Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  Another incident that stayed with Chaman Lal about that unscheduled trip to Cairo had to do with their guide. ‘I was riding a donkey and Jinnah a camel, both very appropriate,’ Chaman Lal recounted. ‘Another Mohammed Ali was our guide, who took us round and suddenly he turned to me and to Jinnah and said, “Sir, you see that kite, he goes up, he goes up and goes up and one day that kite falls. That is the British Empire—goes up, goes up and goes up and one day it falls.”’ It was a political prophecy that impressed Chaman Lal at least very deeply.

  One of the first things that Jinnah did when he landed was to get in touch with Lady Petit. If he was hoping to find Ruttie with her mother, he was in for a disappointment. She had already fled to Paris by herself, even before he reached London. Apparently, her idea of freedom did not include spending a summer alone with her mother. Jinnah had not spoken to Lady Petit since his marriage but it was different now. With her daughter’s marriage in trouble and with no Sir Dinshaw to deter her (he had to stay behind in Bombay because of an extended strike in his textile mills), Lady Petit had no difficulty reaching out to her son-in-law. She had anyway always had a soft spot for him, charmed by his old-world courtesies, ‘always so gracious to ladies’, as her daughter-in-law once told Bolitho. And now with a grandchild she was eager to rescue from her unloved state, she would have seen no reason to keep him at a distance. It was to Lady Petit that Jinnah instinctively turned for both reassurance and news of Ruttie only a few weeks later when he heard that Ruttie was seriously ill in Paris. Later, he would trust her with the child as well, allowing her to go and visit her grandmother as often as she wished.

  But for the present he had not yet worked through his anger against Ruttie. And instead of chasing after her to Paris to talk things out with her, he preferred to spend his time visiting men of influence in England and discussing the Indian problem with them, but the discussions were as fruitless as in Delhi. Then, instead of heading for Paris, he put it off some more by taking an extended tour of Ireland, where he hoped to gain some support for boycotting the Simon Commission. It was now four months since Ruttie had left him but he was yet to come to terms with what she had done. And whether it was out of denial or loyalty or just plain bafflement at what it was that she wanted out of him, he refused to talk about it, not even to Lady Petit or Fatima.

  In fact, Fatima appears to have had so little idea about the breakup of her brother’s marriage that she spent that summer while Jinnah and Ruttie were away searching for dental work outside Bombay. Her life as a single, independent woman had not been a success. In the six years since she graduated from dental college, she had found barely any work, although with Jinnah’s help she had opened her own private clinic. But almost no one came to her clinic and she ended up spending the evenings working for free at a municipality-run clinic. With no friends or social life of any sort, her life in Bombay did not seem worth clinging on to, which is why Fatima spent the better part of the summer of 1928 searching for work in Hyderabad, hoping to make a new life for herself.

  Once again it was Sarojini who provided all the support Fatima needed, both moral and material. She was, of course, not in Hyderabad to personally oversee Fatima’s stay, being away at that time, first at the sanatorium nursing Padmaja and then back in Bombay immersed in political work. But knowing how timid and inhibited Fatima was, she urged her to stay at the Golden Threshold, where Leilamani could take care to see that she was properly fed and entertained while Dr Naidu would do the needful in putting new clients her way for a future practice. And he did, as he wrote to Padmaja on 21 May: ‘I saw Fatima Jinnah yesterday and offered her the house and my office for her work during her stay here. I think she can do more business here and be more comfortable than at the hotel. Most begums will hesitate to go to Montgomery’s for their teeth.’

  Whether she got more work or not, Fatima certainly enjoyed the trip, blossoming under all this care and attention. ‘I hear Fatima Jinnah is having quite a gay time in Hyderabad and some customers as well,’ Sarojini wrote to Leilamani on 31 May from the Taj. And again on 6 June 1928: ‘I hope Fatima will be comfortable and get enough vegetables. Take her out towards Sarurnagar if there is time.’ And finally on 12 June, when Fatima left: ‘I am glad little Fatima had such a happy time. I don’t think ever before in all her life did she have the opportunity to be herself to such a degree. She has always been so repressed.’ Adding as an afterthought: ‘Did you give Fatima a piece [of snakeskin to make a pair of sandals with]?’

  Meanwhile, in Paris, Ruttie with the last restrictions on her freedom finally falling away, was finding it hard to resist that inner void and an aching sort of yearning for the unattainable that she was all too familiar with. Within weeks of moving to Paris, all the aspirations and plans she had made for herself before she sailed from India had evaporated, yielding to an overwhelming urge for self-destruction. She fell sick again from unknown causes and had to be admitted to a private nursing home. When Lady Petit heard and threatened to descend upon her from London, she put her off by pretending that she was getting better.

  She, no doubt, would have preferred to drift away like this—in an unknown place, unrecognized by anyone. But the clinic thought differently. Finding her slipping away, a desperate message was sent out to the only Indian acquaintance of hers they could locate in Paris—Dewan Chaman Lal. He had passed through Paris earlier, on his way to Geneva to attend a conference of the International Labour Organization as head of the Indian delegation, and had called on her. At that time, she seemed fine. Like all their friends, he knew about the rift between Jinnah and her, without ever daring to bring it up with either of them. He had always been a great admirer of hers as well as Jinnah’s, saying, ‘there is not a woman in the world today to hold a candle to her for beauty and charm’. To him, she ‘was a lovely, spoilt child, and Jinnah was inherently incapable of understanding her’.

  But by the time Chaman Lal returned from Geneva, there was a message waiting for him at his hotel to call at once at the clinic. The message was so urgent that he proceeded to the clinic in the same taxi in which he had arrived at his hotel, stopping only to leave his suitcases.

  At the clinic he found Ruttie running a temperature of 106 degrees, and delirious. Chaman Lal does not mention what could have been causing her delirium or the high temperature—was it another suicide attempt? Or perhaps it was not a deliberate attempt to kill herself, but an accidental overdose of morphine? The symptoms could have been anything and Chaman Lal, like all other contemporaries who ever mentioned Ruttie’s various illnesses, is silent about it, either out of consideration for her and Jinnah’s reputation or what is more likely, genuine ignorance, with the doctors themselves unable to diagnose the many dreadful effects of severe depression on both the mind and the body. All Chaman Lal can say is that she was lying in bed, barely able to move but still holding a book in her hand. When she saw Chaman Lal, she handed the book to him, saying, ‘Read it to me, Cham.’

  He took the book. It was a volume of Oscar Wilde’s poems, opened at ‘The Harlot’s House’. Ruttie repeated, in a whisper, ‘Please read it to me, Cham.’ Chaman Lal read aloud Wilde’s poem of disillusionment and betrayal, a dozen stanzas about how his beloved was seduced by the tune playing in a whorehouse, leaving him on the street for the soulless men and women inside, pretending to dance and mimicking a life and passion they could not feel. And when he came to the closing lines,

  And down the long and silent street,

  The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,

  Crept like a frightened girl.

  Chaman Lal looked up and found Ruttie had slipped into a coma. After hurrying out of the room to fetch the doctor, he returned to his hotel and put a call through to Jinnah in London. But Jinnah was still in Dublin and it took another two days before he could reach Paris.

  Although Jinnah rushed to Paris as soon as he got Chaman Lal’s message, his suspicions got the better of him once he reached Paris. He began to grill Chaman Lal, in order to
make sure that his friend had not got him there on a false pretext simply in order to mend the breach between himself and Ruttie. As Chaman Lal recounted: ‘At the [Hotel] George V, where he stayed, he said to me, “But Lady Petit tells me Ruttie is better.” I said: “I have just come from the clinic and it seems to me she, with a temperature of 106 degrees, is dying.” He sat still for a couple of minutes, struggling with himself and asked me to telephone the clinic which I did. He spoke to the nurse in charge who confirmed what I had told him. Thumping the arm of his chair, he said: “Come, let us go. We must save her.”’

  Chaman Lal took him to the clinic and waited outside at a nearby café for nearly three hours. When Jinnah finally emerged from the clinic, ‘the anxiety had vanished from his face. He had arranged for a new clinic and a new medical adviser and all was going to be well.’ Yet, despite his determination to make her well at any cost, Jinnah was unwilling to delve too deep into what might be driving Ruttie to destroy herself. For the next few weeks, he poured all his self-determination into restoring her health, letting nothing stand in the way. For over a month, he did not leave her side, staying with her at the nursing home, devoting himself to nursing her and even eating the same food as she did, as Ruttie later told Kanji.

  But there was an even bigger sacrifice he was making than just sharing her bland food that Ruttie didn’t know about. Back at home, his absence was being acutely felt, holding up an exciting new possibility of finally working out a political settlement that all parties could agree upon. In fact, his presence was considered so vital for any political settlement to be reached between Hindus and Muslims that at first many leaders in the Congress suggested adjourning the proceedings of the all-parties meeting until his return. But the younger Congressmen, particularly Jawaharlal Nehru, who had a very low opinion of Jinnah’s worth, both politically and personally, insisted that they go ahead with the meetings without him. And with the Nehru Commission formed to draw up a new constitution as a challenge to the Simon Commission, Jinnah began to receive more and more urgent appeals from his friends within the Congress to return home at once to participate in the drafting of the Nehru Report. ‘Have you any news of our local Sir John Simon from abroad?’ Sarojini inquired of Chagla on 1 July 1928, meaning Jinnah who had been described in a London paper as the ‘Indian Sir John Simon’. ‘Do let me know if that Sphinx has ever indicated any of his secrets about his plans.’ But even the combined entreaties of Sarojini, Chagla and Motilal Nehru could not persuade Jinnah to leave Ruttie in her critical condition to participate in the talks.

  Chagla, who had used Jinnah’s absence to claim for himself the role of the Muslim League’s spokesman and had been enthusiastically participating in the drafting of the Nehru Report, wrote to Jinnah in July urging him to return soon in order to discuss a possible compromise with Motilal Nehru before he presented the report to an all-parties conference that had been called in Lucknow the following month. Adding his urgent entreaty to Chagla’s was Motilal Nehru himself. He mailed Jinnah a draft of the report on 2 August, assuring him that the commission was still open to any suggestions he might have, and pressing him to return in time to attend the Lucknow conference beginning on 27 August. And if Jinnah could not make it back by that date, he was still urged to try and reach at least by 29 August evening. One reason why Motilal and others in his committee were so desperate to get Jinnah back to India on time to attend the conference was because they realized that without his support, the report would never be accepted by the majority of Muslims. Right now they were evenly divided into pro- and anti-Nehru Report camps, with the report’s recommendation to cut Muslim representation in the central legislature from the one-third that Jinnah had asked for in his Delhi Proposals to just a quarter, the abolishing of separate electorates being particularly unpopular. Motilal was hoping that since Jinnah was such a staunch nationalist and a good friend as well, he would somehow prevail upon Muslims to accept the report as it was. But he disappointed the Congress. As Sarojini astutely observed in a letter to Padmaja on the eve of the conference, on 22 August: ‘Poor Ruttie is very critically ill and Jinnah has not been able to come as expected although in his absence the Mussalmans will come to no conclusion!’

  Like Sarojini, Jinnah, too, was certain that the Congress could not reach any political settlement without him. He felt sure he could afford to wait to address the political situation until Ruttie was better and they could go home together. But the first blow to his confidence came when Ruttie insisted on going back to Bombay with her mother, without even waiting until she had fully recovered.

  She left so suddenly that all their friends, who had assumed reasonably enough that the rift between them was healed, were caught by surprise. Sarojini, who was on her way to America on an extended tour but stopped in Paris for two days only to see ‘poor little suffering Ruttie’, was surprised to find Jinnah alone. ‘I think Jinnah tried very hard to get her to come back,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja after she arrived in Paris on 10 October, five days after Ruttie’s departure, repeating what she had heard from a common friend. ‘But Ruttie is, so I am told, beyond all appeal. Her health is still very precarious. But I have had no talk with Jinnah as yet.’

  But the next day, when Sarojini did manage to meet him, Jinnah did not want to talk about his personal problems. Instead, they discussed the Nehru Report. He was so pessimistic about the report that Sarojini was convinced that his view was coloured by his personal situation. ‘I have had long talks with him in Paris . . . He has had to endure such incalculable personal troubles lately that I do not wonder that he is shaken and uncertain about vital public problems,’ she wrote to Chagla on 25 October 1928, on board the ship to America.

  Chaman Lal, too, returned to Paris after a few days’ absence to find Jinnah alone. He was surprised, having assumed that they were now reconciled, considering that Jinnah had not only taken charge of Ruttie’s medical treatment but even moved into the nursing home with her. Wondering what had happened and yet not daring to ask, Chaman Lal finally plucked up the courage after spending the whole day with him to ask Jinnah: ‘Where is Ruttie?’ Jinnah’s answer was curt: ‘We quarreled; she has gone back to Bombay.’ And, as Chaman Lal writes, Jinnah ‘said it with such finality that I dared not ask any more’.

  But in fact they had not quarrelled. It had been the tenderest of farewells, at least on Ruttie’s part. As she tried to explain in a letter she wrote to him as soon as she boarded her ship to Bombay, ‘had I loved you just a little less, I might have remained with you’. And far from responding in the heat of the moment, Ruttie had actually taken time to think over what she would say to him, something that was alien to her spontaneous temperament, trusting as she did wholly to what her instinct produced in words. But now, for the first time in her life, she had torn up the letter she had previously written to him in Paris, writing him a fresh letter after boarding her ship in Marseilles. ‘I had written to you at Paris with the intention of posting the letter here (Marseilles, on board the S.S. Rajputana),’ as she says in the postscript, ‘but I felt that I would rather write to you afresh from the fullness of my heart.’

  It was a letter almost frightening in its absence of all hope and future, drained of all life and passion, and yet filled with great tenderness and sorrow, as if her only concern now was how best to protect his ‘over-tuned’ feelings from the hurt she was about to deliver by deliberately putting an end to their ‘tragedy’.

  ‘Darling,’ it begins, her bold, clear hand unchanged by the recent weeks of her illness, her words flowing without faltering—only one word in the entire letter scratched out and replaced—‘thank you for all you have done. If ever in my bearing your over-tuned senses found any irritability or unkindness, be assured that in my heart there was place only for a great tenderness and a greater pain—a pain my love without hurt. When one has been as near to the reality of Life—(which after all is Death) as I have been, dearest, one only remembers the beautiful and tender moments. And all the rest bec
omes a half-veiled mist of unrealities.’

  Even her reproach seems that of a dying woman, all the more terrible because it was drained of all anger or resentment: ‘Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon. I have suffered much, sweetheart, because I have loved much. The measure of my agony has been in accord to the measure of my love.’

  She ends with what she could have never said to his face, a heart-wrenching plea not to drag her down any more: ‘Darling, I love you. I love you—and had I loved you just a little less I might have remained with you. Only after one has created a very beautiful blossom one does not drag it through the mire. The higher you set your ideal, the lower it falls. I have loved you my darling as it is given to few men to be loved. I only beseech you that our tragedy which commenced with love should end with it. Darling, Good night and Goodbye, Ruttie’

  A week later, Jinnah boarded the next available steamer for Bombay. There was nothing now to hold him back from the work that was calling to him with increasing urgency. In fact, he did not even wait to land in Bombay before getting down to political business, using his time on board to read and catch up on his mail, including a long-delayed response to Motilal Nehru’s letter seeking his support for his committee’s report. Jinnah was aware, of course, that his return was being awaited eagerly by both the supporters and opponents of the Nehru Report and that much depended on what he had to say on it. But he had no intention this time, unlike during the Simon Commission’s boycott, of rushing into a commitment one way or another, only saying to Motilal in his letter that he had not read through the whole report, and, in any case, ‘much water has run down the Hooghly’ since its publication.

  But even before he disembarked, he faced his first frustration. And unusually for one of his customary iron control, he lost his temper. It was Chagla who became the target of his fury. Having taken his role as the Muslim League’s secretary more seriously than Jinnah had intended, Chagla had taken it upon himself to publicly accept the Nehru Report on the League’s behalf. He had not thought to consult Jinnah on the matter before going ahead and doing what he thought was right. Jinnah must have read about it in the papers just before Chagla went on board to greet him ahead of the ship docking in Bombay. Jinnah was in his cabin ‘in a furious temper’. He shouted at Chagla: ‘What right did you have to accept the Nehru Report on behalf of the Muslim League? Who authorized you?’ Terrified that Jinnah might contradict him as soon as he landed, consigning all his work to the dustbin, Chagla pleaded with him: ‘Please don’t rush to the press, and issue a statement rejecting the report out of hand. Listen to what I have to say first, and then decide.’ And to his relief, the flash of temper was gone in a moment, and Jinnah was his usual impassive self once more. Clearly, he had no intention of giving in to his feelings and risk ruining the political work ahead. As Chagla later recounted in his memoir, ‘After thinking for a moment he said: “All right. I will reserve judgement and we will consider the report at a regular meeting of the League.”’