illusion in rainbow colours all the time.’

  Someone of her own generation, undergoing the same torment of desire and guilt and yearning for liberty and its attendant anxieties, might have understood Ruttie better perhaps—or at least enabled her not to take Sarojini’s words to heart. Sarojini’s letter to Ruttie is lost but one can guess its contents from the tone of the former’s letter to Leilamani. As the more headstrong of Sarojini’s two daughters and at more risk, so to speak, because she had chosen to go abroad to study, Leilamani had often been at the receiving end of such advice from her mother. Almost every mail from Sarojini brought a maternal assault of injunctions and cautions, so unlike the laid-back mother of liberal values that she usually was, growing increasingly insistent that Leilamani never forget her ‘Indian Womanhood’ and bear that load wherever she went, and to think and behave accordingly and to never ‘misuse’ her freedom.

  But Leilamani was also blessed with older siblings, especially Jaisoorya, who could confidently advise his sister to do exactly the opposite of what their mother was preaching. ‘If you do a thing,’ he wrote to Leilamani from Berlin while undergoing therapy at a ‘nerve clinic’, ‘it is not what others say is right or is wrong but because you want to and it is your right to do so. It is just as much your right to make of your life what you desire; it is yours to do what you like with it. Therefore if you choose your own path you did not only right, but if you did otherwise, it was a wrong to yourself. Youth must go its own way, seek its own path and salvation, suffer and learn and find its freedom. Not to have accepted the challenge and asserted your own individuality at that psychological moment as a woman would have been fatal. The tragedy of womanhood is not that her freedom is too much, but too little and her experiences too few. The road to progress is filled with one more duty repudiated and one more religious law defied.’

  But Ruttie, it seems, had had enough freedom. She was already losing faith in herself and in her difficult journey of making it on her own. Her dream of finding herself someday as a published poet perhaps or a writer had remained just that—a dream. Plagued by her inner turmoil and unable to figure out, as Jaisoorya was slowly learning to do through his psychoanalysis, ‘that a person with too many emotional conflicts is incapacitated from action’, she saw it instead as how Jinnah perhaps would have seen it—as a failure of her willpower and lack of discipline. Filled with self-doubt, she let opinions like Sarojini’s, that she should try to ‘accept reality’ and stop craving for ‘illusion in rainbow colours all the time’, chip away at her morale. And whether it was Sarojini who urged her to return to Jinnah, or her own craving for him—for she had not got over him as yet—she decided to end her adventure in single life and join Jinnah when he arrived in England in the middle of June 1923. She was ready to start on a fresh note, or more accurately, persuaded herself that this time it would be different. Time and distance had blurred her memory of what it had been like before.

  Jinnah did not seem in any hurry to see her, although it was now almost nine months since she had left him and the child. With his hypersensitivity, it is not difficult to imagine how deeply he must have been hurt by her desertion, even though it was not in his nature to ever talk about it. He retreated into his usual vice of overwork. Fortunately for him, there was much to do, thanks to Gandhi having cast him into political limbo, with some help, of course, from himself. Now he threw himself into rebuilding his political career almost from scratch. At first, he put all his heart into exploring whether he should join the rebel group of Congressmen who were forming the Swaraj Party in order to fight the elections. But he fell out with them when they refused to break away from Gandhi’s brand of politics.

  Next he became preoccupied with trying to revive the Muslim League. He needed the League, which had become almost defunct since the rise of the Khilafatists, to provide him with a political platform, especially now that he had given up hope of ever rejoining the Congress. But here too he faced stiff resistance, this time from the Khilafatists who were determined to edge him out of the leadership. It was only when all his efforts came to nothing that he finally decided to give himself a break and take a trip to Europe. In his pragmatic way, he thought of it as accomplishing two tasks at one go. He could finally go and meet Ruttie without compromising his pride or showing any eagerness on his part, having survived more than nine months without her. And he could also turn the trip into a useful working holiday by using his presence in England to try and influence politicians there, having failed to make a dent with the government at home.

  But it was no joyous reunion. They must have quarrelled almost as soon as they met because within days of Ruttie joining him in London, she had left him at the Ritz where they were booked for the summer and taken off by herself to visit Leilamani in her college in Oxford. Her trip was obviously a last-minute decision, judging by Leilamani’s dismay when she heard of Ruttie arriving with hardly a day’s notice. ‘Ye gods!’ Leilamani wrote to Padmaja on 14 June 1923, ‘Ruttie is coming up to visit me on Saturday . . . I shall not have much time to see [her] as I wish to reserve my energies for these last few days [before her exams].’

  It was a short visit. She arrived, trailing cigarette smoke, a Persian cat and a French maid, determined to prove both to herself and Leilamani that she was by no means too old and jaded like Jinnah for simple, collegiate pleasures. She put up such a convincing show of enjoying it all that Leilamani was taken in. ‘I’ve just seen Ruttie off,’ Leilamani wrote to her father on 19 June 1923. ‘She came down for the weekend (plus her French maid and a Persian Pussycat!!) to se
e me—I think she loved the welcome Oxford gave her and was very happy to be in the midst of “youth”, even though for a fleeting hour’—the quotation marks around the word ‘youth’ were, of course, meant to be ironic—but not about Ruttie, who at twenty-three was by common consensus among them on the borderline, if not having already crossed the border of middle age. It was Leilamani’s way of being ironical about her own age; she had turned twenty that year, a cause of some dismay because she too was getting old. ‘We took her on the river and gave her the best time we could—incidentally having a little relaxation ourselves, to be refreshed before the ordeal that starts on Thursday,’ Leilamani wrote.

  But the trip did not resolve whatever problem Ruttie had tried to flee from. Within three days of her return from Oxford, she was off again by herself, this time back to Paris, leaving a rather depressed farewell note for Leilamani. ‘I am afraid that it will be a long, long while before we meet again as tomorrow I’ (and here she had almost written ‘we’ but scratched it out, replacing it with ‘I’)”leave England and not again till the next season should I be back if at all,’ she wrote in a letter dated 22 June 1923, unusually full of gaps and scratches, indicative of her troubled mind. ‘I’ll say goodbye therefore and wish you the best of luck.’ On the same funereal note, as if this was indeed the end for her, and time to clear all her debts, with this one presumably incurred by her self-assumed role as Leilamani’s proxy older sister, she wrote: ‘Simultaneously with this is being sent a box of Desti’s Amber according to my promise,’ referring either to the perfume or scented cigarettes of the same brand that had become all the rage in Paris. There was one more debt to settle before leaving, of a trifling nature but nevertheless revelatory of Ruttie’s attitude towards money—blissfully unaware of what things cost, how much money she had on her or even when she had actually run out of it. She was not at all embarrassed to be broke but happy to borrow from the nearest person, and that too only in order to pay for some treat for the very person she had just borrowed from. This spontaneity and generosity may have once endeared her to Jinnah, but no doubt was now grating on his nerves, considering the bills she would have run up in these last eight months of holiday without him. And now, before leaving London perhaps never to return, she conscientiously squared her accounts, returning the quid she had borrowed, not from Leilamani, who evidently had none to lend her, but from one of her student friends, probably as impoverished as her. ‘Am enclosing the one pound for Ghose which you [underlined twice] lent me—thanks. Have had it enclosed in the envelope since Monday! However!’ She wrote in a postscript, failing, even with her usual liberal use of exclamation marks, to disguise the bleakness with which she was looking towards the future.

  Jinnah’s mood was no lighter. Meeting the new secretary of state for India, Lord Peel, soon after Ruttie left, Jinnah was presumably at his dourest and most abrasive, prompting Peel to remark that Jinnah was ‘the only Indian I have yet met who really was disagreeable’. But two months spent alone in the Ritz with almost nothing except his newspapers to keep him from brooding over his marital issues, appear to have made up his mind for him. He had suffered, of course, as no one would ever know—so severely did he impose a seal of silence on his personal life, confiding in no one, as Sarojini remarked about him several years later. But failing at his marriage would be worse—failure was a word, as he liked to say, unknown to him. And having stuck rigidly to his pre-planned schedule of spending his entire summer holiday in London, he made an unexpected detour to Paris on his way back home to see Ruttie. A few days later, Mr and Mrs Jinnah headed home together.

  On the surface, it seemed as if nothing had changed between them, with Jinnah getting immediately busy with his court work and interviews to the press, while she slipped into her old role of making herself indispensable to him—‘looking after him without him realizing it’, as Kanji put it. But under the apparent preoccupation with his work, he had, in fact, withdrawn from her into his stony fortress, as was his habit when he was hurt. Apparently she had not yet been forgiven for those eight months of desertion. He showed nothing, of course, of his real feelings, only erected this wall she could not pass through. The elections to the legislature were almost round the corner and Gandhi was in prison, with his movement called off, but the old excitement of political plans being discussed all night and the camaraderie had gone. In fact, he was still in two minds whether he should contest or not. He wanted to get back into the legislature, of course, but not if the Congress boycotted the elections, leaving him in the same dilemma as when he resigned from the legislature three years ago: not wanting to be seen as pro-British but not agreeing with the Congress policy of non-cooperation either. And while the Congress and the Khilafatists fought it out among themselves, threatening to split the party on whether or not to stand for elections, Jinnah issued his own version of an election manifesto, asking people through an appeal published by the Bombay Chronicle to tell him whether he should contest or not. And while he waited to see what he should do next, he kept his own counsel, making himself even more unapproachable.

  There was an occasional thaw when she could tease him like the old times, usually when Kanji was around, such as when Jinnah eventually decided to contest the elections but would do no campaigning for himself. Knowing he would win his reserved seat without difficulty, Jinnah was focusing his energy on campaigning for weaker candidates, with an eye on forming a loose party of like-minded legislators after the elections. But his ‘over-confidence’, as Kanji recounts in his India’s Fight for Freedom, both amused and worried Ruttie, with Jinnah saying, ‘The electorate is on trial’, and leaving it at that. He won, of course, with the other two contestants beating a retreat before the election. But other than those rare moments when both Kanji and his other friend, Sir Purshottamdas, were there to join her in her teasing, she felt shut out by him.

  It only got worse after that. Even before he could be sworn into the new legislature, he had already given notice for moving two resolutions, one of them calling for the immediate release of Gandhi from prison. And within days of his swearing in, he was holding meetings with like-minded members of the central assembly to form a party of independents. Although he managed to get only seventeen legislators to join him, he became the power centre within the House. But even that was not good enough for him. Now he aspired to seize control of the legislature. And within a month of his joining the legislature, he had achieved the impossible—forming an alliance with the forty-eight-member Swaraj Party until it was his tiny party of independents that was really calling the shots in the House, not the larger Swaraj Party or the government. Now he had a hand in all the laws that came up before the House and he was on all the committees and a star speaker. All this, of course, involved energy of manic proportions, and she was ignored even though she had moved to Delhi with him into the confines of the hated Maidens’ suite.

  Her energy, meanwhile, went into somehow trying to stop this rising tide of uneasiness within her. There was a price to be paid for having repudiated her freedom and come back to her duty, as Jaisoorya so rightly pointed out to Leilamani. She was stuck alone in their hotel room with nothing to do and no one to meet. Now that Jinnah was a legislator again, she was condemned to spend the better part of the next three years alone in a hotel suite, either at Maidens while the session was on in Delhi or at the Cecil when the assembly moved to Simla. The child, of course, had been left behind at home, out of both their ways, looked after by the best staff that money could buy. And other than walking her dogs and being stared at by people in the bazaar, there was nothing to occupy her. She had no friends and no interest in going to either women’s clubs or cultivating the company of the wives of other legislators. With Jinnah gone for most of the day and even night—except when he sat up late working on some papers to do with his work in the legislature the next day—her life stretched out in an unending tedium.

  Occasionally, they attended a dinner together, but this was no fun either, being eithe
r one of those stiff, formal receptions where she was expected to be seated by her host’s side at the table, making polite conversation, or make do with the company of women she had nothing in common. The only company she actually welcomed was Motilal Nehru’s, Jinnah’s good friend and ally in the House, who sometimes took pity on the neglected Mrs Jinnah and dined with her at Maidens. It was true that he was more than twice her age but she cheered up when he dropped in to dine, this old man so unlike the other legislators in the assembly, not only a connoisseur of good food and lover of hearty meals, like her father and other Petits, but someone who knew how to laugh and make others laugh, unheard of in this Delhi environment where jokes seemed almost anti-national. But his visits did nothing to stir Jinnah’s husbandly conscience. Someone with his impeccable manners, who could put everything aside and be a charming host if there was a guest for dinner, preferred now to ignore them both. He noticed, of course, but remarked on it only to make a political point—that even if ‘Pandit Motilal and I used to fight like a pair of wild-cats on the floor of the Legislative Assembly yet on the same evening of our altercation he used to dine sumptuously with my wife,’ unable to resist adding (he was his father’s son, after all) ‘at my expense’.