Mr and Mrs Jinnah Read online

  To her friends, though, it seemed the ultimate irony of Ruttie’s life. ‘Irony of ironies,’ as Sarojini put it later, ‘that Ruttie’s beautiful, suffering body should be put to sleep in a Khoja graveyard among Muslims whose days were measured by tape measure and in the scales with silver and copper coins . . .’ Kanji must have felt so too, because he brought it up with Jinnah even as they drove off from the station, telling him that Ruttie would have liked to be cremated, not buried. But Jinnah, possibly too numb to care, let them go ahead with the Islamic rites.

  The funeral was unusual for the large turnout of ladies and gentlemen from all communities, friends of both Jinnah and Ruttie. Throughout the five hours of the funeral ceremony, Kanji sat beside Jinnah, watching him struggle to keep a tight leash over his emotions, distancing himself by talking only politics. ‘Jinnah put up a brave face,’ Kanji recounts, ‘and after a tense silence, he began to talk hurriedly of his work in the Assembly a week before, and how he helped Vithalbhai Patel, the Speaker, out of the tight corner the latter had got into with [the] Government.’ Then, as Ruttie’s body was lowered into the grave and he was called as the nearest relative to be the first to throw the earth on her grave, it finally sank in. ‘He broke down suddenly and sobbed and wept like a child,’ Kanji writes. The emotion lasted only a few minutes and Jinnah was his reserved self once more. But the momentary breakdown left a lasting impression on all those who attended the funeral. Even Chagla, who was fond of taking potshots at Jinnah’s cold and unfeeling temperament, was forced to admit that ‘there were actually tears in his eyes’, saying it was ‘the only time when I found Jinnah betraying some shadow of human weakness’.

  Reaching home, Jinnah could no longer keep his feelings on hold. He had asked Kanji to meet him at home the next evening and Kanji thought Jinnah probably wanted to know about Ruttie’s last days, since Kanji had been with her all the weeks prior to her death. But it was not for this that Kanji had been summoned. Instead, as Kanji writes, ‘he screamed his heart out, speaking to me for over two hours, myself listening to him patiently and sympathetically, occasionally putting a word here and there.’

  Watching Jinnah break down and weep like that, Kanji had a sudden flash of understanding about his friend that gives a profound insight into Jinnah’s very soul: ‘Something I saw had snapped in him. The death of his wife was not just a sad event, nor just something to be grieved over, but he took it, this act of God, as a failure and a personal defeat in his life.’ Kanji did not know then, or ever, of Ruttie’s piteous appeal to Jinnah to ‘Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread on.’ Jinnah had no means of escaping from those wounding words now.

  And yet, he would not face this biggest defeat of his life, trying to go on in his old work-addicted way. For the week he remained in Bombay after the funeral, he kept himself busy with intensive negotiations, preparing the ground for the Muslim League Council meeting he had scheduled in Delhi for the following week. In an effort to shut off his memories, he packed away everything that reminded him of her—her photographs, her dresses, her beautiful collection of jades, rare objets d’art and first editions—and left Bombay in time for the Muslim League meeting on 3 March. He never mentioned her name or referred to her ever again. But none of this really helped, as Kanji points out: ‘He never recovered right till the end of his life from this terrible shock.’

  Had he looked into her books before he shut them up into boxes, Jinnah might have discovered even more to torment him. Unlike the books she bought later—light Edwardian comedies of manners, old-fogey husbands struggling with new-age modern wives—these books that she had gathered around her in the last months of her life were all favourites from her girlhood years, plucked from Petit Hall where they must have gathered dust all these years, signed with her maiden name with a fountain pen. It was a curious set of books she chose to plunder from her shelves at Petit Hall—Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac, the story of a young heiress disinherited for marrying the wrong man, for loving him with ‘that love which was her doom’; or Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas, revolving around the leader of the Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan, finding himself very isolated while his friends have moved on, reflecting that he was one of those ‘who remain, whether by chance, by bad fortune, or by some natural impediment, stopped mid-way in their course towards the attainment of every hope’. Or another of Dumas’s novels in first edition, Louise de la Vallière (volume 3 of The Vicomte de Bragelonne), with its story of being locked irretrievably in an unhappy relationship.

  And some of the margin markings were certainly not of the girl she used to be at twelve or thirteen. On the front page of The Count of Monte Cristo (volume 2), for instance, under the ‘Rutty D. Petit’ written in pencil, is a new marking in fountain pen, saying only: ‘Page 720’. And turning to page 720, no one can miss the paragraph highlighted with a line drawn down its entire length, not once, but six or eight times. It reads: ‘You have spoken truly, Maximilian, according to the care we bestow upon it, death is either a friend who rocks us gently as a nurse, or an enemy who violently drags the soul from the body. Some day, when the world is much older, when mankind will be masters of all the destructive powers in nature, to serve for the general good of humanity; when mankind, as you were saying, have discovered the secrets of death, then that death will become as sweet and voluptuous as a slumber in the arms of your beloved.’ Why was this ‘Blue Flower’ he had plucked only ten years ago yearning so desperately for death? It was not a question that Jinnah would ever want to face.

  It meant looking deep into the dark corners of his own heart and confronting the truth. How did he ‘tread upon’ this Flower he had plucked, just as she had accused him of? How much of it was to be blamed on his own harsh intransigence, chipping away at her self-worth and pushing her further down the spiral of her dreadful disease of despair and anguish? Or was that only one small part of the inexorable train of circumstances? First had come her exile from her family and community for marrying him, losing everything, including her inheritance and identity. Then came the second exile, more terrible even than the first because it condemned them to stand apart, hated and reviled, only because he refused to follow Gandhi blindly. Finally, so much more vulnerable than him, without his carefully built-up defences, Ruttie had become prey to her own mind’s darkness. Yet, somewhere in his fortressed imperviousness, her reproach in that last letter must have pierced him, for he did confess to a friend’s wife, many years later: ‘She was a child and I should never have married her. The fault was mine.’

  Her friends, too, struggled with the guilt and pain, trying to make sense of it all—sometimes in vain, as in Padmaja’s case. She had not been in touch with Ruttie for months but, as she wrote in a letter to Chagla, ‘though we were so utterly different in every way imaginable, we were very close to each other and between us was a bond of understanding that had long ago grown beyond all need of speech’. And on the night that Ruttie died, Padmaja recounts in the letter, ‘I was seized with such a terrible restlessness and fear that I could not sleep or even lie down and I spent the whole night wandering alone in the garden thinking of Ruttie and shaking with a nameless fear to which I had no clue until I heard twenty-four hours later of Ruttie’s death. By that time I was myself very ill having caught a terrible chill in the garden.’

  Four months after Ruttie’s death, Padmaja was still lying in bed, worn out in body and spirit by her loss. ‘I have not yet grown reconciled to it,’ she writes in a letter to Chagla dated June 1929. ‘It is foolish and futile I know and yet somehow I resent it still. It is not that I fear Death for those I love—Death can be a very beautiful and merciful thing I know and I have been praying every moment for the last two months that it may come to a dear, dear friend of mine who is in agony—but in Ruttie’s case I am bitter because it seems like the wanton destruction of a beautiful thing that was still unfulfilled. What a tragedy of unfulfillment Ruttie’s life has been—she was so y
oung and so lovely and she loved life with such passionate eagerness, and always life passed her by leaving her with empty hands and heart.’

  Sarojini, too, was in extreme shock when she first heard the news. It took her almost a month to find out, with her family and friends shielding her from the truth because she was so far away on her American lecture tour. But the news did eventually reach her, ‘casually over the telephone, told me by someone as a piece of Indian news just come by the mail that “Jinnah’s wife” had died’, as Sarojini put it in a letter to Padmaja from New York on 19 March 1929. ‘He did not know that it was not Jinnah’s wife but someone unutterably dear and cherished.’ The shock was so severe that it felt ‘as if the sun and the springtime had suddenly died out of the world’. But like Jinnah, she belonged to a generation where work came before feelings, always: ‘And yet, I had to go on into crowds and speak when all my thoughts and tears were around a grave in a Muslim graveyard.’

  But work could not distract her from her grief, as she says in the letter: ‘For the first time since I came to the New World have I felt desolate and deserted with an overpowering sense of weariness, loneliness and pain. I did not know that one lovely face hidden in the ground with the earth lying heavy upon its beauty would or could hurt me and cripple all my life forces like this. When Umar died, it was a deep sorrow that cannot be forgotten. But with Ruttie dead, it is as if some intimate, integral part of oneself had gone into the Great Silence.’

  Like her daughter, Sarojini, too, felt a strong sense of foreboding on the day of Ruttie’s twenty-ninth birthday. ‘Strangely enough, on the very day she died I was overcome with a dreadful sense of foreboding and loss. But I resisted my insane impulse, as it seemed, to cable and find out if all were well. It was not an insane impulse. It was the instinct and foreknowledge of love, because I loved little Ruttie with a strange passion of protection . . .’ Sarojini says in the letter.

  And yet, under the protective passion, Sarojini could still be harsh in her judgement of Ruttie, holding her somehow to blame for her own destruction. Death was the only way out for Ruttie, as Sarojini wrote to Padmaja, trying to console her: ‘Somehow I suppose life will not be the same again. Out of the day and night a joy has taken flight—and yet, I know that there was no other solution to her problem. Death was the sole, the supreme compassion for that broken life, for the shattered body, that clouded mind, those ruined and degraded nerves that had become the victims of every poison that could destroy the fineness, the nobility, the lucidity, the loveliness of the once radiant spirit. Had she lived, it would have been both unspeakable grief and maybe unspeakable shame too for those who loved her. She could not have been salvaged from the causes and effects of her own folly and fantasy of life. Far better for her and for all who loved her that she should pass out on the high crest of her youth, and be remembered for what she really was—beyond and behind the clouds that had begun to throw the sinister shadows across her soul. For the shadows had already begun to gather and grow two years ago. And last year, when I came to you at Arogyavanam, there was already doom written upon every line of her being—poor fatal child.

  ‘But in the midst of such unhappiness, disillusion, suffering, the extravagance of her caprice, her wayward and stubborn self-destruction, she was a spirit of flaming beauty and purity. In her there was nothing intrinsically small or mean or unclean. She had valour and vision, magnanimity, loyalty and a passionate sense of truth and incomparable tenderness towards dumb things.

  ‘Let us remember her always as that radiant spirit of delight, unstained by a single shadow, unsullied by a single flaw which after all were incidental and not integral parts of the Ruttie we loved and the Ruttie who loved us. You she loved with a deep, clinging love that held in it trust and admiration and a soul of worship for the beauty of your spirit. Let us offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the supreme compassion of her death. Her body will become dust but for you and me she will be a flame of gold and an illumination of immortal loveliness.’

  She ends her long letter with: ‘Goodnight my darling. I have yet to write to her mother, her husband and her child—but we loved her more than they and knew her better.’

  In the following week, Sarojini found out more to reinforce her conviction that death was the only reprieve for Ruttie’s troubled life: ‘Today I was lunching with Princess Journevitch, whose husband is a famous Russian sculptor,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja from New York on 25 March 1929. ‘In the course of lunch she casually mentioned having known a Madam “Zhinna” four years ago in Paris and how she was ruining her life with drugs and how all her beauty was being destroyed. And how she had heard that Madame Zhinna was in Paris very ill and separated from her husband. But what would you? said the Princess. And when I told her that “your friend is dead”, she said “La! La! Of course. The long needle . . .” I was startled. But Syud Hossain tells me that when the poor little thing was in America it was the same and he spoke to her very seriously. And a dear old lady here Mrs Fud who admired her beauty said there was death already on her face. Well! As Cousins said to me only last night, “I think it is the mercy of God.” “Why?” I asked. “Sarojini Devi, when we saw her in Kashmir something had already broken in her brain.” Poor little child. If all the world knew, it was better for her to have passed away into the Silence in the spring time. In a little while people will remember only the beauty and radiance and not the gathering cloud and shadow upon that beauty and radiance . . .

  ‘It was as long ago as 1920 mad Mrs Harker foretold her sudden death either on her 28th or 29th birthday. I had forgotten that prophecy but how strange and true it was! I wonder if she has found all her beloved dogs and cats awaiting her coming in the world to which she has gone—Nere, Dono, Loafer, Zippie—it would be so lonely for her without them.’

  By the following week, Sarojini had come to terms with her own guilt and pain and loss, ending her mourning process. ‘For the last fortnight I haven’t slept, since I heard in such a crude and casual manner about little Ruttie’s death—but I have now realized that it was indeed a release from all the many forces of bondage she endured by the very fact of being alive,’ she wrote to Padmaja on 30 March 1929 from Pennsylvania, USA. ‘Somehow she seems very near and I have now faith that she is happy and sane . . . she had departed from all sanity on earth long ago but now I know that she is herself in that region of liberty once more a brilliant flame and not a broken and flickering ember of a bright and shattered fire. It will be very sad for me to return to Bombay and find no Ruttie . . .’

  Strong as ever, she was able to console her still-grieving daughter: ‘Darling, I know how much you have felt her death and yet you must realize that she could not stay. There was nothing for her to cling to because she herself had not the power to hold on to anything. And so it is best that she has gone back to the first Light of spring. There are two cats in the house, for all the world they reflect of Ruttie’s grey cat and black cat. But not so beautiful as Ibn-e-Shapur, on whom be peace!’

  A lover of nature and all good things on earth, for Sarojini there was always some cure at hand for her sorrow. In Pennsylvania, as she wrote the next day to her younger son, Ranadheera: ‘I am staying with a lovely woman. Her house is 12 miles from Philadelphia set in a wood and bordered by a river. And today the woods held a real celebration of beauty. It has brought me great refreshment. I was so worn out after the shock and sorrow of Ruttie’s death. But now I am no longer sad. I know she has found deliverance and is at rest.’

  And again the following week, in a letter to Padmaja on 7 April 1929 from Montreal, Canada: ‘There is the radio playing—all the way from New York comes the music upon the waves of air. What is distance, what is the menace of sea and land to the conquering force of knowledge. And by the same token it is wondrous and yet how proper and natural that one does not realize the menace of death or the challenge of distance when one lives truly and with understanding. So darling you are very very close to me, closer than the music that comes across s
o many hundreds of miles . . . and now little Ruttie is even nearer to me than she was in life when her poor lonely pitiful hands and heart clung to me for affection and shelter—from life, from herself most of all, poor little Ruttie!’

  But there was one more shock in store. Stopping in England on her way back to India, she met an acquaintance—two, in fact—who confirmed what a psychic in New York had told her about Ruttie’s death. ‘But nothing amazes me any more really,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja on 6 May 1929 from Lyceum Club, Piccadilly, ‘since a woman I met in New York told me—not knowing my name or anything else about me—a reclusive woman—that a young friend of mine had suddenly passed away lately having after much preliminary consideration taken an overdraught of a sleeping draught and left a letter to say so . . . and that I would know of it after leaving the States. And last night Lady L [illegible] told me and today [illegible] guardedly corroborated the fact that poor little Ruttie had taken an overdraught of veronal! And almost to the letter what Lady L told me . . . it was all inexplicable.’ Sarojini did not forget to remind her daughter to be discreet about what she had just passed on: ‘But, darling, you realize of course that this is not the official version. I suppose there was no other end possible . . . poor mad little suffering child. Maybe she’ll find the peace that she was denied—or denied herself on earth . . .’