Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 35

  Several times, as Ruttie told Sarojini many years later, ‘it came to almost breaking point and she never meant to return’. But perhaps because she did not have the heart to leave him again, when his political career was once more rising to its former heights; or because, despite ignoring her and focusing only on his politics, he still seemed to need her around, or so she hoped; or maybe simply because she had lost her nerve, with that one failed attempt to break free—she stayed put.

  But some vital chord that had kept him bound to her despite his undemonstrativeness seemed to have mysteriously snapped. Under the chill, he, too, was unhappy in his own way, revealing himself in sudden and inexplicable bouts of irritation. The first time it happened was when she, with all good intentions, intervened in an acrimonious war of words between him and his arch-rival, Mohammed Ali. The bitterness between Jinnah and the two Ali brothers dated back to when the former walked out of the Congress four years ago, heckled by their supporters. And with the collapse of the Khilafat movement, their rivalry had only sharpened, with both fighting for the same space: to retain their hold over the Muslim community. They went for each other in public, with Jinnah scoffing at Mohammed Ali by calling him ‘the little Maulana’, and his Khilafat Committee as ‘not worth respect’; Mohammed Ali called Jinnah ‘parasitical’. And when Jinnah published an article in the Bombay Chronicle attacking the Congress’s ‘unconstitutional’ policies, Mohammed Ali took him on, writing a series of letters attacking Jinnah which the newspaper readily published in full. But after two or three of these articles had appeared, while Jinnah stonily refused to react to his rival’s personal taunts, Ruttie felt compelled to respond on his behalf. She called at the newspaper’s office and through the editor, appealed to Mohammed Ali to stop his articles ‘as this would create bitterness’ rather than resolve issues. A year back, Jinnah would have probably smiled indulgently at her concern and let the matter drop, but now he was enraged at her interference. ‘Ruttie had no business to intervene,’ he snapped at the editor when he was told of what had transpired. After that, Ruttie kept out of his affairs.

  But some devil seems to have got into her as well. Knowing how deep was his sense of correctness and propriety, she began to needle him, knowing that he would not retaliate either by word or gesture. Bolitho describes how she went out of her way to ‘offend his genteel proprieties in public’. One evening in Simla when they were driving to dine with the governor, as Bolitho recounts in a passage later expunged from the biography of Jinnah he had been officially commissioned to write, ‘she stopped the carriage and bought a roasted corn-cob from a man beside the road. She began to eat it as they came near Government House.’ Of course, he said nothing to her—it would be beneath his dignity to either protest or plead with her. ‘He accepted the foolish hurt in silence,’ as Bolitho adds. How hurtful the episode would have been to a man of his acute sensitivity to proprieties, who would literally rise from his deathbed only in order to do the proper civilities, can only be imagined. The wound stayed in his mind, recalling the story years later, as Bolitho wrote, ‘to a woman he trusted, and said, “It was not level-headed: would you do a thing like that?”’

  Even she never knew how deeply she could hurt him, so wooden was his exterior, infuriating her into making more attempts to breach his fortress wall of impregnability. It brought out that mischievous streak in her, but now no longer innocent of malice. She went for him whenever she could, not when they were alone, for that would be pointless, but in public, wanting to get under his skin and draw blood. It would take the form, as Chagla wrote in his memoir, of walking into his chambers while he was in the midst of a conference, perching herself on his table, dangling her feet, unmindful of how uncomfortable the other men in the room were by her presence. He had always welcomed her dropping in at his chambers, even allowing her to do it up for him in a style that raised it to a level of smartness unknown in the dingy lifestyle of the high court. Nor did he mind what she wore, far from it—he was enormously proud of her beauty and style; yet he was far too smart not to know when she was deliberately trying to provoke him by her behaviour or dress, verging as it was now on insolence. His response, as Chagla witnessed, was to never utter a word of protest, and carry on with the conference ‘as if she were not there at all’. But she did drive him crazy, as he admitted years later, in the only self-revelatory admission he ever made about his marriage, confessing to another friend whose marriage had just broken how Ruttie ‘got on my nerves—she drove me mad’.

  And he drove her mad with his inhuman lack of all emotion, or so it seemed, and his punctilious sense of duty, as if she was no more to him than a duty he must discharge. In the past, she would have been able to laugh at him—at that rather sanctimonious way he had of pronouncing ‘I have my duty to do.’ But now she couldn’t—at least, not unless Kanji was there to lend her some moral support. But this sinking feeling that she was being erased as an individual; that the only part of her that still existed was the role he expected of her, doing her duty by him as he did for her, bothered her. Eventually, she had channelled it into a poem—the only one she wrote after her marriage—a ‘song’, as she called it, lacking in lilt but not sense. It was the sort of scribble that she would have probably hidden or thrown away—for, that was part of her problem, especially after her marriage to Jinnah, letting her self-doubts chip away at her confidence and her cherished dream of becoming a published poet like Sarojini, only because he did not admire poetry. But the ever-sympathetic Padmaja, to whom she must have recited her poem in private and who too, like Ruttie, wrote poems in secret but rather overcome by her mother’s great repute as a poet lacked the courage and faith in herself to find a publisher, drew it out of her against her will. The poem went:

  Not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for the sake of the self is the husband dear.

  Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear, but for the sake of the self is the wife dear.

  Not for the sake of the son is the son dear, but for the sake of the self is the son dear.

  Not for the sake of the Gods are the Gods dear but for the sake of the self are the Gods dear.

  The ink had hardly dried on the paper, when the doubts began assailing her again, making her write in self-deprecation in the accompanying note to Padmaja, ‘I warned you, did not I, that its only appeal rested in its thought and so far from being a “song” it hadn’t sufficient lilt . . .’ But still, it had a resonance for her that she could not explain to Padmaja or herself—‘wonderful to the understanding if not the ear!’, as she put it. It marked her disenchantment with love, but that craving for ‘illusion in rainbow colours all the time’, as Sarojini dismissively put it, refused to go away. There was no getting rid of that yearning and finding the will to ‘accept reality’, as Sarojini so badly wanted her to do.

  From the outside, it certainly looked as if she was finally settling down, falling unresistingly into her role as dutiful wife and homemaker, as thousands of modern young women like her were doing all around her, unable to resolve their dilemma of what to do with this new freedom that an English education had given them. So flawlessly did she play the part that even Sarojini, with whom she was closest and most candid, was taken aback four years later, in 1928, when she confessed how trapped and unbearably stifled she had, in fact, felt during those latter years of her marriage. As part of her effort to settle down and stop dreaming, she had poured all her creativity and gift for beauty and, of course, a small portion of Jinnah’s money—he was worth millions by now—into transforming South Court into one of the most enchanting homes on Malabar Hill, unique in its style, like her. It took away one’s breath, as one caller, Sayyada Badrunissa Begum, who was just married to a well-known lawyer of Delhi, wrote later. The newly-wed had sought out Ruttie through their mutual friends, the Sobhanis, and had called on her one evening, accompanied by Umar Sobhani’s younger brother, Osman. Sayyada Badrunissa’s account of that visit, published years later, in 1929, in a Urdu
monthly, Humayun, gives a graphic portrait not only of the Jinnahs’ home but also their differing temperament and the distance between them. She recalled being asked to wait in the hall—an intimidatingly splendid room of antiques and Persian carpets and tapestries besides bronze and copper casts of ancient animals. Unused to such a startlingly exotic departure from the current fashion of very ‘English’ furnishing and décor, and the distinctive fragrance floating in the air, the Begum thought ‘the place looked like a house of magic’—an impression that was only heightened by the entry of a ‘vicious looking’ dog, followed soon after by a black Angora cat that fixed its unblinking gaze on her. The Begum was transfixed in her antique chair, trembling with fright, before Ruttie finally walked in, fresh from a bath.

  She was like a beam of light in the dark room, according to the Begum, her beauty stunning, like ‘a fairy come down to earth’. Speaking in ‘exquisite English’, Ruttie soon put her guests at ease, even leading her into her bedroom to show her collection of saris because the Begum was so impressed by her taste, and then later into the library (‘filled with books in leather matching the colour scheme of the furnishings’) because Ruttie had, in her impetuous way, offered to write a letter of introduction to a friend in Delhi so that the Begum would have some company when she got there. And while she was at it, Jinnah returned from work, tall and lean and very correct, knocking on the door of the library and asking permission to enter before stepping in and after a formal introduction, leaving the room to Ruttie and her guests. But Ruttie, presumably to give him his space, took them to ‘her’ part of the house—the verandah facing the sea—and gave them sherbet to drink and made polite conversation until it was time for her guests to leave.

  Beside the verandah, she had by now created a sitting room for herself which Jinnah rarely entered unless she had a visitor he wanted to talk to, like Kanji. It was, like the rest of the house, exquisitely done up in an eclectic mix of the occidental and the oriental, with a Buddhist touch, as Leilamani vividly described it when she visited South Court in late November 1924. ‘Yes, Ruttie’s drawing room is almost as enchanting as her clothes, her three Persian pussies and her latest fads. It seemed to me, on first tremulously entering, as if I were treading on the mind shadow of some once martyred Buddhist Priest—martyred because he loved and dared to beckon the wild gypsies and watched them dance at dawn upon the carpet of his dreams,’ Leilamani wrote to Padmaja on 26 November 1924.

  Leilamani, who had come home on what was supposed to be a short holiday from college but turned out instead into a six-month forced break, was even more impressed by Ruttie’s cooking skills. This was a hitherto-unexpressed facet of Ruttie, with her having little need to cook while she lived with her parents, and was possibly inspired by her constant craving for Petit Hall’s rich, spicy cuisine. It was yet another of those little differences between them, endearing while in love but by no means an insignificant factor in their growing apart. Jinnah’s taste buds, such as they were for a man of his abstemious habits, ran mostly to bland English fare. She could never hope to tempt him with her home-cooked meals, so this was evidently a hobby she reserved for the rare occasion when one of her friends dropped in for lunch. As Leilamani added in her letter: ‘Need I add that Ruttie is as delicious as ever . . . especially since her “cuisine” has creditably and considerably improved of late—The prawn curry was scrumptious.’

  And in a mirror image of what Jinnah seemed to be doing to her, raising a wall between them, she, in turn, did to the child, enclosing her in a sealed compartment, both literally and figuratively. The child was still apparently confined to her nursery, well out of her parents’ sight, even though she was now over six years old. As Leilamani wrote in the same letter to Padmaja, ‘The one dark shadow (an exquisite little shadow, really) i.e. the unnamed and unloved little baby, clung to me and begged me “not to go” when I was leaving her nursery after an hour’s play with the little one’s toys.’ Having already heard from both her mother and sister about Ruttie’s strange indifference to her child, and now seen it for herself, Leilamani still could not bear to fault her adored friend for the child’s unloved condition, preferring instead to shift the blame to the supposed faults in Ruttie’s super-rich upbringing. ‘Ruttie, however, can’t be blamed for her innate lack of motherly affection,’ she added, providing a feeble but nevertheless plausible explanation for her idol’s unmaternal aspect—‘she got so little parent love herself, poor kid.’ For Leilamani, brought up by two exceptionally warm and demonstrative parents, it would have been easy to have misinterpreted Ruttie’s privileged background, raised practically by servants and governesses, as a sign of an unnatural emotional reserve within the Petit household. It was a sign too of how much Leilamani had changed since she left home four years ago, having given up her envy of Ruttie’s super-rich background for a better appreciation of her own upbringing, raised in a household of modest means but with parents who gave them, among other inalienable rights during those more formal times, the licence to climb into their bed every morning for a cuddle, bringing their dogs and cats with them.

  Leilamani had returned from Oxford in September 1924, ‘plus luggage and new ideas and quite minus good manners in the main’, as Sarojini caustically put it. The change in her daughter alarmed Sarojini enough to decide that what Leilamani needed now more than a college degree was ‘a prolonged stay in India to get back the true Indian perspective and to correct all those mental and moral traits in her which distress me beyond measure’, as she told Padmaja in a letter on 12 September 1924. And the last person Sarojini wanted on the scene at such a time was Ruttie whose ‘unbalanced company and conversation’, as she wrote in another letter to Padmaja, would hardly promote Sarojini’s project of force-feeding her youngest on a diet of ‘Indian’ culture. But there was little Sarojini could do to prevent the two friends from meeting every day. While Leilamani stayed with her mother in Bombay, most of her day—and night—was spent with Ruttie, either going to South Court for lunch where ‘Ruttie fed me on absolutely wonderful things’ or Ruttie coming to spend the day in Sarojini’s Taj suite, ‘fighting with me like a baby over “tea cakes”.’ Or, ‘Just off to the cinema with Ruttie and the cats’, as she wrote to her siblings over the next few weeks. The cinema outing, incidentally, was an evening show—a time of day that Ruttie had until recently dutifully kept aside to spend at home with Jinnah because he liked to have her at home when he returned from work.

  There were other ways in which she began to court his displeasure. Much to his distaste, she had taken up dancing. It was all the rage in Bombay then—not the sedate ballroom dancing of the old, pre-War days but the new, uninhibited forms that had sprung up along with the growing popularity of jazz. In Willingdon Club, members were enthusiastically learning the new steps. Kshama Row took Leilamani there to dance (the latter wrote to Padmaja). And while Leilamani did not think much of their friend’s dancing—‘Kshama’s dancing made me roar so much that I quite recovered from the “tired feeling”,’ she wrote. But she soon caught the current craze, telling Padmaja in her next letter four days later, on 16 September 1924, that ‘I’m liking dancing nowadays—I suppose because I’m tired of languishing with “ennui”!’

  Ruttie herself preferred to dance elsewhere. While the Taj moved into the Edwardian trend ‘at a steady but none too confident pace’, it was at the hotel next door, the Greens, where the city’s smart set ‘leapt and pranced with few signs of inhibition’, as the Times of India put it, with its little dance floor becoming so crowded that ‘they will soon have to have somebody to direct the traffic or perhaps the jazzers will have to wear buffers’. And since the Greens had a not-undeserved notoriety ‘for its racy, honky-tonk atmosphere’, Jinnah was understandably disapproving. It reached a stage, according to an interview which Kanji gave late in his life to Pakistani writer Shahabuddin Desnavi, where Jinnah became so unreasonable that he tried to forbid Ruttie from dancing with any man, even in the respectable Willingdon Club. Kan
ji was made the sole exception, according to the interview—and that was only because, as Kanji pointed out, Jinnah was well aware that he did not know how to dance.

  If the ‘cold logician’ was indeed seized by such an irrational impulse to control her, it seemed to have only made her more defiant. She started going out on ‘dance nights’ a day of the week when hotels invited live jazz bands to play and all were welcome on the dance floor. She was escorted by idle, rich young dandies for whom Jinnah had nothing but contempt. In a few months, even the staid Taj Mahal had succumbed to popular demand and started its own dance night with performances by live jazz bands and a Mlle Singy—‘Professoress of Dance’—arriving in the city to introduce the even more shocking tango at a series of ‘Tea Tangoes’ in the Taj. For Ruttie, this was a double bonus—she could not only dance all night but save herself the inconvenience of going home afterwards by sleeping over in Sarojini’s rooms until the next day. In this—as in most things—Sarojini’s sympathy was entirely with Jinnah, and her opinion of Ruttie’s new fad and her choice of dancing partners was no less scorching. It crept out in the occasional remark in one of her letters to her children, as for instance to Ranadheera: ‘[Ruttie’s] new craze is for dancing and her chief partner, a bumptious youth who knows you, Ali Kurrimbhoy . . .’ Or to Padmaja: ‘Today Ruttie having danced all night is lying asleep on my bed.’