Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  Throughout that year, Ruttie continued to fall ill off and on, enabling her to skip both the winter session in Delhi and the summer session in Simla. After seeing the pattern—short bursts of restless high spirits before she collapsed, unable to climb out of bed for days on end—it occurred to Sarojini that Ruttie’s illness might be at least partly self-induced. ‘She is usually ill and when she gets better she starts overeating to get ill again,’ she observed much later, but this was possibly Sarojini’s busiest year in politics, and her subsequent election as president of the forthcoming session of Congress, left her no time to spare for Ruttie’s seemingly capricious self-destructive behaviour. But Ruttie’s mother, although similarly helpless to intervene, was seriously alarmed—not about her headstrong daughter as much as her unloved granddaughter, as Sarojini wrote to tell Padmaja on 25 March 1925. On a visit to Petit Hall to deliver a lecture at one of Lady Petit’s garden parties, Sarojini wrote: ‘Petit Hall was en fete today and the beautiful French lawn was a mass of red and violet flowers for my lecture to a huge crowd of fashionable women . . . But before the lecture I spent the day with Lady Petit who is full of sorrow because she thinks Ruttie is going to die and full of anger against her because of the little girl who is worse than an orphan.’

  Others, including casual acquaintances, had also begun to notice that shadow behind Ruttie’s vivacious exterior. According to one acquaintance, Jahanara Shahnawaz, who met Ruttie more frequently than most because of the parties hosted by her father, Sir Muhammad Shafi, at his home in Simla, Ruttie was ‘a very vivacious person and full of life . . . Whenever Ruttie attended a function at our house, she would take part in the games wholeheartedly and would make the party come to life with her charming personality.’ But being the life and soul of the party was not the only thing Jahanara noticed about her. ‘She insisted on eating things like green chillies that were forbidden by the doctors, and I remonstrated [with] her for doing so, she would not listen,’ Jahanara writes in her memoir. ‘She was a person who felt lost and was deliberately trying to shock people around her.’

  This need to shock took various forms. ‘Whenever she went to the Viceregal Lodge [in Simla, when the assembly was in session in the summer capital] she would never stand up to pay her respect to the Viceroy,’ according to Sir Yameen Khan. ‘She argued that being a woman she was not required to pay him respect in this way. After all he was a man.’

  And then, Khan writes, she would walk into the Lower Bazaar—where ladies from the upper class never ventured out alone—to eat chaat by the roadside. ‘Mrs Jinnah with her dog would visit the Mall Road in a rickshaw every evening,’ Khan writes in his memoir. ‘First she would buy chocolate for her dog from the shop of Hussain Baksh General Merchants, and then from Lower Bazaar she would buy herself some chat served on a large leaf. Once, when a friend asked her about it, she said, “I do it to tease people like you.” Jinnah, by all accounts, instead of trying to discourage her from calling attention to herself, sometimes got out of his carriage to fetch her a plate of chat, ignoring the doctor’s warning to Ruttie to avoid spicy and unhygienic food. Nor did it seem to matter to her that the chocolate was as bad for her dog as the roadside snack was for her.

  ‘She often used to be in the mood for shocking people,’ as Jahanara put it, ‘which some people did not approve of, but those who knew her well would laugh over it.’

  Jinnah, however, was no longer as amused as he once used to be by her now almost desperate need to shock, although he never betrayed what he felt either by word or gesture. But under the almost inhuman composure, there must have been at least a trace of relief at the fact that she remained in Bombay for the next two sessions. As a legislator he had never been this busy, focusing on his work in the legislature as if ‘we need not bother ourselves outside the assembly’, as one of his own partymen remarked. He stood up on the floor of the House to speak on almost every issue which meant, of course, hours and weeks of diligent reading in preparation for the interventions. And even after his acrimonious split with the Swaraj Party, he kept up his punishing pace, having been elected to two important legislative committees that would keep him busy for the remaining year of this assembly. Living in the hotel without Ruttie and ‘her zoological department’, as Sarojini once called it, was by no means a deprivation. Nor were his brief visits to Bombay as frequent as they once used to be when he would commute between Delhi and Bombay to keep up with his court work. Having made ample money for a lifetime of ease, he was not interested in making more, and would rather not lose a single day of the session, even if it meant sacrificing his legal practice.

  His icy withdrawal from her, however, was now past. Having once made up his mind to take her back, reproaches were indeed senseless, as his pencilled lines in Napoleon’s biography reminded him. Moreover, it was not in his nature to mull over grievances, imaginary or real, and while he was home between the two sessions he was ready to fall in with whatever plans she made for them—that is, of course, only if they did not clash with his other work, political or legal.

  But in April when he returned from Delhi after the session closed, she was already deep into an obsession of her own. This was her passion for what she called ‘spiritual phenomenon’ and the clairvoyants and mediums who claimed to be able to get in touch with spirits outside the physical world. As she wrote to Kanji: ‘Lately I have been very much drawn towards the subject of Spirit Communication and I am most anxious to know more and to get at the Truth. It is such an elusive Subject and the more I hear of it the more puzzled do I become, though still more passionately interested.’ Her intense craving to find out for herself rather than depend on what other people told her led her, according to Kanji, to conduct ‘difficult and dangerous experiments on herself. As Kanji was a member of Annie Besant’s Theosophical Society of India, Ruttie assumed he would be able to put her in touch with the right circles in Bombay where she could join their séances. As she says in her letter to him: ‘I don’t profess any creed nor do I subscribe to a belief, but of late willy-nilly I have been propelled towards the study of so called spiritual phenomenon and I am too deeply immersed in the matter now to give it up without some personal satisfaction for I cannot content myself with other people’s experiences, though I fully realize that in a matter of this nature one doesn’t always get the evidence one seeks.’

  Her friends were dismayed. There was no dearth of clairvoyants and mediums in Bombay, mostly from Ireland or England, making a lucrative living by foretelling the future. Nearly everyone in Ruttie’s circle had been to an astrologer or face reader or some other form of fortune teller, but with Ruttie’s tendency to go overboard with her fads, they were afraid for her. As Sarojini wrote to Ranadheera: ‘She [Ruttie] lives in a vague, half-dreaming condition steeped in spiritualism which I think [is] a source of danger to one of her excitable and unbalanced mind.’ Even Kanji had his reservations. To his mind, ‘Séances were not only unsafe guides for getting such knowledge and experience, but they were dangerous to all those who participated in them . . . séances weakened the mind and the spirits of those who indulged in them and further they made people credulous.’

  This interest in the otherworldly had, in fact, begun towards the end of the previous year, 1924. Jinnah was then at home for nearly two months. But while Ruttie was increasingly becoming deeply immersed in her ‘Spirit Communication’, asking Kanji to find her a clairvoyant or a medium she could consult without giving away her identity, Jinnah was preoccupied with first the Hindu–Muslim Unity Conference, with Gandhi in the chair, and also with his efforts to put some life back into the Muslim League and bring Muslims together under one political platform. He hardly cared what Ruttie was up to. They each followed their predilections, with Ruttie attending a meeting of the Theosophical Society which was holding its annual convention in Bombay in December 1924, while he was busy refusing to move a Muslim League session in Bombay to Belgaum, where the Congress was holding its year-end session. When he did notice, on the oc
casions when he found her conferring seriously with Kanji about ‘this business of magnetizing and thought transference’, as Kanji put it, he ‘used to laugh at Ruttie and me’.

  It was left to Kanji, as he writes in his memoir of Ruttie, to deflect her from what he thought was her dangerous pursuit of the occult, nudging her towards the study of theosophy instead. But as with politics, she was more interested in people than their ideas and philosophy. She went readily to the annual theosophical convention that was being held in Bombay that year and listened to the speeches, including ‘a most inspired address by Mr Jinarajadas’ (C. Jinarajadasa, an official at Annie Besant’s ashram in Adyar, Madras), as she later wrote to Kanji on 28 December 1924. But she was more entranced by his wife, Dorothy. It was love at first sight, as Ruttie said in her letter, thanking Kanji profusely for introducing her to ‘a very charming and rare type of womanhood’. Her enthusiasm was so great that for a while she seemed like the old bubbly Ruttie, with her passionate attachments and fine appreciation of beauty in others. ‘Looking into her face (it is one of those faces one looks into and not at),’ Ruttie wrote, ‘I understand for the first time what is meant by a “radiant face”. I must confess I fell for her absolutely and I hope that you will try and arrange so that I may meet her some time when she happens to be in Bombay.’

  While it lasted, Ruttie was so swept away by her enthusiasm for the theosophists that she even contemplated sending their child (now six) to a school for girls the society ran at their ashram in Adyar in Madras. She made inquiries through Kanji about the school, and Dorothy, a little overcome by the honour being done to their school by admitting the child of such an important personage, sent him the details. But by then, Ruttie had either been overruled by Jinnah or had lost interest in the project; there was no more talk of it from her end. Dorothy sent several reminders, writing to Kanji on 29 August 1925: ‘I do hope Mrs Jinnah will send her daughter to the School, for I am sure she must be a very intelligent girl, and it will be worthwhile her having a good education.’ And again two months later, on 29 October 1925: ‘I hope you have received satisfactory answer regarding the School and it would be good for Mrs Jinnah’s child to go there.’ But Ruttie was no longer interested.

  She was even more fascinated with a painting that caught her eye at the convention. Of the painting she says nothing except that it is ‘of Chandrasekhara’, who might have been a revered figure among the theosophists but whose name has not survived in their annals. But it appears to have struck such a deep chord in Ruttie that she immediately placed an order with Dorothy Cousins for three reproductions of it in varying sizes. One would have expected her enthusiasm to have waned in the three months that the package took to arrive, but when she received only one copy instead of the three she had ordered, and discovered that Dorothy had already sailed for England along with her husband and could not be reached, she became unaccountably desperate, as she wrote to tell Kanji. Unable to locate another person in the society’s headquarters in Adyar who could help her get the remaining two copies of the painting, she turned to the unfailing Kanji. ‘I must get those other copies or I shall be quite frantic and I am sure you don’t want me to lose my equilibrium!!!” she wrote in her letter to him dated 31 March 1926, a few months after she thought she was done with the Theosophical Society forever.

  In her eagerness, she tried to carry Jinnah along as well, despite his avowal of scepticism and wanting nothing to do with this ‘business’, as he put it. He was home for the summer, and because there was nothing much happening politically to occupy him, she was able to renew her efforts to draw him into her current enthusiasm. Both she and Kanji were convinced that Jinnah had an intuitive side to him, a ‘sixth sense’ which he refused to acknowledge in himself, even though, as Kanji pointed out in his memoir of Ruttie, he used it to such good effect in his political career. Having picked a book which she thought would be a good bait for him, Ruttie was able to make him read it by using her old methods—‘alternate bullying and coaxing’, as she put it. The Spirit of Irene, as Ruttie describes it in her letter, was an account of a murder trial in England of a case that became famous as the Boscombs Murders, where the baffled police apparently resorted to a séance to find the clues that helped them solve the murder mystery. Either to humour her or because he sensed she was drawing away from him and wanted her close to him again, Jinnah, as Ruttie writes, ‘had to admit that it was remarkable and irrefutable’. If not exactly convinced, as Ruttie adds, ‘J was not at all events able to find any flaw in the case.’ But her eagerness to convert Jinnah was palpable in how frequently she refers to him in just this one letter to Kanji, beginning with: ‘I am slowly, but surely drawing J’s interest into the matter . . .’

  That eagerness to win his approval for this new interest, or at least not have him scoff at her for it, seemed related in some curious way to her growing sense of alienation from his politics. It was as if because of her disillusionment with politics in general and Jinnah’s politics in particular, she needed some other link, however tenuous, to hold them together for fear of growing more apart. It was a time when Jinnah, having just split up with the Swaraj Party, was being roundly condemned by them as a rank communalist, a charge the newspapers had taken up, while he did very little to correct the impression. She knew there was no truth in it, yet his increasing focus on building a base for himself among Muslims was making her increasingly uncomfortable.

  The week when Ruttie dropped in at the theosophical convention in Bombay, for example, and got so carried away by everything to do with theosophy, was also the week when Jinnah had been busy planning his Muslim League session. But she kept her distance from both him and the session, leaving him to turn instead to his assistant in court, M.C. Chagla. It was Chagla who was now the sounding board for his ideas. Chagla buoyed him up with his admiration and youthful enthusiasm, as Kanji and Ruttie had done on earlier occasions when his politics had nothing to do with Muslims. And while she went with him for the session in Bombay’s Globe Cinema, sitting beside him on the platform—for it meant a lot to him to have her attend these sessions, as a political gesture he wanted to send out to these all-male gatherings—she would rather have not been there. As it turned out, it would perhaps have been better for everyone if she had listened to her own feelings and kept away.

  Her mute presence, instead of adding to his image as a progressive Muslim leader, only detracted from it, as Chagla points out in his memoir, Roses in December. The overwhelmingly male audience resented her presence in the hall and some of them were shocked at the way she was dressed. It was her usual fashionably transparent sari with a sleeveless blouse—a dress in which she could step into the theosophical convention the previous day without raising an eyebrow—but it outraged conservative Muslim sensibilities. As Chagla recounts: ‘The hall was full of bearded Moulvies and Maulanas and they came to me in great indignation, and asked me who that woman was. They demanded that she should be asked to leave, as the clothes she flaunted constituted an offence to Islamic eyes. I told them that they should shut their eyes as the lady in question was the President’s wife and I could not possibly ask her to leave the hall.’

  She did, in fact, avoid going for the next session of the Muslim League held in Aligarh the following year, in December 1926. Finding her sense of duty to him competing with her own desire to go with Kanji and his wife and their four-year-old son to the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, where a jubilee convention was being held in the same week as the Muslim League session, Ruttie informed Jinnah that she would not go to Aligarh with him.

  But it turned out that Ruttie could not go either with Jinnah or Kanji. Her beloved cat, Shapurjee, fell ill and she had to stay behind in Bombay to nurse it. Ruttie’s emotional bond with her pets had always been deep, but in her isolation and the loneliness within her marriage, they had come to mean even more to her, the only objects of her love and a means of maintaining her fragile mental equilibrium. Despite the brittle mask she put up fo
r the world to see, the emotional toll had already begun its devastating effect, erupting in those frequent bouts of illness that were becoming by now an almost permanent state of invalidism, and sudden fits of despair that resulted at least on one occasion, as she later confessed to Sarojini, in an attempt to kill herself. Jinnah, of course, was as oblivious as ever to the real state of her mind, but even Kanji, who had become so close to her as to count as her only real friend, was equally taken in by her light-hearted manner of normality. But Shapurjee’s illness, coming on top of all the emotional strain that she kept locked up so tightly within her, appears to have shaken her badly.

  She became so distraught by the cat’s illness that the frail composure that she had found for herself in recent months, thanks to Kanji and theosophy, threatened to fall to pieces again. She badly needed someone to talk to but there was simply no one she could turn to, with even Kanji having left for Adyar. Sarojini, who had so far been her one refuge, had become increasingly unavailable of late, with either her overcrowded schedule keeping her out of Bombay or her impatience getting in the way of her sympathy. She was again out of town, caught up in her own programme for the year-end Congress session in Kanpur over which she was to preside in a few days. Jinnah was as usual unavailable, particularly during her emotional meltdowns. In her desperation, Ruttie clung to Kanji even from a distance. Kanji was, by now, in the thick of the jubilee convention he had gone to attend. But she insisted on sending him a daily wire updating him on Shapurjee’s condition, more to relieve her own feelings than to inform Kanji who, as she well knew, was not interested in her cat or its health.