Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  She could feel his sadness as she could not feel her own, writing to him that: ‘I suppose we all have our moments of melancholy and moments when everything seems to be impending and yet nothing happens—a sort of waiting mood, and one just waits and waits and grows distrustful of life.’

  She would much rather watch over him, and try and help him than pay attention to whatever was troubling her and making her so restless and unhappy. ‘But I feel you are troubled—troubled—troubled,’ she wrote, making Kanji feel flattered with her concern for him, ‘and I too begin to become restless and unhappy. Anyway you know that you can come and see me whenever you want and that I am always glad when you come. So don’t please let any idea of my not being strong enough and well enough keep you away, if you feel the need of friendship that understands without explanation.’

  When it came to Kanji, she roused herself from the numbing fatigue and sickness that was pulling her down. Apart from nurturing his interest in social work and boosting his self-confidence, she did those tender little things for him that she once used to do for Jinnah—sending him, for instance, a gift of mangosteen because she wanted him to taste an exotic new fruit she thought he might like. Kanji had begun by being overawed by her beauty, glamour and intellect. But now, they were on such free and easy terms that she dared to invite him to dine alone with her at home. And wrote letters to him telling him he was such a dear that ‘the more I think on it, I feel you had no business to be born into the world with “Dhoti”. The correct setting for a nature of such fine sensibilities is a Sari!—or a Skirt as the case may geographically require.’ Falling deeper into her depression, she leaned on him now without her earlier reserve. It was only when he was around that she could let go of her distrust of life and relax. Her distress had become so acute by now that even the sleeping pills stopped working. ‘When I used to be with her,’ Kanji recounts in his memoir of her, she used to say, ‘I am very tired but I cannot sleep.’ All that I had to do was to say: “Ruttie, sleep”, and hardly had I said this she was fast asleep. Sometimes she would say: “Oh, if I sleep you will go away”, I said: “I would not go, sleep, I will read a book”, and the next moment I found her sleeping peacefully. When I was not with her she would ring me up late at night to say that she was tired and could not sleep. On the phone I would tell [her]: “Go sleep, you will sleep.” Next morning she would ring me up and thank me.’

  In November, Padmaja came to visit her mother. To Sarojini, who had seen Ruttie go through worse times, she seemed happier than she had seen her for months. ‘She [Padmaja] and Ruttie and Ruttie’s three dogs, seven puppies, four cats and four kittens are very happy together,’ as Sarojini wrote to Leilamani on 12 November 1926. But Padmaja, who was seeing her after a long spell, was shaken. ‘Ruttie is not at all well,’ was her version when she wrote to Leilamani on the same day from her mother’s rooms in the Taj, ‘and is lonelier than ever except for her wonderful animals.’

  But even her wonderful animals let her down. One of the seven Alsatian pups, which Ruttie had given to Padmaja as a birthday gift—named, symbolically enough, ‘Spirit of South Court’—fell ill and died. Three days later, another pup died. It traumatized both Ruttie and Padmaja. As Sarojini explained in a letter to Leilamani on 4 December 1926: ‘This has been a very bad week for poor Bebe. First of all her beautiful little Alsatian pup which Ruttie gave her on her birthday died after a week’s illness. Which meant of course a great new strain for her and much commingling of grief with Ruttie in whose garden it was buried with due honours. Yesterday Ruttie’s twin pup died—just three days after, and a similar procedure was repeated, with the result that both Ruttie and Bebe are prostrated and worn out with vigils and weeping and emotion.’

  And that was not the end of it. The following week, yet another of the pups died, driving Ruttie and Padmaja to further paroxysms of grief and Sarojini to exasperation. ‘Another dog tragedy has happened in the Jinnah ménage,’ Sarojini wrote on 11 December. ‘So Bebe has again been requisitioned as chief mourner and spent the night there washing, scenting and watching by a small puppy. It has become a morbid obsession now with both Ruttie and Bebe.’

  Even Dr Naidu, usually so indulgent to the many foibles of his eccentric family, especially Padmaja’s, was fed up. ‘No more cats or dogs,’ he warned Padmaja from Hyderabad, ‘not even if they come from the great Ruttie. They may or may not give much—but they always ask for too much from us. In fact they take it—I am getting too old to stand shocks from loss of friends, especially animals.’

  It was a fact that Padmaja could see for herself, revealing a side of Ruttie that she had not seen before. As she wrote to Leilamani on 5 December 1926: ‘I see a good deal of Ruttie who is lonelier than ever and clings pathetically to us. I practically lived in her house for over two days as an adorable puppy that was one of her lovely birthday presents to me was very ill and she was looking after her for me. She died a few days ago in great agony but her illness and the exquisite care Ruttie took of her, sitting up night after night to watch over her, was an astounding revelation even to me who had always suspected the immeasurable depths of tenderness and gentleness and devotion that Ruttie is capable of.’

  Less than two months into the New Year, Ruttie’s resilience was once again put to test. Yet another of her dogs fell ill and died. This was a little spaniel named Inera, and Ruttie was far more attached to her than to the pups. It left her drained and lonelier than ever.

  She was ‘unfortunate’, according to Kanji, when it came to her pets—they kept dying on her ‘inspite of her kindness and care and she suffered terrible unhappiness as a result’. Sarojini, too, was inclined to believe that ‘there is a curse upon little Ruttie’. She was in Delhi for the Hindu–Muslim talks when she received a wire from Ruttie about her dog. ‘Poor Ruttie is so unhappy and alone in Bombay with Inera in a dangerous condition,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 23 February 1927. ‘I had a wire from her yesterday.’ And a few days later: ‘I had a sad and unhappy letter from Ruttie. The little dog who looked like a spaniel died in a few minutes. There seems a curse upon little Ruttie. Poor child, poor child! Write to her and send her a message of comfort.’ Then Sarojini added a line that explains why she felt so responsible for Ruttie, highlighting the tragic loneliness of a life that had once been so full of promise: ‘She has only us to love her and understand her.’

  It was all Sarojini could do—comfort Ruttie and urge her children to do the same. The previous week, a few days before Ruttie’s birthday, her twenty-seventh, knowing how alone and sad Ruttie must feel in Bombay, with no links to her family and Jinnah in Delhi too busy to bother about trivial things like birthdays, Sarojini had written to Padmaja, reminding her to wish Ruttie. ‘I hope you will give Father a happy birthday on Sunday,’ she wrote to Padmaja on 12 February 1927 and because Ruttie’s birthday fell on the same day, ‘and that you will remember lonely little Ruttie too on that day.’

  Of course, Sarojini never brought up Ruttie’s loneliness with the one person who was the cause of it. Quite apart from knowing how fiercely Jinnah resented anyone invading his privacy, Sarojini herself could not bring herself to interfere in her friends’ personal affairs. Besides, she had far more important matters to discuss with Jinnah other than the state of his marriage, the most crucial of them being the Hindu–Muslim political agreement that was holding up the drafting of a new constitution. They were both in Delhi, Jinnah for the new legislative session and Sarojini arriving in mid-February and staying for over a month at M.A. Ansari’s house while she held political meetings at all hours, ‘literally lost in the negotiation for a possible Hindu–Muslim Settlement’, as she put it. And when Jinnah was not busy in the House speaking on every piece of legislation that came up, he was trying to build a consensus among the Muslim League members in order to negotiate a political settlement with the Congress. Sarojini, too—though not as much as Jinnah—was ‘night and day been obsessed by it’, as she wrote to Padmaja on 22 March 1927 when at last there
seemed as if there was a breakthrough, ‘not because of the Hindus but because the Muslims have shown great courage and statesmanship and even against their own feelings and fears they have shown remarkable unanimity in supporting me’.

  And while she refused to take sides with either of the Jinnahs, she could not resist the occasional sly dig at one or the other. ‘Ruttie of course has not arrived,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 12 February 1927, soon after she reached Delhi, ‘and I am rather glad because the accommodation would have been entirely unsuitable for her zoological department!’ A week later, after watching Jinnah in the assembly, she wrote again to Padmaja: ‘Jinnah seems more and more isolated and his following is reduced to a few members and two in uniform from the Punjab, extraordinarily handsome.’

  Sarojini’s admiration for Jinnah at one time was so unalloyed that people had mistaken it for infatuation, but this became more ambivalent over the years. When Jinnah’s junior lawyer, Chagla, published a tongue-in-cheek portrait of his famous boss, for instance, a few months later, she was unambiguously delighted. ‘I have read with much interest and pleasure your frank and able exposition—or is it exposure—of your Chief,’ she wrote to Chagla on 4 August 1927. ‘You are a plucky “devil” (it is your own word) to “expound” or “expose” him with such wit and candour and courage! Someone I understand has called it “a libel” on the great M.A.J. but I consider it only a “label” of those obvious outer qualities that are like a crust hiding the real man of which (or should it be whom? Being so impersonal an entity my grammar gets rather mixed in relation to him!) you never get a glimpse.’

  But something within her also caused her to spring fiercely to his defence. And it is with that characteristic mix of wit and loyalty—and generous use of pun that Sarojini championed Jinnah in her letter to Chagla: ‘I think you have done a capital impressionist sketch of him,’ her letter goes on, ‘monocle, audacity and all—someday I hope you will find yourself transformed from being a “devil” to being a friend of the “lonely man” who habitually breathes the rarefied air of the “colder regions”. There you will find—as those of us who are fortunate enough to know him intimately have discovered long ago—that the spiritual flowers that blossom within the colder regions have a beauty and charm denied to the flora that grows in the warmer valleys of the common human temperament! But I confess you do need a fur coat now and then in the course of your botanical expedition in this polar region!!’

  But for the present, Jinnah had risen higher than ever before in Sarojini’s esteem. He had against all odds and almost single-handedly brought about a near resolution to the Hindu–Muslim problem that she and other Congress leaders had been attempting to resolve for so long. Summoning a meeting of prominent Muslims, most of them legislators like him, he came out with a bold set of proposals—the Delhi Proposals, as they soon came to be called—that set the basis for a Hindu–Muslim political settlement. The relief at finding at last a near resolution to what had so far been a political impossibility, was so great, as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja, ‘that I feel sick with it’. The letter, written from inside the assembly, was dated 22 March 1927, the very day when the Delhi Proposals were finalized. ‘Jinnah has absolutely risen to his height and carried the better mind of the people with him,’ she wrote. ‘I am very proud of Jinnah.’

  It was easy for her then to shut her eyes to what living ‘in this polar region’ was doing to Ruttie. And even when it became impossible to evade the fact that Ruttie was now on the verge of a breakdown, Sarojini resolutely refused to blame Jinnah for it. She met Ruttie in the end of April, not in Bombay but in Lahore, where Sarojini had gone to tend the wounds of a communal riot, one of the worst that year, ‘with 105 casualties and blood flowing in the streets’, as she wrote to Padmaja. Ruttie, on the other hand, was heading for Kashmir, determined to take that holiday which Jinnah had been putting off for so long even if it was by herself. But while in Lahore, Ruttie clung to Sarojini, begging her to spend at least a few days with her. Sarojini, unable to bear her distress, yielded even though she had to get to Bombay for an All India Congress Committee (AICC) session. She wrote to Padmaja on 3 May 1927: ‘My going there [Kashmir] was purely accidental. Had I known that the AICC was postponed, I might have yielded to Ruttie’s tears and stayed on at least till Jinnah went up but I had no intention of going at all. I only promised to go from Lahore to Rawalpindi with Ruttie—about five hours journey. But when we got there she insisted on breaking journey to spend a few days with me, which considering her nervous condition, her immense quantities of luggage, four utterly democratic servants, ice panee, and her cats (on ice!) I thought wholly unadvisable. So I offered to go up for three days to Kashmir and get back in time to travel to Bombay for the AICC on the 5th May.’

  It was Sarojini’s first time. ‘Kashmir,’ she writes, ‘is only 200 miles from Rawalpindi, a beautiful drive which need not take nine or ten hours and Kashmir itself is a land of Romance and Dreams, quite in accordance with every legend one hears. And yet it is not more beautiful than many parts of India—certainly not so beautiful as parts of Africa nor even Switzerland. But it is quite lovely enough to make one intoxicated. The air from the snow mountains scented with the breath of spring flowers is divinely full of balm and healing. The meadows were purple with iris, the orchards were cloud white and cloud peach with cherry, pear and apple blossom. The gardens were aglow with lilacs and wistaria and tulips and narcissus, all the Persian flowers and the Italian flowers of the spring. The life on the Jhelum—crowded with houseboats and little boats called shikaras which ply over the water past the crazy huddled old houses on the other side of the banks. And what unsurpassed beauty of colour and form have the women and children—alabaster and rose and pearl and ivory and silver—exquisite, incredible beauty and what dirt!’

  Ruttie, however, was too troubled to enjoy it all, prompting Sarojini to add: ‘I loved my three days there but I wanted you with me. You and I would love the dream peace of Kashmir. But I doubt if restless Ruttie whose whole life is so artificial can respond to its real simplicity and charm. She carries town with her everywhere, poor child!’

  Had Sarojini but known it, there had been a time when Ruttie’s heart too had leapt to life with Kashmir’s charms. In happier days, when she had not yet given up on J and herself, Kashmir was the haven she had planned for their getaways from Jinnah’s political work. He had indulged her then, letting her spend 50,000 rupees—a fortune in those days—merely to do up their houseboat. It was going to be their base from where she dreamt of setting out with him on horseback to explore a Kashmir known to only the most intrepid of travellers. As preparation for these trekking holidays she was determined to take with him—rather like her aunt Hamabai—she bought and pored over a travel guide to Kashmir, possibly the first of its kind. The Tourist’s Guide to Kashmir, Ladakh, Skardu & c was for the intrepid traveller giving details of Kashmir’s most remote and scenic regions and the mountain passes and pony tracks by which one could get there, written by an expert, a Major Arthur Neve, who had served as a surgeon in the Kashmir Medical Mission and was therefore familiar with the terrain. Ruttie’s copy of the guide, in its thirteenth print run by 1923, is heavily underscored in pencil, marking all the treks she must have diligently planned for them, drawing lines to remind her of all the practical details such as the times of the year when the mountain passes were accessible and camping directions. But that dream too had passed away.

  She broke down and wept when Sarojini was leaving. ‘Poor child!’ Sarojini wrote, moved despite her exasperation with Ruttie. ‘How she cried when I left. How she pleaded for me to stay and for me to bring you in June. But we cannot make plans—until after Father has sailed.’ Dr Naidu was setting out in a couple of months on a working holiday to Europe, his first trip abroad since he had graduated from Edinburgh’s medical college. But by then something had broken in Ruttie’s heart, and she never again thought of going to Kashmir, with or without her friends.

  Disturbing
though Ruttie’s tears were, Sarojini was soon immersed in politics again. At the AICC meeting later that month, Jinnah’s Delhi Proposals were discussed and accepted as they were. It was the ‘ray of light’ that Sarojini had been waiting for so long, and in her gratitude to him for having brought it about, she gave him a magnificent gift to mark the occasion. It was a jewelled gold casket with an inscription: ‘To Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Ambassador of Unity, From his loyal friend and follower, Bombay, May 1927, Sarojini Naidu.’

  * * *

  Ruttie did not go with Jinnah for the new session in Simla. Instead of involving herself in the fate of his Delhi Proposals, which were by now rousing both Hindu suspicions and Muslim fears alike, she began pestering Kanji to take her along with him to the brothels of Bombay where he was conducting his investigations of their living conditions. ‘When are you going to take me round so that I may see for myself the conditions existent and the life lived by those poor women?’ she wrote to Kanji on 28 August 1927, insisting on visiting the seamier establishments. ‘Mind, the places I want to see are those commonly called “brothels” and not where the girls work independently.’ And with Kanji by her side, she toured round these brothels ‘for hours together, visiting one brothel after another’.

  There were other ways she found of distancing herself from Jinnah and his politics. One was her sudden missionary zeal to improve the living conditions in the city’s animal shelters. It involved visiting the shelters, the ‘pinjrapoles’, as they were called, many of them run by Parsi charitable trusts, including one headed by her father. The conditions were harrowing, as Sarojini discovered when she was roped in to visit one shelter. Both Ruttie and Kanji wanted her to write about it in the newspapers to publicize the issue. ‘My visit three days ago to the Chembur Pinjrapole is one of my saddest memories and I am haunted by the pitiful wail of the wretched dogs in the last agonies of living death,’ Sarojini wrote to Kanji on 9 September 1927, just before leaving for Simla to try and resolve the Hindu–Muslim differences that still persisted. ‘Dante would have, I think, another corner in his Inferno had he heard that incessant cry of misery . . . the dogs were a terrible sight and a terrible commentary on our ideas of compassion.’