Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  Sarojini had, in fact, anticipated how Jinnah would react, as she wrote in her letter to Chagla on her way to America. ‘Tomorrow when you meet your chief after all these months, the first question you will both discuss will inevitably and properly be the Lucknow conference and by the time this letter reaches you, you will have realized all the implications—and dangers if I might use such a violent word—of his general uncertain and pessimistic attitude and his real conviction that things were bungled in his absence in regard to the Muslim rights or demands.’

  ‘But,’ she added somewhat more reassuringly, ‘I am also sure that with his very quick perception and clear analysis of the situation as it will present itself to him not at the distance of six thousand miles, he will grasp the real issues and revise his impressions . . . and Jinnah who would, I really believe, give his soul to have the Hindu–Muslim question settled must be made to understand that he holds the scales . . . he must be made to realize the terrible responsibility that is his in his unique position and that he must accept the challenge and the opportunity to prove the worth and wisdom of his leadership not as a communal politician but as a statesman of wider vision and indomitable courage.’

  Neither his unique position nor the golden opportunity to prove his worth was lost on Jinnah and for the next eight weeks, he plunged into politics again with no time for anything except to work out how best to rally the dispersed Muslim points of view under his leadership and how best to work out a compromise that all sides could agree upon.

  Ruttie, on the other hand, had little to distract her from her troubled self. It was true that the lives of nearly everyone she knew of her own age or younger seemed to be falling apart, and suffering from depression or the ‘Blue Devil’, as common as the flu: Padmaja reduced to invalidism, her dreams of an active life and love crushed; Leilamani struggling to keep afloat as a single woman, teaching in faraway Lahore and getting addicted to drink, like their brother, Ranadheera; while the older brother, Jaisoorya, studying medicine in Berlin, actually admitted himself into a sanatorium to be treated for depression. But at least they had parents who supported them both financially and emotionally. Dr Naidu especially, although living alone in Hyderabad while his family had scattered to various parts of India or abroad, was a pillar of strength, invariably sending words of encouragement along with the gifts of cash that kept each of them going.

  With Ruttie, however, her isolation was near-total. As Sarojini put it a few months later, ‘She was so utterly defenceless and alone in the midst of the world’s plenty.’ Her estrangement from her father and brothers had not changed despite her now single status, and the gates of Petit Hall were still barred to her. The only relative who did visit her occasionally was Lady Petit, but since her mother’s visits usually left Ruttie feeling even more irritable and depressed, that hardly helped. The only person who could perhaps have lifted her morale was Sarojini, but she, of course, was away on her protracted tour of North America and would not be back for another six months at least. But by now it hardly seemed to matter to Ruttie, her spirits having sunk so low that she did not even care enough to pick up pen and paper to write to Sarojini. In her despair and numbness, she made no effort to reach out to Padmaja either. But in any case, Padmaja was unavailable just then—when she was not lying in bed recovering from her tuberculosis, she was either thinking of getting a job in Madras or going to Calcutta to attend the Congress year-end session because she felt ‘a great need for contact with great surging crowds after a year of utter inaction’.

  Only Kanji was still around, putting his home, his time and occasionally even his wife at her disposal, which the long-suffering woman did not seem to mind (or if she did, Kanji does not mention it). He called on Ruttie every day at the house where she was now living, going there sometimes more than once a day if his busy official duties permitted. She seems to have moved out of the Taj after her return from Europe and Kanji’s account suggests she settled into an independent house of her own. Throughout January and February 1929, Ruttie continued to be ill, according to him, and this depressed her. With so little known about depression then, it did not occur to him that it might have been the mental agony that was the real cause of her phantom illness. Watching helplessly as she deteriorated before his eyes, Kanji tried to lift her spirits as best as he was able. Since she had stopped going out altogether, he persuaded her to take short walks with him. He tried to revive her interest in spiritualism and took his theosophist friends, including J. Krishnamurthy, to visit her, hoping they would cheer her up. Her guests certainly took to her—in a letter to Kanji on 30 November 1928, Krishnamurthy repeatedly hopes Ruttie is very much better and asks Kanji to give her ‘my love, if she will have such a thing from me. Also please tell her that I am thinking of her constantly.’ But somehow, Ruttie’s heart was no longer in spirituality—or anything else for that matter.

  Not all Kanji’s deep devotion and concern for her could stop her from sinking further each day into depression, her pain and despair so overwhelming that only her sleeping pills could provide some relief. But the pills, the only known barbiturate of that time marketed under the brand name Veronal, had their lethal side effects which nobody suspected then—that fatal cycle of dependency and overdose, and untold damage to liver and other internal organs that was detected only half a century later. Her condition became so precarious that he was afraid to leave her alone even for a few days, taking on his own shoulders all the responsibility for checking on her night and day. Jinnah was there but he may as well have not been. When he was in town he came regularly every evening to see her, but failed to notice how sick she was. For the hour or so that he sat with her, the three of them—Kanji, Ruttie and Jinnah—‘kept on talking as in the old times’, as Kanji put it. Jinnah’s entire time and attention at this time was taken up with meetings and discussions on the Nehru Report, which was coming up for discussion at the all-parties conference called by the Congress in Calcutta. It did not strike Kanji—and certainly not Ruttie—that Jinnah was quite unconcerned about her ill-health. Instead, the mere fact of Jinnah dropping in every day at Ruttie’s home for a pleasant chat appeared to Kanji as a clear sign of Jinnah’s devotion to her from which he drew the inference that the two would get back together very soon.

  As for Kanji himself, he felt so responsible for Ruttie that he did not want to go to Calcutta for the all-parties conference because it meant leaving Ruttie alone for a few days. But his leader, Annie Besant, insisted he come and Kanji had to obey her, setting aside his apprehension.

  Surprisingly, when Kanji returned from Calcutta, he found Ruttie much better than when he left her. She looked so much improved that J. Krishnamurthy, who dropped in on her during his next visit to Bombay, thought she would get well soon. Funnily enough, her recovery, although only partial, coincided with Jinnah’s collapse, both emotional and physical, immediately after he returned from the all-parties meet in Calcutta. It was as if she had dredged out her waning life force now that he needed her again.

  He had had a harrowing time there. After an acrimonious debate that lasted till 2 a.m., the Muslim League at its session in Calcutta finally decided to accept the Nehru Report with six amendments. But the next morning, when Jinnah took the amendments to the all-parties conference called by the Congress, expecting at least a reasonable hearing, he was shouted down and attacked viciously, especially by Hindu Mahasabha associates such as M.R. Jayakar. Instead of discussing the amendments, Jayakar mounted a personal attack on Jinnah, questioning his credentials as a Muslim leader. Even the Liberals who were for accepting the League’s amendments were hostile, with Tej Bahadur Sapru, co-author of the Nehru Report, calling Jinnah ‘a spoilt child’. But deeply offended as Jinnah was, he still managed to keep a leash on his temper and appealed to the convention again and again—‘not as a Mussalman but an Indian’—to accept these small concessions that Muslims were demanding for the sake of unity. And when all his persuasion and conciliatory speech failed to convince the Hindu
s and Sikhs to accept the amendments, he still appealed to the convention to ‘let us part as friends’ and avoid ‘bad blood’. But it fell on deaf ears, and with Jayakar calling him a ‘communal zealot’, Jinnah abruptly left the conference.

  He was so unnerved by the abuse heaped on him that the next day when he left Calcutta, he broke down and wept. It was the first time anyone had seen him cry. As his friend, Jamshed Nusserwanjee, later told Jinnah’s biographer, Hector Bolitho: ‘It is a fine thing that he did, pleading as a great man for his people.’ Jamshed was referring to Jinnah’s role in the conference. ‘His demands were rejected. One man said that Mr Jinnah had no right to speak on behalf of the Muslims—that he did not represent them. He was sadly humbled and he went back to his hotel.’

  ‘About half-past eight next morning, Mr Jinnah left Calcutta by train,’ Jamshed recounts, ‘and I went to see him off at the railway station. He was standing at the door of his first-class coupé compartment, and he took my hand. He had tears in his eyes as he said, “Jamshed, this is the parting of the ways.”’

  Jinnah did not go back directly to Bombay. He stopped at Delhi to attend the All India Muslim Conference organized by Muslim hardliners. He had no plans initially of attending the conference but after his all-parties failure, he decided to put in an appearance at their open session, raising hopes among the hardliners that they ‘had at last won him over to our view’.

  But shaken though he was by the way he had been treated in Calcutta, he could not think of crossing over to the hardliners’ camp. He returned instead to Bombay, heart-sick. He would have given, as Sarojini said, his soul for Hindu–Muslim unity and instead, he’d just been shown the door again by the Congress. It was in this moment of utter desolation that he once more reached out to Ruttie, needing her at least to talk to and comfort him. Even his health broke down, and it seemed as if he had lost his will to fight back. And, of course, she could not bear to see him like that, summoning all her remaining strength out of sheer force of her will, in order to be there for him. All of January 1929 Jinnah dropped in on her every day, and she unfailingly rose out of her sickbed to receive him, and cheer him up with talk ‘like in old times’, with Kanji also there to keep the conversation going.

  And cheering him up was seemingly good for her as well. Or so Kanji must have thought when he saw Ruttie’s renewed interest in people and social life. Hearing that Krishnamurthy was coming to Bombay, she asked Kanji to bring him over for tea. She had not invited anyone over to her house for weeks now. They all had such a good time together that after spending almost two hours at Ruttie’s house, Krishnamurthy invited her for dinner the very next day at his host’s house. She accepted with alacrity and took Kanji along as well and it was yet another pleasant evening that they spent together.

  With this renewed interest in life and people, Ruttie looked, as Krishnamurthy remarked in another letter to Kanji, as if she was getting better. In fact, it was Jinnah who got sick now, something that seldom happened to him. He had become weak enough to force him to skip the opening of the new legislative session. But, of course, with his willpower, he was able to shake it off soon enough. By 6 February 1929, he was back to his usual self, as his telegram to the Muslim League’s assistant secretary in Delhi amply demonstrates: ‘Thanks am better. Shall reach Delhi soon. Please call Council meeting end Feb. Consult Kitchlew.’ Five days later, he was back on the floor of the legislature, the ‘Lion of the House’ once again, harrying the government with his indefatigable questions, from the racial discrimination in grants of overseas allowance to bank and railways employees to interventions on the trade disputes bill, and ending the day by being chosen to work on the select committee.

  But once he left Bombay, Ruttie’s will to get better also seems to have vanished and her health began to deteriorate again. She was fine for the first couple of days after Jinnah left for Delhi, even going to the cinema with Kanji and his wife for an after-dinner show. But within a few days of Jinnah leaving and Kanji also getting caught up in other things, Ruttie sank deeper into depression than before.

  The Bombay riots were on, as Kanji recounts, and as an honorary magistrate, he had night duty in the outlying Byculla on the night of 16 and 17 February. The next morning, Annie Besant arrived for a day’s visit, and Kanji could not go to see Ruttie because he had to receive Mrs Besant at the station. Since Mrs Besant’s visits to Bombay were invariably very brief—she usually arrived by the morning train and returned to Madras the same evening—Kanji was expected to spend the entire day with her until she left Bombay. He stayed with Mrs Besant till lunch but after that, when he went home for a short while, Ruttie came there, ‘terribly depressed and unhappy’. So Kanji had to spend the next four hours with her in his flat, and eventually he took her back to her place. Mrs Besant had asked him to come in time for tea, and he hoped to keep that engagement. But once she got to her house, Ruttie called him in and made him some tea and he found he could not leave her in ‘that condition of terrific depression’. So he skipped the tea appointment with Mrs Besant, something he had never done before, and stayed with Ruttie till seven in the evening, only able to leave her after assuring her that he would be back by 10.15 in the night, after seeing Mrs Besant off at the station.

  When Mrs Besant heard what had kept Kanji from meeting her earlier, she understood, telling him to look after Ruttie. But short of admitting her in a hospital, with all its attendant stigma, there was little Kanji could do to save her. By the time he got back, she was almost gone. ‘I discovered to my horror that she was unconscious,’ Kanji writes in his book on Ruttie, again, like Chaman Lal, maintaining a discreet silence on what clearly appears to be another suicide attempt by an overdose of sleeping pills. He spent the night trying to revive her—perhaps because calling in a doctor without her permission would be taken by Ruttie as a breach of trust—and eventually she woke up. Kanji went home after that, undoubtedly exhausted, but did not get any sleep. Early the next morning, Ruttie was on the phone, asking him to see her on his way to office. She was still ‘most depressed’, according to Kanji. He tried his utmost to comfort her but it was of no use. Knowing her, it would have been futile for him to suggest calling in a doctor or even her mother. Neither in any case would have been of much help, with her compulsion to kill herself becoming more overwhelming by the hour. As he was leaving, he said: ‘I’ll see you tonight.’ Her reply was ominous: ‘If I am alive. Look after my cats and don’t give them away.’ He had a dinner engagement that night but his anxiety drove him to visit her after that, reaching Ruttie’s house at 11.15 p.m. He found her fast asleep. Instead of being alarmed, he felt relieved and went back home, wanting to catch up on the sleep he had not had for two nights in a row.

  But by the next afternoon, Kanji writes, ‘I was informed by telephone that she was unconscious again and there was very little hope of her living.’ He does not say who gave him the news, whether it was one of her servants or perhaps Ruttie’s mother or brother who might have been summoned to the house by the servants when they realized that she was sinking. He went immediately to her house, but either because she had been taken to the hospital or her parents had arrived and taken charge, he could not see her. On the following evening, 20 February 1929—her twenty-ninth birthday—she passed away. There is no medical record stating the official cause of her death, but nearly half a century later, Kanji did come out with the truth. In an interview he gave to an Urdu author close to the end of his life, Kanji unequivocally declared that Ruttie had killed herself by taking sleeping pills that were always by her bedside. ‘She chose to die on her birthday,’ Kanji told the Pakistani writer, Syed Shahabuddin Dosnani, who met the ageing but very alert Kanji in his apartment in Bombay on 16 February 1968.

  It was not Jinnah’s practice to call and wish Ruttie on her birthday, or he might have heard sooner. As it was, he was sitting with Chaman Lal in Delhi’s Western Court late that evening, unaware of what was going on with Ruttie, when a trunk call was put through to him
from Bombay. Chaman Lal heard Jinnah say calmly over the phone that he would leave that night, and then, putting down the phone, he walked towards Chaman Lal, saying: ‘Ruttie is seriously ill. I must leave tonight.’ There was a pause, after which he said: ‘Do you know who that was?’ And not waiting for Chaman Lal to speak, answered his own question: ‘It was my father-in-law. This is the first time we have spoken to each other since my marriage.’

  Chaman Lal suggested that Jinnah leave by the Frontier Mail next morning—because in any case the night train would not get him to Bombay any quicker. Jinnah, all reason as usual, agreed, not knowing until the next morning that Ruttie was already dead. The news was broken to him on the train via the telegram of condolence that came from the viceroy. If he broke down when he was alone in his first-class compartment for the twenty-four hours he spent on the train, no trace of it was visible when he got off at Grant Road station on 22 February morning. Kanji, along with a colonel and Mrs Sokhey, received him at the station and found him his usual self, well fortressed against any talk of a personal nature. Arrangements for the funeral ceremony had already been made while he was on his way from Delhi. The Petits would have liked no doubt to take over and give her a Parsi funeral, at least reclaiming their daughter in death. But that would be at the risk of excommunication of the entire Petit family, according to the ruling of the Parsi panchayat after her marriage. Instead, the arrangements had been turned over to strangers, including a Haji Daudbhai Nasser and Rajab Alibhai Ibrahim Batliwala. The funeral prayers were to be held according to Muslim rites at Pala Galli mosque from where the body was to be taken in a buggy to Arambagh, the Khoja cemetery at Mazagon belonging to the breakaway sect of Khoja Shia Isnaashari Muslims to which Jinnah and his father had affiliated themselves nearly thirty years ago.