Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  Having visited once, Sarojini had no desire to repeat the experience. But with Ruttie, it became a morbid preoccupation. Accompanied by the ever-faithful Kanji, she spent weeks going thoroughly into the conditions of the suffering animals. She dwelled in almost loving detail on the animals’ neglect and suffering. ‘We saw dogs with matter oozing from their skins in the last stages of violent eczema—dogs with wounds, which through dirt and neglect had decayed the flesh . . . causing sinuses which had eaten an inch deep into their flesh and which on the resident Vet’s own admission he had not even noticed,’ says a letter dated 2 September 1927 that she wrote jointly with Kanji and published in the Indian Daily Mail.

  At the Chembur shelter, the letter says, they found dogs ‘in the last stages of starvation. The drinking water was as foul as on our previous visits. The refuse, instead of being removed, was heaped in the enclosure and served as a magnet to myriads of flies, which would alternate between the open sores of the victims and the delectable mound of filth.’ Describing the conditions at the shelters as ‘death by slow torture besides which a slaughter house would pale into insignificance’, the letter urged ‘the public of Bombay to bestir themselves and whip these gentlemen into action’.

  In her zeal to save the animals, she was freed of the usual conflicting pull of her duty to Jinnah and her need to be away from him. The work, though harrowing, had kept her so engrossed that she had put off going to Simla until it was almost too late, with Jinnah deciding to cut short his stay and return to Bombay even before the session closed. And when Jinnah wrote saying he might be back in Bombay earlier than expected, she felt, if anything, almost dismayed. ‘J writes that he may be returning before the end of the sessions and that Simla is quite dull, but surely the Sandhurst Committee will be sitting to the end of September, won’t it?’ she wrote to Kanji in her letter dated 28 August 1927.

  But in September, Jinnah was elected chairman of the Hindu–Muslim Unity Conference of legislators and other leaders to be held in Simla later that month to settle the differences and grievances between the two groups. It left Ruttie just enough time to join him in Simla at least for the remaining one week of the session. But her going there, with her cats and their various ayahs, was not worthwhile. The conference was not a success, and Jinnah was in a hurry to get back to Bombay. But just as they were leaving, one of her cats escaped from their hotel room. and while she refused to leave without it, Jinnah did not want to stay until it was found. In the end, he left, expecting her to make her own way back. Once again, it was Sarojini to the rescue. ‘Darling,’ Sarojini wrote on 26 September 1927 from the Cecil to Padmaja, ‘All the turmoil and the shouting has died and the Captains [Dadabhai Naoroji’s three granddaughters active in the freedom struggle] and the Haqs [Maulana Mazharul Haque, a prominent Congress leader from Bihar and his wife] have departed. But as for me, I am held up walking between Banton’s where I was staying and Peterhoff where I am supposed to be staying on account of Ruttie. Jinnah left with the Captains and the Haqs but Ruttie remains for no purpose that I can see except to “will” the lost cat to return out of nowhere. But I must persuade her to go back to Bombay as soon as I can without fulfilling her hare-brained scheme of motoring through all the villages from Ambala to Delhi with her eight cats, two ayahs, one jewel box and cigarette case looking for the prodigal.’

  The humour apart, Sarojini was seriously alarmed by Ruttie’s condition. ‘I don’t think Ruttie coming was worthwhile,’ she continued. ‘She has hardly seen anyone. She scarcely comes out of her room before the afternoon—poor child. There is a turmoil in her mind and a turmoil in her spirit and she cannot rest or concentrate her life in any way.’

  Sarojini, too, was in as much a hurry to get back as Jinnah, but not for work commitments like him. Padmaja had fallen seriously ill. ‘But,’ as she says in her letter, ‘this motherless child needs me terribly now.’

  Three days later, they were still in Simla. ‘My darling, I have had such an anxious time with Ruttie who has been in a desperate state of tension and excitement,’ Sarojini wrote again to Padmaja, on 29 September. ‘At last I have persuaded her to go back to Bombay and leave the search for the cat in the hands of the police commissioner. And she has agreed on condition I take her back. So I am leaving with her direct for Bombay on the 1st. If I can I shall leave for Hyderabad on the night of the 3rd Oct from Bombay but don’t build on that too much darling as I find some wretched things have been fixed up in Bombay with the SPCC [sic] for me on the 9th. I am trying to see if the date can be altered. In any case I am coming home. You’ll see me over there a few days later. I am so anxious about you darling. But you have the whole of Hyderabad to look after you while this poor child whose mind seems to be hovering on the brink of madness and loneliness has no one and clings to me with a terrible need.’

  Sarojini eventually reached Ruttie to her home and Jinnah, but she kept worrying about her. Throughout the next fortnight, as she shuttled from Simla to Bombay, and then a brief stopover in Hyderabad to see her ailing daughter and back again to Poona to address a women’s conference there, she was haunted by the image of Ruttie on the verge of a breakdown. In her anxiety, she made a call from Poona to Ruttie to find out how she was. To her relief, Ruttie sounded more composed. ‘I’ve just spoken to Ruttie over the phone,’ she wrote to Padmaja on 16 October 1927 from Poona. ‘She is better.’

  Jinnah would have been surprised had he known how worried Sarojini was about Ruttie. When he noticed Ruttie at all, she seemed no different from what she had always been. He was back in Bombay now that the session had ended, and thanks to a British blunder, had bounced back right into the centre of the political picture. This was because the Simon Commission, a statutory commission for constitutional reforms in India, had managed to raise the hackles of all nationalists cutting across party lines because it did not include a single Indian among its eight members. Jinnah had earlier approached the viceroy personally to urge him to include at least two Indians in the commission to win over ‘the better mind of India’. But when the government went ahead and announced the formation of the all-white commission, he was among the first to advocate a boycott and stood so firm that even the leaders in the Congress had to reluctantly accept his leadership of the popular anti-Simon movement. In control again of the national discourse, he was at his best, speaking at public rallies and leading the boycott campaign and simultaneously getting the Muslim League to work in tandem with the Congress on the issue. His chamber in the high court was once more buzzing with young men looking to him to lead the way and he had not been this mellow in a long time.

  He held court, too, at home. At one dinner party, as Kanji recounts in India’s Fight for Freedom, with Motilal Nehru, R.D. Tata and himself, ‘Jinnah kept the table roaring with laughter,’ giving an instance of how his independent party in the legislature had worked with the Swaraj Party to pass the Steel Industry (Protection) Bill, the main purpose of which was to bolster the infant Tata Iron and Steel Works at Jamshedpur and enable it to withstand foreign competition. At the table, Jinnah told the story of how the evening before the final voting, Ratan Tata rushed to his suite of rooms in Cecil Hotel in Simla, screaming that one member of the assembly, a Swaraj Party member, was asking for a big consideration to vote in favour of the bill and threatened to vote against it if he did not get a bribe. Despite the lateness of the hour, Jinnah sent for the member who was staying in the same hotel and told him: “R.D. Tata has complained to me that you have demanded Rs 10,000 for your vote. You will not get that money. You go to hell and now you get out of this room.”’ The crestfallen member got out quickly and the next day voted for the bill. It was a story that made them all laugh, including Ruttie. It felt like they were friends again.

  Not only did he not notice any sign of her unhappiness, she, too, seemed to have grown almost fond in her forbearance with him. In fact, the week that the Simon Commission was announced and Jinnah’s boycott campaign was just taking off had been a time of unusual m
arital accord between them. There had been a happy event in South Court: one of Ruttie’s Persian cats had a litter. For a while, the whole household revolved around the ‘happy little cat hold’, with Ruttie supervising their care and feeding. It was a picture of such reassuring domesticity that even Jinnah was taken aback at her strength of mind when she decided to part with one of the kittens—the finest of the litter, in fact—as a birthday present for Padmaja. This time Padmaja could not make it to Bombay for her birthday, so the kitten had to be sent to Hyderabad instead. ‘I can’t make up my mind which to part with and am taking two along with me,’ Ruttie wrote to Padmaja on 15 November 1927, just before leaving for the station. ‘But of them the one I intended for you is the most intelligent of the litter. The ayah is crying and J actually called me a fool for parting with little bright eyes.’

  It was the hardest thing she had done in a long while. After shedding her own farewell tears over the kitten at the station, she packed it off without a ‘trousseau’ but with many minute instructions on its welfare, from telling Padmaja to let the kitten sleep in her bed (‘It has never slept by itself in the whole of its little life and it will feel very lonely if it is expected to do so now’) to how ‘the fish is served boiled and the chicken is roasted and finely chopped (not minced)’. She waited to hear of its safe arrival but after two days could wait no more, sending Padmaja an urgent cable: ‘Wire news of the little newcomer. Anxious.’

  And then, after her tender mockery of J and her separation pangs over a mere kitten, and having survived a nervous breakdown, finding the resources within her to rise to his support yet again when the Muslim League split, accompanying him without a word of protest to Calcutta for the session of his half of the divided League, she finally mustered the strength on their way back to break out of that cycle of love and guilt and tell him that it was finally over. She told him to his face, in their first-class coupé, on the train back from Calcutta.

  On 4 January 1928, they parted wordlessly at Victoria Station, she going to the Taj with Sarojini, who had been on the same train, while he went home alone, too proud and hurt to stop her. He had not seen it coming.

  Chapter Twenty

  At first, the relief was enormous. To think that it had cost her so much agony and anguish over so many years when it had been so simple all along—just shift into the room next to Sarojini’s in the Taj and no one any the wiser for weeks to come. It was strange, as Sarojini observed, ‘how few people have even an inkling of what has happened in the very heart of Bombay. Fortunately, everyone is used to seeing her here at all hours that no one suspects her being here with her cats and he at home alone.’

  In fact, it was Sarojini who showed more distress than either of them. Everyone still believed that she had been instrumental in bringing about what was openly acknowledged as the worst mismatch in recent times, but Sarojini’s conviction that ‘Jinnah is worth it all’ had never shaken. And what is more, despite their quarrels and differences of temperament, she had persuaded herself that the two loved each other as much, if not more, than when they first got married against such stiff opposition—had ‘come to a better understanding’ of each other, as she put it a few weeks later in her letter to Padmaja. It was not in Sarojini’s nature to interfere in other people’s affairs, especially matters of the heart, but this was too important to let things go their own way. The very shock of Ruttie walking out on Jinnah was enough to drive her frantic with worry. For a full two weeks after Ruttie came to her, she was unable to think of anything else, even forgetting to write her daily letter home to her children, something that was unthinkable for her even at the busiest of times. On the two occasions when she was able to pull herself sufficiently together to write a line or two, she either forgot to post the letter or sent it absent-mindedly to the wrong address. But by the end of the first two weeks, she had to admit that matters between the Jinnahs were beyond even her legendary peacemaking abilities. ‘I don’t know how to explain my long silence,’ she finally wrote home to her two daughters from the Taj on 16 January 1928, after a fortnight’s silence. ‘I wrote a long letter to you in the train but forgot to post it. I sent a wire the other day but addressed it Station Road Bombay—so of course it never reached. All of which goes to show that my mind has been very distracted owing to various reasons. Ever since I put my foot on the station platform I have been in the thick of worries and anxieties not one of which belongs to me strictly speaking and though I have been longing to write or get home, I have literally not had one spare moment.’

  ‘I am going to Calcutta on Friday,’ the letter continued, ‘and returning on the 27th. I’ve not made one note for the Kamala lectures. But I hope everything will take a turn for the better soon and I shall be less ground between the upper and nether millstone of other people’s affairs.’ And then, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst out with the secret she had struggled to keep: ‘I think I should tell you—but it is so far as I could keep it so—quite confidential, that Ruttie is in trouble. It has I suppose been due and was due for years. What exactly has brought it to a head I cannot tell. Some slight incident in Calcutta apparently . . .’ And then, without elaborating on what that ‘slight incident’ might have been, she goes on to recount what happened when they got off the train from Calcutta, returning from the Muslim League session, with Jinnah and Ruttie travelling as usual in a separate first-class coach by themselves: ‘But on the platform, when we reached here, she told me she was not returning to South Court but coming to the Taj—and she has been here since the 4th in the room next to mine. I have done my best and can do no more. There is a point beyond which friends cannot interfere. No two people who really love each other are unhappy and bitter and will not come to any understanding. It is extraordinary how few people have even an inkling of what has happened in the very heart of Bombay. Fortunately, everyone is so used to seeing her here at all hours that no one suspects her being here with her cats and he at home alone. I am hoping desperately that things will come right; but who knows? Meanwhile I don’t think you should write to her about it. The less said the sooner mended. But you can imagine my great anxiety.’

  Her concern about Ruttie did not lighten her worries about her own two daughters coping alone at home by themselves, ending her letter with: ‘My darlings, my heart is also with you. If I cannot write you will understand. Please take care of yourselves. If I know that you are doing that I shall at least be relieved of one heavy care. I will write again in a day or so. I have a Murshidabad sari for each of you. Mother.’

  But it was another four days before Sarojini could bring herself to write home again. Perhaps because her younger daughter was away from home, having left on an all-India tour in search of employment, Sarojini was able to write more openly about the Jinnahs’ breakup, having more confidence in Padmaja’s discretion. ‘I feel so unhappy about leaving Ruttie here alone and going away,’ she wrote on 20 January 1928, just before leaving for Calcutta on her speaking engagement, in a letter brimming over with sorrow and concern for her ‘poor child’ Ruttie, whose depths of anguish and despair she was just beginning to discover: ‘Nothing is settled about her except that she will not have any reconciliation but will go away with her mother to Europe in April. There is nothing that any friend can do at the moment since it’s not just a sharp bitter quarrel as I had at first imagined, to be healed by time, patience, a little mutual toleration and a little mutual pardon for faults of temperament. But even we who have been so close to Ruttie and loved her so well never knew or guessed the deep underlying current of mutual unhappiness that began from the first day almost and has been gradually gathering strength, intensity and bitterness . . . She says that several times it came to almost breaking point (when I was in Africa) and she never meant to return and now she says “Don’t force me back into slavery. Let me be free. Let me be free.” Poor child, she does not realize the price of such freedom! She is not unhappy now, only restless and longing to be free of all her shackles. She says h
er youth is going and she must live, that Jinnah cannot satisfy her mind and soul. He stifles her by his lack of understanding and his lack of the spirit of the joy of life. He has also an accumulation of grievances against her . . . She makes charges against him . . . and it is a story to which every one of the ten years has added a fresh chapter apparently. Latterly it seemed to me that both were settling down to a better understanding of each other and Ruttie herself felt that he was much more tender and tolerant and there were none of the bitter quarrels that had so disturbed and devastated the earlier years of their marriage. But I suppose with two such individual natures—fervent youth and rather dull middle age personified—the clash was inevitable. Jinnah is too old, she is too young and neither in spite of the real affection that has surely been between them, can make the necessary surrender with honour to ensure peace. Poor little Ruttie! I never knew then her brave spirit suffered fear. She never spoke and we never knew. I think it best that she should go away to Europe with her mother in April as already arranged. Jinnah too will be gone about the same time. And who knows—Time might after all be the great atonement for the years that these two have caused each other pain and misery through blindness of heart and vision.’

  But even in her anxiety to get them back together as quickly (and discreetly) as possible, Sarojini was forced to admit that Ruttie’s decision to leave was not entirely unwarranted, as she had first thought: ‘Meanwhile, curiously enough, Ruttie is much more normal than I have ever known her since her childhood. She eats and sleeps well and almost at regular hours. She is natural and herself as she never was in her own home. She keeps on saying “I am free. I am free.” She wants you to know all her reasons someday for leaving Jinnah, for feeling she cannot go back again, as she puts it, “under this marriage ice”. But I told her that you should be spared the suffering it will cause you to learn—as I have only now learned—how difficult have been those ten years,’ and here Sarojini alights on the real cause of what must have surely shaken her to the core, especially when she had so far assumed that Ruttie’s unhappiness was of her own making, almost as if it was mere capriciousness on Ruttie’s part and not to be taken seriously. The half a sentence is so casually inserted and then dismissed, as if not wanting to call attention to it, but there is no hiding the grave import of what she is saying: ‘and how she even tried to put an end to herself deliberately . . .’ And having said the dreadful words, Sarojini seems anxious to quickly change the subject without further elaboration, either because it was too painful a subject for her to dwell on or more likely, to spare Padmaja the details, knowing how it would affect her morbid and sensitive daughter: ‘Well, Ruttie has only us really. Her own people are strangers to her. Her poor mother loves her but drives her distracted . . . She loves us and trusts us and so she comes to me for sanctuary, poor child. She feels safe here. Safe in her soul.’