Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 36

  And it was not just this one act of childish rebellion. The frigid silence between them seems to have grown with the months. Her tenderness for him, the cajoling and teasing and almost maternal indulgence had disappeared; and on his part, the loyalty and trust in her had gone. Neither ever spoke of it. But one hint of what might have possibly been going on behind Jinnah’s mask of iron composure is suggested in a few lines of a book that he underlined several times, as if they had struck some personal chord within him. It was one of those biographies he occasionally found the time to read, titled Napoleon: Lover and Husband, by Frederick Masson. Marked on one of the pages in pencil are these lines about Napoleon’s struggle to come to terms with his wife’s infidelity: ‘It was no half pardon which was extended . . . (Bonaparte had the wonderful faculty of forgetfulness). He argued that those men were not to blame, but that the fault was his, for he had not taken good care of his wife, that she had not been properly guarded, but left too long alone and unprotected, and so another had been able to penetrate into his harem. It was natural, the necessity of sex ordered that man should be insistent, that woman should succumb; it was the law of nature. Bonaparte reasoned that if the erring wife was no longer beloved, she should be repudiated; if she was still dear the only thing to do was to take her back; reproaches were senseless.’ And enclosed in a box, as if to highlight their significance further, underlined over and over again in curly and straight lines, are these three words—‘reproaches were senseless’. Was this the problem then—Jinnah’s struggle to reassert his reason over his feelings of injury and betrayal?

  There was certainly nothing to stop her had she ever wished to even experiment on that score. She had always scorned conventional morality and now, after the War, there had been a great awakening of women’s sexual freedom, especially in Paris where she had spent a lot of her time. It was reflected in almost all the books she read—scores of novels and collections of short stories that she gobbled up without bothering to put her name on the front page, as she used to do before her marriage, when she took her reading seriously. These books—‘bestsellers’ before the word was even coined—seemed to take an almost malicious pleasure in bringing down the edifices of Victorian marriage and morals, using parody as their weapon. But with her, if there had indeed been ‘another’, it would have been a passing thing, perhaps even a desperate call for Jinnah’s attention. Philandering was not a part of her temperament. Hidden under all that extravagance and frivolity was an almost ascetic streak. She now entered a phase of what can only be construed as self-loathing. From being someone who had relished ‘dressing up’ in a playful way, in sharp contrast to Jinnah’s deadly seriousness when it came to clothes, she suddenly lost all interest in her appearance. With her sense of drama, even this was theatrical: the sudden and inexplicable transformation of Bombay’s most dazzling beauty into ‘the miserable remnant of Mrs Jinnah’, as Motilal Nehru lamented to Sarojini. The gulf between them had led not just to separate sitting rooms but presumably to separate bedrooms as well, judging from their contrasting sleeping habits. (It is very curious that among the household effects of Jinnah, who hoarded everything that once belonged to Ruttie, there is no sign of a double bed!) Jinnah slept very little, but as Fatima Jinnah says in her book, he had a ‘life-long habit of sleeping when he willed’. Sleep, however, had deserted her of late, along with her peace of mind, leaving her tossing all night, making it impossible to share a bed with anyone, least of all Jinnah, with his extreme aversion to any sign of restlessness around him. It was doubtless far more convenient for both to sleep separately, enabling him to get his few allotted hours of sleep, while she could toss restlessly about or get up, as she chose, leaving her bed at least on two instances to write a letter to Kanji well past midnight, without disturbing Jinnah. He was, moreover, a stickler for routine, unable to bear even the slightest departure from his clockwork timetable—the day beginning on the dot at 7 a.m., no matter how late he slept; with his personal valet entering the room with his tea on a tray and the newspapers; exactly an hour later, his bath, while the valet laid out his clothes; and then sharp at quarter past nine, breakfast, and out of the house by ten. All this while Ruttie was still asleep, having finally snatched her few hours of slumber with the help of a medication that had become all the rage among a restless new generation chasing sleep by means of a new invention called the ‘sleeping pill’.

  How much of Ruttie’s sleeplessness had to do with the emotional toll of his frigid withdrawal and the retribution, as Jaisoorya called it, for repudiating her duty to herself, and what portion of it was due to her growing addiction to the barbiturate called Veronal, is hard to determine. Veronal was by now indiscriminately prescribed by most doctors for any patient of nervous disposition who complained of sleeplessness. Except for a cautious few, like Dr Naidu, who advised Padmaja not to use medication to treat her insomnia but to try instead a hot spinal bath—even sending her a cutting from a newspaper on the method to be followed—doctors throughout the world saw no danger in the new barbiturate. And it would take at least another half-century before they found out its lethal side effects, including the risks of addiction and requiring ever higher dosages to counteract its wearing effect, with overdose leading to death in many cases. How long Ruttie had been on Veronal is uncertain but by mid-1925 she evidently was accustomed to taking sleeping pills, judging by her complaint to Kanji in a letter dated 7 April 1925, of her dreamless ‘heavy druglike sleep’ which had no redeeming feature except ‘the five, or at the most six hours rest it ensures a restive mind’.

  Even when they were thrown close together, as in their hotel suite while the assembly session was on, she found ways of avoiding being alone with him. Jinnah, in any case, had ensured that the suite he booked for them at the Maidens had two sitting rooms so that they could each have a living room to themselves, but that did not seem to suffice for her need to get away from him. Instead, she hit upon a plan to invite Padmaja to go along with them. Dreading the reopening of the assembly, when she knew there was no way out of going with him to Delhi, and in a fever of apprehension in case Padmaja rejected her proposal, she nevertheless plucked up the courage to write to Padmaja, inviting her to come to Delhi with them. Ruttie’s letter, dated 2 January 1925, says very little about her unhappiness in her marriage—in fact, portraying Jinnah as a fond and forbearing husband, happy to give his wife and her friend their space when they wanted it, which, of course, was true, even if she had brushed the rest of the truth aside. But the letter says a great deal more of the changes within her since their marriage. Sarojini, of course, was the first to notice it, observing in a letter to Ranadheera (wrongly dated April 1921, when Ruttie was in Monte Carlo): ‘How she [Ruttie] has altered physically and mentally . . . She has lost much of her beauty and yet continues to be better looking than most people anywhere.’ But even Sarojini seems to have missed the utter decimation of Ruttie’s self-confidence since her marriage and the social ostracism that had followed, turning her from the bright, confident young woman of sixteen who could almost peremptorily summon Padmaja, as if she was a princess, to come and visit her in Mahabaleshwar, into this craven, almost abject supplicant nine years later, afraid of being spurned by the very same friend. So devastating apparently had been the effect of her isolation that every line in her letter to Padmaja seems to reflect this desolation within her, beginning with her choosing to write to Padmaja, rather than ask her directly. At the time Ruttie was writing the letter, flinching in anticipation at a possible rejection, its recipient, Padmaja, was not only in Bombay, but had, in fact, visited Ruttie the previous day, giving Ruttie ample time and opportunity to make her request in person, as friends normally do when they plan a trip together.

  But instead, here was Ruttie beginning her letter with the utmost trepidation, as if their roles had reversed, she now the nervous schoolgirl while Padmaja who had once been too embarrassed to confess that she had no car at her disposal now had the power to reject her proposal. ‘I hadn�
�t the courage to ask you when you were here yesterday as I was afraid that you might give me some hasty reply in the negative,’ Ruttie wrote, ‘and I hadn’t the heart to face that as it would mean the wrecking of very many dreams and illusions I have been nurturing since the last few weeks or more.’ And having begun, she still needs to brace herself again not to stall and come to the point: ‘You see, I feel quite nervous to come to the point, as your answer is going to mean so much to me. Anyhow you must be getting rather fed up with this endless preamble so I will come to the point.’

  Then at last it is out: ‘I want you to come and stay with us for a couple of weeks or more at Delhi. We shall be putting up at the Maidens Hotel and directly I hear from you I shall arrange for rooms for you. We have already booked for ourselves one of the only two suites in the hotel and as it has two sitting rooms we can always lock J up in one of them when we want to be by ourselves. Besides I shall do my best to get you as nice a room as possible and in the same passage as us if not exactly next door.’

  ‘J will have to be there about the 17th instant,’ she wrote, hastening to reassure her friend that it was not J’s programme that was as important for her as having Padmaja come along with them, ‘and I am not sure that I shall go with him as I would much rather follow in about a fortnight later. Anyway it all depends on you. About the first week of February is by far the best time to come up and we can travel together.’ And having at last come out with her invitation, the almost pathetic eagerness with which she waited for her answer: ‘Do, do say yes as I have dared to build on your answer and my disappointment will be great. However, your own inclination will be your only guide. Please let me know as early as you can, firstly as I shall be hopping about for the reply and secondly as I must write for rooms at once. Love, Ruttie.’

  But to Ruttie’s ill-luck, before Padmaja could make up her mind, she was suddenly recalled home to Hyderabad on a summons of an urgent and mysterious nature, a ‘cry of despair’ apparently so compelling that she had to abruptly cut short her holiday with her mother and sister, and return to Hyderabad by the next train. The only hint of this summons—or possibly her errand of mercy—is in Leilamani’s letter to Padmaja from the Taj on 16 January 1925, saying that their mother has asked Leilamani ‘not to worry you with questions so I sadly pocketed my desire to console you and of course my curiosity’.

  It would take another couple of weeks before Padmaja turned down Ruttie’s invitation, in all likelihood because she was still caught up in whatever errand had taken her back to Hyderabad so suddenly. The disappointment must indeed have been great, as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja as soon as she learnt of her decision, ‘Ruttie will be heart-broken at you not being able to join her.’ But there was also some relief commingled with the commiseration. ‘On the whole,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 30 January 1925, ‘when I think of it, having been to Delhi, for now you would not have stood the crowds and bustle at Maidens Hotel.’ Leilamani concurred—except it was not the bustle she thought was the problem so much as the boredom. ‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am you could not join Ruttie,’ she wrote from the Taj to Padmaja in Hyderabad. ‘Although the little woman apart, you would (I feel from our last visit to the Imperial City) have surely died of cold there had you succeeded miraculously in surviving the Boredom. But then, you’ll add, I’ve survived worse things than either . . .’

  But even before Padmaja’s rejection could do its work in demoralizing her further, something else occurred to shatter what remained of Ruttie’s self-confidence about her social life. Very soon after Padmaja’s abrupt departure from Bombay, Ruttie had an unpleasant scene of some sort with Leilamani which led to a severing of their friendship that was to last all her life. It had to do with Ruttie’s friendship with Umar Sobhani’s younger sister, Khannum, who was also a friend of Leilamani’s. ‘Khannu’, much to her brother’s dismay, had become so close to Ruttie in the past couple of years as to be virtually inseparable. In his desperation to put an end to a friendship he considered unsuitable for his sister, Umar resorted to underhand means, paying a visit to Ruttie at South Court without telling his sister and carrying a message purportedly from Khannum that destroyed Ruttie’s faith in her friend. He played the same trick on his sister, lying to her that ‘a most insulting letter’ had arrived from Ruttie ‘but that as she was too ill to see it he had destroyed it’. Somehow Leilamani’s name also seems to have been dragged into the story that Umar had concocted, and given her ‘terrible tempers and her even more disgusting manners’, as her unindulgent mother believed, it lent credibility to Umar’s story. In happier times, Ruttie would have perhaps laughed it off and moved on, unaffected, or even perhaps confronted her two friends with what Umar had said, and sorted it out with them. But the past few years of her largely undeserved notoriety and the constant odium directed at her from all sides, and the disapproval, either open or covert, of parents and guardians of the young women she tried to befriend, finally insinuated itself deep within her. It made her touchy, quick to withdraw in hurt pride at insults, imaginary or real. Ruttie cut herself off from both Leilamani and Khannum without giving or demanding an explanation from either, just as Umar had hoped. ‘Ruttie and Khannum have ceased their wonderful friendship and no longer talk to each other, much to Omar’s relief and joy,’ Sarojini wrote a year later to Padmaja, on 16 January 1926, still unaware of what had transpired.

  To Leilamani, it seemed to be a minor misunderstanding that would soon clear up. ‘I’ve not seen Ruttie since you left,’ she wrote to Padmaja in her letter of 16 January 1925, ‘only heard the tail-end of the quarrel from “Khannu” who came to inquire why I had called her a “D- -n liar”!’ I’ve made my peace with her [Khannum] but Ruttie I shall leave alone as I am weary of strife and a patched up peace will help neither of us—I shall continue to be her friend whether she likes me or no—I cannot help that—misunderstandings when they cannot be unravelled, should be left alone for time and loyalty to diminish.’ But time never healed the wound, cutting deeper into Ruttie’s fragile sense of her own worth than either of her friends suspected.

  It was Khannum who eventually made the first move, desperate to patch up with Ruttie, arriving at her doorstep the day before Ruttie sailed, possibly on her trip abroad with Jinnah for the Skeen committee almost fifteen months later. As Ruttie wrote to Kanji in an undated letter, on board a steamer, also unnamed: ‘By the bye, Khannum came to see me the day before I sailed and she asserts that Umar told her that a most insulting letter had arrived from me but that as she was too ill to see it he had destroyed it. She also denies all knowledge of her brother’s visit to me and his message from me was the first that she had heard about it!!’

  But she was still in denial about her own vulnerability, feeling instead pity for Khannum. ‘Poor little kid,’ Ruttie wrote, ‘I didn’t like to say anything but I told her that I would ask Umar about it on my return. Life has been very hard for her and the world a fearsome relentless monster but unless she pulls up and takes herself in hand she will fall all to pieces, both physically and mentally. The strain of circumstances is too much for her, as it would be for me were I in her place.’ The ‘strain of circumstances’ that Ruttie was talking about was probably a reference to the crash of the Sobhani fortune after the government withdrew contracts to them because of the Sobhanis’ anti-government politics during Gandhi’s non-cooperation agitation. But it did not once occur to Ruttie that her life had been even harder, and the world an equally, if not more, ‘fearsome relentless monster’, and that unless she too ‘pulled up’ and took herself in hand, she was even more likely than Khannum, with her large family to buffer her from hard knocks, to ‘fall all to pieces, both physically and mentally’.

  The first sign that she was not as impervious as she had assumed was another bout of her old illness. Whether it was the strain of cutting out Khannum and Leilamani from her already depleted social life or the disappointment of Padmaja declining her invitation, she was seized again by the illness that doc
tors had no name for. Within days of Padmaja’s decision to turn down Ruttie’s invitation, she had collapsed. But in her unhappy, restless state of mind, she refused to stay in bed. Instead, she dragged herself out to visit Sarojini at the Taj. As Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 5 February 1925: ‘Ruttie is really very ill, I think. She was here yesterday, about half her usual size and hardly able to sit up, poor child.’ One good thing about it though was that she could now put off the dreaded shift to Delhi, perhaps for the whole session. A fortnight later, she had still not joined Jinnah in Delhi but, instead, was taking around one of Leilamani’s friends from Oxford who had turned up in Bombay while both Leilamani and her mother were away. The friend, ‘a graceful little person of beautiful manners who I am told is a brilliant student and an allround sportsman as well’, as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 21 February 1925, arrived the day Sarojini was leaving for Patna on official work, taking Leilamani with her. And it was only natural for Sarojini, who knew nothing as yet of the quarrel between her and Leilamani, to ask Ruttie to step in and do the needful. ‘Ruttie took him in charge for the day,’ as she wrote in her letter to Padmaja.

  Ruttie’s delicate manoeuvre of cold-shouldering Leilamani, who was still living in the Taj with her mother and going with her wherever Sarojini’s official duties took her, while at the same time continuing to drop in on Sarojini as if nothing was wrong, apparently had fooled Sarojini for a while and she did not notice their strained relationship for at least another month. When she did, her sympathies were with Ruttie, as she was fed up with Leilamani by then. ‘Papi [Leilamani’s name in the family] needs a first class whipping, poor beast,’ Sarojini wrote to Ranadheera on 23 March 1925. ‘She’ll get it soon enough from life. I cannot help being very sad for her deliberate mockery of her best self, alienating every single friend by her terrible tempers and her even more disgusting manners. But she will find her level very soon. Meanwhile till she goes the strain on my nerves is awful.’