Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  A week later, when Shapurjee recovered, Ruttie followed Kanji to Adyar for the convention, not fully recovered but intent on her search for some light to ward off the gathering darkness. She was so hopeful that this at last was the path she had been looking for, that she came all ready to join as a full-fledged member of the society and take her initiation from Annie Besant in person.

  But again, what she found was disappointment; and that lost feeling of not belonging anywhere. She felt an outsider among the theosophists, and much as she wished to blend in, could not. Jinarajadasa, sensing she would be uncomfortable in the temporary huts set up at the ashram for the delegates, suggested she stay in a hotel in Madras instead. But she turned up every afternoon at Adyar, diligently attending the meetings and lectures. One evening while at the ashram, she became unaccountably upset and Mrs Besant had to take her to her rooms to talk with her in private. They spent half an hour alone together. Ruttie told her that she had come to Adyar to join the Theosophical Society but was upset because of the society’s practice of having recitations from scriptures of different religions during the morning meetings. And according to Kanji’s memoir of Ruttie, she informed Mrs Besant that she no longer wanted to be a member of a society that was bringing back these forms of religion. Mrs Besant calmed her down by reassuring her ‘that it was not essential for a serious minded and genuine person like her formally to join the Theosophical Society as a member’.

  It could be that the prayer meeting reminded Ruttie too sharply of other betrayals on account of religion, particularly the way J was moving irrevocably closer to his Muslim identity and therefore away from her. At any rate, Mrs Besant sensed at once that there was something more than theosophy that was troubling her. After their meeting, Mrs Besant told Kanji: ‘Look after your great friend, she is unhappy.’ And when Kanji was surprised at that, she exclaimed: ‘Don’t you see unhappiness in her eyes? Look at her.’

  There was another Irishwoman with psychic powers, a friend of Sarojini’s called Mrs Harker, who too had been able to see beyond the light-hearted, almost frivolous exterior to the despair lurking in the shadow of Ruttie’s beauty. ‘My dear,’ she is supposed to have remarked to Sarojini when she met Ruttie in her room as far back as 1919, ‘I see a dreadful sight. I see this beautiful child dead before my eyes, dead ten years hence on her birthday.’ But Sarojini had merely brushed it aside, disbelieving, so convincing was the front that Ruttie put up.

  Just as now when Kanji looked, all he found was the very social and confident Ruttie attending a glittering dinner party hosted by Lady Emily Lutyens at the Adyar headquarters, a party that impressed Kanji because it was an international gathering with guests speaking in English and French. It did not seem to him that anything was troubling her at all, even when she asked Jinarajadasa during a dinner he hosted for them to ‘magnetize’ something for her in order to protect her from some imminent danger she felt from either outside or within her. ‘Magnetizing’, the process of transferring thoughts of positive energy into an object, usually a precious stone, which the owner believed would keep her safe from harm was one of those ‘spiritual’ practices that the theosophists frowned upon and Jinarajadasa fobbed Ruttie off by saying: ‘Why ask me? Your friend Kanji can do it very well for you.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  The visit to Adyar marked the end of Ruttie’s short affair with theosophy. She came back from Madras thoroughly disillusioned with theosophy, much to Sarojini’s relief, and wanted to engage in something quite different, something like youth issues. ‘Ruttie is fed up with theosophists after attending their great jubilee at Adyar,’ Sarojini wrote to Leilamani on 16 January 1926, after Ruttie’s return to Bombay. ‘She is going to preside at a students’ debate on inter-communal marriage but is frightened now because she has to make a speech.’

  This was odd, because stage fright had never been Ruttie’s problem. As a young bride of eighteen, she was able to stand up before a crowd and deliver an impromptu speech that kept her audience entranced outside the town hall during the anti-Willingdon protest. Even in the following year, 1919, she rose to the occasion, effortlessly delivering an impromptu speech from the side-box where she sat at a large trade union convention in Bombay while moving a resolution against their friend Horniman’s deportation.

  But her interest in the occult survived a while longer, flickering on for a few months more, before that hope died out as well, leaving her defenceless against the encroaching sense of despair and emptiness from within. From the beginning, her interest had been in what she called ‘Spirit Communication’ rather than theosophy, and obsessed with finding out how to contact these spirits, as if that would save her somehow from this anguish of the real world and its bonds that she longed to escape. Even when Kanji was able to interest her in theosophy as a way of taking her mind off séances and other occult subjects, he was still not quite able to cure her of her craving for supernatural experiences and séances. ‘What I am after,’ Ruttie wrote to Kanji on 28 December 1924, the very day, or day after, attending her first theosophical meeting in Bombay at his urging and being apparently so swept away by its charms, ‘is a Séance controlled by some experienced medium, professional or otherwise; as I am most anxious to get a personal experience of this matter in which I so passionately believe.’ Equally futile was his attempt to deflect her search away from séances towards telepathy and ‘dream travel’—the belief he shared with other theosophists that people with karmic connections could send messages to each other through dreams. This she resisted because, as she pointed out, she not only had trouble sleeping but when she did, her sleep was disappointingly dreamless. ‘Yes, I know of the dream travels of which you speak,’ Ruttie wrote to Kanji on 7 April 1925. ‘But I do all my dreaming in my waking hours. I am not being waggish. There is nothing I would welcome with greater rejoicing than an experience of the sort to which you refer in your letter but in my heavy druglike sleep there is no redeeming feature and besides the five or at most six hours’ rest it ensures a restive mind, and a correspondingly restless physical state it has no value. I don’t dream excepting very rarely and then I wake up only to the consciousness of having dreamt, and no more.’

  By now, this search had become so urgent and vital for her, that nothing else seemed to matter, and yet, she could not get rid of that restlessness that was troubling her, as she confides to Kanji in her letter: ‘My soul is too clogged! And though I aspire and crave, God knows how earnestly! how intensely, my researches remain uncrowned—even by thorns! I am feeling peculiarly restless and wish one with psychic powers would come to my assistance.’

  Her pursuit seemed at least partly to do with her struggle to reconnect with herself,; she had the feeling of being lost since her marriage and she hoped perhaps spirituality would provide the meaning she was unable to find and the lack of which made her life so unbearable. ‘My proud soul humbles before the magnitude of this subject,’ she wrote, ‘and in my estimation those of us with Second Sight and other such psychic powers should rank with the world’s poets and songsters for their gift if more intelligible is also more divine. The seers and saints should stand among the world’s prophets. After all we are at present too blind and unseeing to comprehend what the psychics would reveal to our half demented senses. But what the mind often revolts at, and refuses to accept, the intrinsic self within us admits with certain ease which makes the more thoughtful ponder, as though it had some ancient and original knowledge of its own.’

  And the more it eluded her, the more determined she was not to give up, as she writes: ‘There is much to clear away, and almost as much to mend, before I can dare to feel disappointment, because certain signs and manifestations for which I long and contrive do not occur. But I am weak and spoilt by indulgence, and to drive myself is a task to which I don’t impose a time limit for obvious reasons.’ Till now, Ruttie had been on somewhat formal terms with Kanji, ruled by the convention that you could not pay a personal call on a member of the opposite sex unless
you were related to them, and she still needed to reassure him in her letter that all he had to do was ‘let me know by phone or a written word when you are free to come, and you will be more than welcome’. But for the time, she felt close enough to him to say what was on her mind, and trusted in his sympathy and understanding. ‘I have written much,’ she wrote, ‘but I feel confident that it is in sympathetic hands and they will be understanding eyes that read what I have said.’ What she does not say, however, is why with Jinnah at home right then—probably sleeping in the next room, considering that her letter, which began at midnight, had by now stretched well into the next day, as her postscript clearly says—she needs to lean on a relative stranger like Kanji for closeness and understanding rather than on the man she had married at such cost to herself.

  At its height, this chasing after the unreal served another useful purpose: she was able, quite unintentionally, of course, to keep her feelings from overwhelming her—no trifling thing in her fragile state. For example, there had been another pet tragedy in South Court six months before Shapurjee got ill. As Sarojini pithily put it in her letter to Padmaja on 10 April 1925: ‘Ruttie has been bitten by Arlette who has gone mad.’ Something like this would have ordinarily shattered Ruttie for weeks on end, as it almost did when Shapurjee fell ill at a time when her intoxication with the other world was beginning to wear off. But at this point she was so thoroughly oblivious to everything but her pursuit of the otherworldly that the tragedy seemed to pass her by without rousing any feeling, even though it involved, among other things, putting down Arlette who had been her life’s companion, going everywhere with her from her Petit Hall days. In the letter she wrote to Kanji only two days later, on 12 April 1925, she talks of everything, from the books on theosophy he has sent, Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and its challenges, Jinnah and the challenge of making him read The Spirit of Irene, and even a word of thanks to Kanji for forwarding her the address of the artist who did the portrait of Chandrasekhara, but not a word, even in passing, about either Arlette or her grief at her passing. In fact, Arlette seems so completely forgotten in the excitement of having at last seen a ‘manifestation’ that she declares herself to be even happy that day. ‘I am very excited,’ she wrote, ‘and equally happy as at last I have two manifestations, one was a most extraordinary luminance—a sort of perpetual flash suspended midway at the corner of Hughes Road and Sandhurst Bridge.’

  Her excitement over the manifestations also blunted her disappointment at J yet again cancelling the holiday in Kashmir they had been planning for so long. She was now able to brush it aside in two casual lines: ‘It doesn’t look as if we are going to Kashmere after all, as J is engaged in the Bawla case. So it is more than likely that we shall remain in Bombay.’

  The Bawla case itself obsessed her for a while. It was a sensational murder case revolving around a young and beautiful singer called Mumtaz Begum, who escaped to freedom from the court of the prince of Indore and was ambushed while she was driving near the Hanging Garden on Malabar Hill by the jealous prince’s goons, killing her lover, a wealthy merchant called Abdul Kader Bawla. Mumtaz struggled with her assailants and called for help from a group of British army officers who were passing by. They rescued her, and her assailants were handed over to the police. The case was splashed in all the newspapers and attracted so much public attention that when the trial started, there was no room for the crowds that pushed to get into the courtroom.

  But Ruttie’s interest in the case was not so much with the drama of sex, mystery and violence that were drawing the crowds, but with the plight of the young singer. It was as if she identified with her—this young woman who had been taken possession of by a powerful prince at the tender age of fourteen, isolated from her mother and shut away for his occasional enjoyment, but pursued and hunted down when she tried to escape from his court. Ruttie became so fascinated with Mumtaz Begum that she not only read every word of what the newspapers said about her, but sat through the trial, missing nothing. Access to the courtroom was easier for her than for most people because Jinnah was the lawyer for one of the nine accused, for whom he managed to get an acquittal. She did not stir out of the courtroom for as long as the trial lasted, and was seized by a desire to help Mumtaz Begum after that to try and rescue her from her circumstances. ‘Don’t you think that this would be the critical moment to approach Mumtaz Begum to wean her away from the life to which she seems predestined?’ she wrote on 1 May 1925 to Kanji, who, as a legislator and social worker, had the power to help her in this matter. ‘When I saw the witnesses one by one who gained connection with her I was frankly disgusted. Her associations are horrible—but I can’t help thinking that she is above them as she is above her associates . . . If she is allowed to remain in her natural surroundings a reversion to type is inevitable. Can’t anything be done?’

  Apart from serving as her sounding board, Kanji had become important to her by now as an emotional support and for boosting her morale. All through 1925, as Kanji writes in his memoir of her, they met regularly three or four times a week. Besides their shared interest in psychic and spiritual matters, Ruttie threw herself into his work as she had once done with Jinnah’s politics. Here again it was his work in the brothels of Bombay that fascinated her, although she did not as yet push him into taking her along for his investigations into their living conditions.

  And yet, despite how far they had grown apart, she was nowhere close to getting over J. Some part of her still clung to him, even as the rest of her struggled to break free. In July, when he left for the new session in Simla, she kept intending to join him there but fell ill each time. As Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 1 September 1925, ‘I told you, didn’t I, that Ruttie couldn’t be with Jinnah in Simla at all. She has been ill all the time, poor child!’ Having all the time to herself, she felt restless and unhappy, turning up every night at Sarojini’s to escape her solitude. As an exasperated Sarojini wrote to Ranadheera on 14 September 1925: ‘What was left over [of my time] especially between 10 pm and 4 am was cornered by Ruttie who simply won’t go home. She is ill and lonely and restless. She looks haggard and weary and is always in pain. I am glad that Jinnah will be back in a day or two to take charge of her.’

  It was a part of Ruttie that Kanji never saw. To him, she was all in all: a source of inspiration, one of the two most helpful and healthy influences on him and his work (the other being his mentor and spiritual guide, Annie Besant). According to him, Ruttie was ‘extraordinarily clever, full of understanding, full of affection and [with] a noble heart’. Her health, if it ever cropped up at all, was lightly dismissed—‘I have been ill again,’ she mentioned casually in her letter to him on 5 June 1925, ‘so almost any evening will find me at home.’ Nor did Kanji seem to notice her anxiety attacks and sleeplessness. She had fled from home in her usual fit of restlessness and then recalling an appointment she had made with Kanji, she had raced back only to find that he had left a few minutes before. And that troubled her so much that she could not sleep, and at 2 a.m. she wrote a letter of apology. And yet when she wrote in the same letter ‘It is nearing 2 am. I am frightfully tired and sleepy but the thought of you having come to me I simply had to crawl out of bed to write to you—to ease my conscience if nothing else,’ Kanji took it as a sign of their growing friendship rather than a symptom of the nameless anxiety that was taking over her life.

  When Jinnah returned, it was back to the usual routine: they were friendly and even fond of each other, but starved of all intimacy. He, too, saw no sign of anything troubling her, and was happy to accompany her to a birthday dinner party that Sarojini was hosting in her suite for Jaisoorya. Jinnah even wore the clothes that Ruttie had obviously picked out for him because Sarojini had organized a ‘Hyderabadi’ dinner, made by her sister’s cook and brought to the Taj for the occasion. To Sarojini’s surprise, as she wrote to Padmaja on 27 September 1925, ‘Jinnah invited himself and appeared in real Lucknow costume and fed daintily as befits a dandy.’ It was a s
mall gathering of friends, including Jai Joshi, another young friend of Sarojini’s who frequented her Taj suite. Jai, around Ruttie’s age and equally fashionable, was a qualified doctor but also adrift, not knowing what to do with her life, but strangely enough, with so much in common and meeting often in Sarojini’s rooms, had never become a good friend of Ruttie’s. ‘Jai failed us at the last moment owing to and [an] appointment in the “sooburbs”,’ Sarojini wrote, making fun of Jai’s accent. ‘But Ruttie more than made amends in the matter of appetite.’

  Meanwhile, Gandhi had withdrawn again from politics and retreated into his ashram life, and everyone was feeling a bit like Ruttie—aimless and drifting after the excitement of being part of his mass agitation. As Sarojini wrote a week later to Leilamani, on 3 October 1925: ‘Everyone is as usual, only more so than usual! Ruttie with her dogs and cats. Jai [Joshi] with her alternate cynical smile and womanly tears, Osman brave and horribly in need of work and money [the Sobhanis went bankrupt after taking part in Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement]; Omar with his proud air that defies the poverty of seven worlds; Shuab [Qureshi, another young Muslim nationalist like the Sobhani brothers who had been active during the non-cooperation movement] with his hair wilder than ever with a flat of his own now and a growing circle of lady-friends. And so on and so forth.’

  Jinnah, too, was his usual self, showing no signs of being discouraged. He had put in extraordinary effort into the last couple of legislative sessions, but politics had ground almost to a halt, particularly for him, now that he was out of the Congress, at odds with the Swaraj Party, and with almost no Muslim League to speak of. Anyone else in his position would have probably thrown up his hands and sunk into his legal work, which at least made him money, or have taken his wife on that long-promised holiday. But Jinnah was Jinnah; refusing to give up, he now poured all his energy into rebuilding his Muslim base. He had plenty of work to keep him busy, starting with his plans to hold the next session of the Muslim League in Aligarh, including doing all his own correspondence related to it, true to his reputation as ‘a one-man secretariat’. In between, there were his public engagements, and to make up for the time he had been away on legislative work, he now accepted whatever invitations he received to address Muslim gatherings as part of his work of rebuilding the Muslim League. In mid-January, he left for the winter session in Delhi, leaving Ruttie to follow. But after returning from her trip to Adyar with her great hope of finding her mission among the theosophists evaporating, her precarious health once again broke down. For Sarojini, sending her weekly bulletin of news about their friends to Leilamani was all part of the usual: ‘Sarup, bobbed and beautiful, is sailing on March 1st with Ranjit,’ her letter to Leilamani on 21 January 1926 says. ‘Jawahar is taking Kamala by the same boat to Geneva for treatment. Poor Betty [Sarup’s younger sister, Krishna ]—also bobbed and beautiful—is already looking and feeling forlorn and Bebe [Padmaja] went and bobbed her hair again today. She looks about fifteen. Ruttie has been ill again. Jai Joshi is still full of complaints against life and the living.’