Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 39
But a week later, Ruttie’s illness seemed to have left her as mysteriously as it had erupted. Her recovery, or at least her willingness to be up and about, coincided with one of Padmaja’s visits to Bombay. As Sarojini wrote in her next letter to Leilamani on 29 January 1926: ‘It is 2 am. Ruttie has just gone and Bebe is tumbling into bed. We all went to see the dancer Ruth St. Dent and her company—beautiful dancing and yet after Pavlova—very tame.’ The famous Pavlova had come with her troupe to India four years earlier, leaving Sarojini so deeply moved by her dancing that she had gone for all her performances in Bombay, despite her tight schedule.
The week after, everyone, including Sarojini, was in Delhi for the Hindu–Muslim Unity Conference. Everyone except Ruttie, who had found another reason to postpone joining Jinnah in Delhi. ‘Ruttie is not coming here,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja from Delhi on 7 February 1926, ‘to apparently knock off the extra pounds.’ Adding: ‘She is ailing quite often.’
It was either the fastest weight loss ever or Ruttie changed her mind driven by her loneliness, because she arrived the following week to join Jinnah at their suite at the Maidens. ‘Ruttie arrived this week with the dogs and cats, an enormous amount of luggage and a new ayah who is already driven to distraction,’ Sarojini wrote in her next letter to Padmaja on 13 February 1926.
But once in Delhi, instead of fleeing her solitude as she did at home, restlessly in search of distraction, Ruttie stuck to their hotel rooms, refusing to stir out even to walk her dogs. Jinnah, of course, was busier than ever in the legislature, not missing even a day while the assembly was in session. And with the unity conference going on, he had even less time for her, although he did not get too involved with the conference, considering it a Congress, or rather a Gandhi show. But there was no dearth of company if Ruttie had the will to seek it. Delhi was, as Sarojini wrote to Leilamani on 23 February 1926, ‘full of people you know. Goswami has brought his shy, just-coming-out-of-purdah wife, Mrs Chaman Lal is here, the Maharani of Baroda . . . [and] Mrs Sultan Singh [who] is becoming a public person nowadays founding clubs and schools and what not.’ The city was at its best too, at the close of winter, its gardens bursting ‘with sweetpeas as large as your eyes and every kind of glowing purple and blue and crimson flower in full bloom’, Sarojini wrote to Padmaja, and ‘so peaceful too, so far away from the dead on one side and the living on the other’. But instead of going out and enjoying herself as the others were doing, Ruttie hung about in her own rooms, getting ‘very ill and restless and so on’, as Sarojini put it, impatient and annoyed with Ruttie’s inertia.
It was foreign to Sarojini to understand Ruttie’s shrinking from people, fearing hurt and rejection. To someone of Sarojini’s self-assured temperament, it seemed almost as if Ruttie was deliberately wallowing in her loneliness. As she wrote to Padmaja on 27 February: ‘Ruttie is not well. She looks like a lovely ghost and spends her time buying more and yet more clothes, not particularly pretty. And she seems to have no friends except (me) or the hangers on of [illegible] kind and of course the animals which never get any exercise and are overfed . . .’
But still, Sarojini made an effort to pull Ruttie out of her hotel room. She herself loved shopping, especially in the local bazaars where she spent hours looking for pretty, affordable gifts for her daughters, mostly handwoven saris and ethnic knick-knacks for their rooms. And one day when she was not sitting in the assembly and listening to ‘endless drivel and wonder[ing] why some men should waste good time in such footling ways’, she took Ruttie shopping with her. It was not a success. She wrote to Leilamani on 3 March 1926: ‘I took Ruttie out to Chandni Chowk to buy Delhi shoes today. Never again! I marveled at the patience of the shop man!’
It was another month before they met again. After Delhi, Sarojini had gone on a village tour of north India, returning to Bombay in early April. The Jinnahs, too, were back in Bombay by then, and on their way to England. Jinnah had been appointed a member of the Sandhurst, or Skeen Committee, which was going on a four-month study tour of Europe, Canada and America for setting up a military training school in India, and he was taking Ruttie along with him. While Jinnah could not—or did not want to—see the signs, to Sarojini it seemed clear that something was seriously wrong with Ruttie. ‘She is the wreck of herself in body and mind!’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 8 April 1926, and again, two days later, to Leilamani: ‘Ruttie and Jinnah are sailing today by the Kaiser-i-Hind. She is looking just the very shadow of herself—a wreck of what was once a beautiful and brilliant vision.’
Dimly, she too could sense that she was going down somewhere deep beyond recall, and tried feebly to fight it off. Unable as yet to identify what it was that was crushing her, she clung desperately to her faith in charms to save her. Turning to the only person she could trust in these matters, she spoke to Kanji a few days before they sailed. ‘You will not be with me to protect me and help me,’ she told him. ‘Do please, therefore, magnetise something for me to keep me in touch with you.’ Kanji hesitated but she was insistent. Her need for some magic to help her cope had become urgent by now. So he asked her to give him a precious stone and promised to do his best. She gave him one of the jades from her beautiful collection and he ‘magnetized’ it ‘with thoughts of love and protection with particular reference to protecting her from any adverse effects of séances’.
If Jinnah thought he would make up to her now for the past years of overwork, she did not give him a chance. She had decided even before they sailed that she was not going to stay with him in England. As Sarojini wrote in her letter to Leilamani on 10 April 1926, the day they sailed for England, ‘I don’t think she will be more than a very few days in England but spend her time in Paris and go to Canada and America with Jinnah, when the Skeen Committee goes there.’
There could be another reason, apart from her urgent need to breathe freely, why she was in such a hurry to get to Paris, even before Jinnah could finish his work in England. Sarojini only discovered it by chance three years later, in 1929, when she ran into an acquaintance of Ruttie’s in Paris. The lady, a princess and cousin of the queen of Italy, told Sarojini that ‘Madam Zhinna’ had been recklessly experimenting with drugs since her visit to Paris in 1924—‘the long needle’, as she put it, meaning morphine that had to be injected. And when this friend warned Ruttie that ‘she was ruining her life with drugs and how all her beauty was being destroyed’, she did not heed her. It was as if mere magnetizing and thought transference could no longer help her cope with the feelings that were threatening to overwhelm her.
Leaving him to his work of interviewing military experts for the Skeen Committee, she went ahead of him to Paris. Either because she was in such a hurry to get to Paris or because she was not ready to forget their quarrel, Ruttie did not visit Leilamani at Oxford as she had always done on previous visits. Leilamani was hurt. ‘I have learnt that the less one exhibits one’s inmost feelings to those one really loves, the less risk is run of being damnably misunderstood,’ she wrote to her sister on 28 April 1926. ‘That is also why I am not writing to Ruttie, though the news of her arrival in England makes me pathetically eager to see her.’
Jinnah joined Ruttie in Paris only when it was time for both to board the ship for their onward journey to Canada and America, where his committee was going to study the working of their military academies. Immersed in his work, he did not notice, or ignored, the signs, but Syud Hossain, their friend from better days who had now moved to New York as editor of the New Orient, could see at once that she was on some drug. ‘He spoke to her very seriously about it,’ as Sarojini was to learn from him only much later. Whether his talking to her helped or not, she seemed to have got a grip on herself by the time they returned home in the first week of August 1926.
Or at least she looked no different from when she had left four months ago.
Sarojini, who met Ruttie nearly ten days after they returned, found her ‘looking very lovely but very drawn in the face and . . . very restless’, she wrote
to Padmaja on 18 August 1926. ‘She has brought back thirty-five saris all more or less of the same kind, two Persian cats, some shoes, cigarettes, jewels and all sorts of beautiful gauds. The cats are really beautiful—one black and one blue gray.’
Kanji, who met her soon after, could see no change either, except for the better. It was to do with the jade he had magnetized for her before she left. When he went to dine with them soon after their return, Kanji says in his memoir of Ruttie, he asked her casually if she had attended any séances, and how she had reacted to them. ‘She jumped out of her sofa and exclaimed: “Good God! What kind of thoughts [did] you put in that jade?” I said: “Well, why, what happened?” Ruttie said she had made three appointments for attending séances, once she missed the train, the second time the medium did not come and so nothing happened and the third time she forgot all about the appointment. “Tell me, what thoughts you put in that jade?” she asked again. I told her what I had done. She felt grateful and I know that she never any more thought in terms of séances.’ Jinnah, too, was relieved, according to Kanji, by her having finally put an end to ‘her fruitless and dangerous pursuit’.
To Kanji, they must have appeared as devoted a couple as ever. Certainly, they were both equally glad to see him. Jinnah had rushed off to Delhi for the last session almost as soon as they got off the steamer, but he got back to Bombay by the last week of August, when Kanji dined with them. It seems they sat up talking till five in the morning. ‘Have you made up the sleep you must have lost last Saturday,’ Ruttie wrote to Kanji on 1 September 1926, inviting him to dine with them again the following Saturday. ‘Five o’clock in the morning is an early hour at which to be out and barely respectable. If ever I have to be up by 5 am I generally don’t go to bed at all, it hardly seems worth the while!’ Adding: ‘Anyhow do come, both J and I would feel so pleased.’
Fresh elections to the assembly and council had been announced, giving them plenty to talk about, and there was camaraderie and humour once again in their home. Jinnah, as usual, was far too confident of winning his reserved seat to be under any pressure, and it was a surprisingly relaxed time for him, having nothing much to do except support other candidates in their campaigning. His taking his voters for granted had become something of a joke between Ruttie and Kanji. And yet, beyond the teasing and laughter, there was something troubling her. There was no other sign except she kept falling ill again.
She was fine on 26 September when she and Jinnah went to dine with Sarojini, who again was having a birthday party for Jaisoorya in her rooms in the Taj. But having overindulged in the rich Hyderabadi food that Sarojini had once again got her sister’s cook to make for the occasion, Ruttie had another attack of her old illness. As Sarojini wrote to Leilamani on 2 October 1926: ‘On the 26th we celebrated Jaisoorya’s birthday with a dastarkhan dinner to which Mr and Mrs Jinnah, Chagla, Doshi, Mrs Harker [Sarojini’s friend, a psychic] and others came and how they all ate what Gunnu Auntie’s cook had made. All Hyderabadi dishes.’ And here, Sarojini makes that remark about Ruttie’s self-destructive pattern of eating to fall sick: ‘She is usually ill and when she gets better she starts over-eating to get ill again.’
The first week of October went into just being ill. As Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 11 October 1926: ‘Ruttie has had a bad week but is now much better.’ She had turned away even more than before from human company and looked to her animals for solace. Not content with the two cats she had brought back from abroad, she acquired another dog as well, an Alsatian, which was still a rare breed in India. ‘Ruttie nowadays is mad on her animals,’ Sarojini wrote in her next letter to Padmaja on 13 October 1926. ‘She has a magnificent new dog which had pups the other day. What excitement! what fun! What preparations!’
But after the excitement, again the sickness. ‘Ruttie has not been well at all,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 23 October 1926, and then, looking for something less monotonous to write about, changed the subject to the forthcoming elections. ‘The elections are making me sick—this scramble for seats is bringing one to the lowest and nastiest traits of Indian character. They can’t fight clean somehow!’
In November, with the elections due in a couple of weeks, Ruttie made an effort to ignore her illness and take more interest in Jinnah’s concerns. Seeing how he steadfastly refused to do anything to promote himself with his voters, Kanji and other friends had pitched in with some campaigning on his behalf, but that was not something in which she could join in, being a woman and his wife. Other friends tried to help by sending their cars to him on voting day, to be used to ferry voters to the booths. Having been forced to keep out of it all because of the illness, she now stirred herself to some last-minute activity. Perhaps it was a stirring of her wifely sense of duty or maybe she could think of nothing else she could do for him, and wanting somehow to be a part of his big day, she decided to pack a picnic basket with his lunch and take it to him in the town hall, where he had been the whole day because the counting was going on. But that too ended badly.
Chagla, who was with Jinnah throughout the polling, recounts the incident in his memoir, Roses in December: ‘There was a lunch interval between one and two in the afternoon. Just before one o’clock Mrs Jinnah drove up to the Town Hall in Jinnah’s luxurious limousine, stepped out with a tiffin basket, and coming up the steps of the Town Hall, said to Jinnah: “J”! guess what I have brought for you for lunch.” Jinnah answered: “How should I know?” and she replied: “I have brought you some lovely ham sandwiches.” Jinnah, startled, exclaimed: “My God! What have you done? Do you want me to lose my election? Do you realize I am standing from a Muslim separate electorate seat, and if my voters were to learn that I am going to eat ham sandwiches for lunch, do you think I have a ghost of a chance of being elected?” At this, Mrs Jinnah’s face fell. She quickly took back the tiffin basket, ran down the steps and drove away.’
If he was remorseful for having hurt her feelings, he did not show it. And less than half an hour later, it was Chagla’s turn to get his head bitten off. Jinnah had apparently not quite resolved his dilemma on whether to be true to his real self before his orthodox Muslim constituency or to pander to their prejudices in order to be able to call himself a Muslim politician. After an awkward pause caused by his tiff with Ruttie, Jinnah took Chagla with him to eat at a well-known restaurant near the town hall. Since the place was famous for its pork sausages, they ordered some and were eating it when an old, bearded Muslim and his young grandson came to meet Jinnah. He asked them very politely to sit down and ordered a cup of tea and a cold drink for them. And as they were sitting at the table, Chagla writes, ‘I then saw the boy’s hand reach out slowly but irresistibly towards the plate of pork sausages. After some hesitation, he picked up one, put it in his mouth, munched it and seemed to enjoy it tremendously. I watched this uneasily, in a state of mind compounded partly of fascination and partly consternation. After some time they left and Jinnah turned to me and said angrily: “Chagla, you should be ashamed of yourself.” I said: “What did I do?” Jinnah asked: “How dare you allow the young boy to eat pork sausages?” I said: “Look, Jinnah, I had to use all my mental faculties at top speed to come to a quick decision. The question was: should I let Jinnah lose his election or should I let the boy go to eternal damnation? And I decided in your favour.”’
Chagla does not say how Jinnah responded, but it was doubtless contradictions like this within him that he refused to even acknowledge to himself that drove Ruttie even further away both from him and his politics. She grew depressed at the distance between them. All through those two months when he was at home in Bombay, she was down with her nameless illness.
And to add to her troubles, she accidentally stepped on a needle and did not notice it until her foot swelled up and had to be operated on. The swelling was so troublesome that it required two consecutive surgeries to remove the broken needle stuck in her foot.
Yet, she would not—could not—sit still. The uneasiness within her forced her
to flee, seeking some diversion or the other outside the home. Her foot was so swollen that it would not fit into her shoe, and yet she went calling on her friends, and going to the cinema in the night in her bedroom slippers. But there was no peace to be found outside either.
She was not ready to admit that anything was troubling her. Instead, being closest to Kanji now, she began to imagine he was the troubled one, not her. ‘Ever since the other night when you had pot luck with us,’ she wrote to him in an undated letter, ‘have I been obsessed with the idea that you are troubled. I have tried to put away this thought as just merely the disordered fancy of ill-health, but it persists and so I am being true to instinct—not without an effort, and writing this to you.’