Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 5

  But then, as if she was unable to help herself, she gives in to the restlessness and sense of oppression that was bothering her: ‘Do you ever get into a Bohemian mood? I do. Today I feel as though only a mad life of roving irregularity could satisfy me. A life without law, without consistency and doctrine. Though my nature is unacquainted with either, still the life I live adheres to the common code of society. I would much rather help a friend than pay a creditor. I feel I could enjoy the excitement of being pursued by bailiffs and marked as “unsteady”. And if I only had enough money to pay the garriwala or taxi driver, I would most certainly give it to the hungry beggar in the street—he would have the greater claim! But what is the use of saying these things and dreaming a life I can never fulfill? I might just as well tell you while I am about it, that I have a greater regard for unpunctual persons than the more polite beings who somehow always turn up at the right time in the right dress with the right words. Oh dear they do make me feel so uncomfortable!’

  And this leading to a spurt of rage that she makes no more effort to stifle with polite talk: ‘I have just been contemplating the nicest way of murder and suicide—and I have come to the conclusion that stabbing with a jewel-handled dagger is far the best—shooting and bombing is much too civilized for my taste!’ She signs off with a ‘But don’t fret. I intend doing neither’ just in case Padmaja should get too alarmed.

  There are also two poems she wrote that year and shared with the Naidu girls that are on the same theme—of a lover who seems to have moved on, leaving her either sad or piqued, or both. The first, signed merely ‘1916’:

  Why should I weep

  Or groan in despair

  While the stars still peep

  At a world so fair?

  Why should I be dull

  And living, pine

  While life is still full

  Of Love’s sweet wine?

  Why should I be sad

  And dim mine young eye,

  While others are glad

  At the glorious deep sky?

  Why should I not play,

  And laugh, and sing

  While the world is so gay

  At the coming of Spring?

  The second is also on fleeting love, but less defiant and more despairing:

  A flower came to me one day in its natural loveliness and it told me the secret of its colours and then faded.

  A wind blew around me once and it whispered the story of its travels into my ears and then it ceased.

  A wave one day dashed up in its native fierceness and it touched my feet as they rested on the rocks and then withdrew.

  A bird came to me one day in its freedom and it sat upon the young bough of the green tree o’erhead and it told me its tales of love from birdland and then flew away.

  A dream once came to me in its vaporous beauty and then I awoke.

  Happiness came to me one day in all its exquisite radiance and I danced with it full two days and two nights, and then it tired and left me.

  Love came to me once in flower-like sweetness, and I breathed its fragrance till it sickened and satiated.

  Sorrow came to me with its black robed beauteous form, but it has not forsaken me. I have drunk deep of its cup of gall and I taste it when I wake and when I sleep; when I smile and when I weep.

  Sorrow knows not satiety!

  Had Jinnah then cooled off? He was, after all, no fool and could see clearly with his legal experience that without her father’s consent, their courtship did not stand a chance of going anywhere—unless he wanted to commit political suicide by running away with her or entangling himself in legal hassles that would take years to untangle. Moreover, he belonged to a generation of Indian men who regarded falling in love as a weakness. ‘The moment you suspect that any girl has inspired a feeling of some sort in you, break off at once and do not let it grow,’ as his friend Motilal Nehru once advised his son, Jawaharlal, in England. And no one could be better than Jinnah at curing himself of an inconvenient attachment, having used his iron willpower all his life to vanquish his feelings. And at this time, he did not even have to try. In the last six months alone, in between Ruttie’s two trips to Mahabaleshwar, he had achieved what no man had ever achieved before in Indian politics: he was re-elected to the legislative council, spending less than three days campaigning for himself but still winning with a margin. He was active as usual in the legislative session in Delhi, speaking on all major issues. He was elected president of the Muslim League for the forthcoming joint session of the League and the Congress in Lucknow, which was going to be the turning point in the country’s politics, bringing about a settlement between Hindus and Muslims. He was the prime mover of the pact, the only man to be trusted by both sides; and to reinforce his position as the tallest national leader, he was asked to preside over the Bombay provincial Congress conference in Ahmedabad. In contrast, Ruttie’s life was lived either in the drawing rooms of her parents’ various homes or in the homes of their friends.

  Or she escaped into the realms of her fantasy world, living her life through the books she read. She had always done that, even as a child fleeing from her boisterous games with her three brothers into the world of books; she was the acknowledged bookworm of a large family that indulged her passion for reading without sharing it themselves—her copy of The Complete Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example, was a present from her father when she was not yet twelve, inscribed with the words: ‘To dear Rati from her loving Papa. 14th December 1911. The date of birth of her little brother Jamshed.’ And her copy of Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley was a present from her second brother, Manek, on the eve of her twelfth birthday, with the inscription: ‘To dear Ruttie from Manek Feb. 18 1912.’ So far her reading had been limited to English authors and poets or at best European writers translated into English—from the standard Milton and Silas Marner and Bernard Shaw prescribed for students preparing for the Senior Cambridge exam to her own reading for pleasure, ranging from poetry to novels (almost all of William Thackeray’s novels and Alexander Dumas’s in English translation), Ibsen’s plays (very fashionable then, with many attempting Indian translations, and staple reading in study circles, along with Browning’s poems); a heavily marked and annotated copy of the English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, but not his ‘De Profundis’, from which she loved to quote, possibly for its shock effect. But now, for the first time in her life, she took to an Indian book, Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra: A Play in One Act (issued in 1914 in a limited edition ‘by the Indian Society’) which she seems to have read with even more passion than the Romantic English poets she had so far loved, judging by the number of footnotes and pencil markings alone.

  Tagore’s fame, although growing among the English educated, possibly had not yet travelled to Petit Hall, for the only ‘Indian’ book to have found a place in the bookshelves of the baronet’s castle so far was The Garden of Kama and Other Love Lyrics from India, inscribed with Lady Petit’s name and dated 1914. One would guess the Tagore book was ‘borrowed’, for Ruttie did not sign or mention the date of acquiring it on the first page as she invariably did; she liked to stamp her mark of ownership with bold fountain pen strokes inscribing her name, spelt variously as ‘Rutty Petit’, ‘Rutty D. Petit’ or even ‘Rutty Din Petit’, as if trying them all out for the perfect fit.

  But whether the book was borrowed or her own, the enthusiastic pencil markings on this dramatic verse based on the Mahabharata story of Arjun falling in love with Princess Chitrangada clearly belong to no one else, and mirror her budding passion and how it emerged. Beginning on page three and continuing till the very end, the markings consist of vertical lines of two or more strokes to signify the most poignant lines for her, such as Madana, the God of Love, saying: ‘That requires no schooling, fair one. The eye does its work untaught, and he knows how well, who is struck in the heart’; or ‘then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman and knew tha
t a man was before me’; or ‘Fair Lady, the very sight of you is indeed the highest hospitality . . . to feel his heart struggling to break its bounds urging its passionate cry through the entire body—and then to send him away like a beggar—no, impossible’; or ‘I felt like a flower which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the humming flatteries and whispered murmurs of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the sky, bend its head and at a breath, give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment that has neither a past nor present’; or ‘. . . a smile about his lips like the crescent moon in the morning’; or ‘. . . I remembered what I used to be and ran and ran like a deer afraid of her own shadow’. And a big cross over these lines: ‘shame slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his call—“Beloved, my most beloved!” And all my forgotten lives united as one and responded to it. I said, “Take me, take all I am!”’

  Interestingly, there is a book Ruttie bought and read just before this second trip to Mahabaleshwar. A long English poem in the Sufi tradition—The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yazdi—A Lay of the Higher Law, written by the British explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton, whom Ruttie admired greatly for his daring adventures and unconventionality that she longed to emulate. The book carries Ruttie’s name and the date—9 October 1916, and what makes it interesting is not the poem itself but the short biography of Burton that precedes it in which Ruttie has chosen to pencil-mark these lines: ‘As a boy he had a strong imagination and where others might have remained silent on this score, or admitted a weakness for invention, he described himself as “a resolute and unblushing liar. I used to ridicule the idea of my honour being in any way attached to telling the truth; I considered it an impertinence being questioned. I never could understand what moral turpitude there could be in a lie, unless it was told for fear of the consequences of telling the truth, or one that would attach blame to another person.” He was once asked by a curate if he had shot a man on his way to Mecca. Burton is said to have replied: “Sir, I am proud to say I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.”’ Could the pampered, protected heiress possibly be plotting sedition?

  Whatever be her secret thoughts and hidden plans, Ruttie certainly returned to Bombay restored to good humour. Her next letter to Padmaja, on 22 November 1916, is so much like the girl she used to be before her love troubles, that her parents must have been reassured that she was now on the road to recovery, if not fully recovered. ‘I am so glad you like the photograph,’ her letter from Petit Hall begins. ‘It is a little more than a year ago since it was taken. Mother wants me to have a fresh lot taken, but I always put it off—it is such a bother!’ The cumbersome process of having one’s photograph taken, involving posing before a camera for hours, was something that fashionable families had taken to, especially the Parsis, and everyone was into exchanging these photos of one another for their albums. ‘How many more times have I to remind you to send me a photo of yourself and Leilamani. And oh! When is your mother going to send one of herself? Do remind her!’

  The other reassuring sign was her resuming her old activities, and she goes on in her letter to relate an amusing incident that happened at one of the many fetes that the fashionable ladies of Bombay loved to hold, setting up stalls selling knitted socks and other such stuff for the benefit of soldiers fighting in the War. ‘I was on duty at Block D of the Lucky Bag(h) enclosure yesterday and it was great fun. One very smart young officer handed me his number, which entitled him to 24 yards of some sort of coarse material. He was very vexed, not knowing what to do with it and quite realizing that it would mar his swank were he to carry it about, he went to the enclosure next door from where he received a dozen Turkish towels. You can imagine his distress as he walked off with a bundle under each arm! How we laughed!!!!’

  And she can banter once again about her many admirers that she is unaware of and flirt with the idea of them chasing her: ‘I wish I could have seen the too “progressive” follower of Islam with the “burning heart”. I think I would have taken to him if he has been kicked out of the Aligarh College for his young and flashing patriotism. I suppose that is what was meant by progressive?’

  But her parents would have been less reassured if they had read her next sentence, bristling at Padmaja’s use of the words ‘old fools’ when referring to the national leaders at the forthcoming congress. All her hackles rising, Ruttie writes: ‘By the way, how do you mean “won’t act”? What would you like the “old fools” to do? The only way they can act at present is to unite.’ It was a particularly sore point that Padmaja had touched off with her thoughtless remark, echoing the younger generation’s impatience with the way politics was going—leaders arriving at the annual Congress session and giving thundering speeches for four days and falling into coma until the next session. For Ruttie, at the stage when Jinnah was the shining hero who would give India back its freedom, and worshipped the work he was doing towards it, ‘old fools’ was not the words she wanted anyone, least of all her friend, to associate him with.

  Two days later, writing to Leilamani, she was again in an elated mood: ‘Am I excited about going to Lucknow?’ she writes, responding to Leilamani’s query about going to the forthcoming Congress session in Lucknow the following month. ‘I should think so. Who wouldn’t be [?]’ And indeed, the Congress’s annual session was something people looked forward to, especially politically minded people, young and old, arriving at the venue—held in a different city each year—putting up with friends and acquaintances, prepared not just to hear the rousing speeches delivered in the pandal but also to dress up and be seen at the many parties and dos that were part of the Congress jamboree. It was a national picnic of sorts, lasting four days and four nights, where one met old friends from across the country and made new ones. ‘I am so glad your mother will also be there too,’ Ruttie goes on in her letter. ‘Is it quite settled about her going? You too must try and come.’

  But for Ruttie, the excitement about going to Lucknow was not about the session, as she claimed, or even about the prospect of seeing Jinnah again or glorying in his big moment. She had her own plan that she had been plotting for some time that she had not shared with anyone so far, not even with Jinnah. And Lucknow, with its stirring talks of freedom and how to wrest it from those who denied it to Indians, would be the perfect place to put it into action, safe from her parents’ meddling.

  Chapter Three

  That the Petits allowed Ruttie to go to Lucknow, and that too without either of them to keep an eye on her, speaks a lot for the way Ruttie was raised. On the face of it, it seemed foolhardy on their part to let her to go to the one place in the world where her chances of meeting Jinnah were not only certain, but where her admiration for him would be redoubled. They could hardly be unaware of the buzz that Jinnah was to be the hero of this historic political session that would bring Muslims and Hindus together on a common platform and accept a pact for unity that promised an imminent end to British rule in India. Freedom, according to the Bombay Chronicle, was right round the corner and Jinnah was to be at the helm of these changes. They would have persuaded themselves, of course, that there was really no danger, especially now that Ruttie seemed to have recovered from her misplaced passion for him. Jinnah too, having been put in his place by Sir Dinshaw, had dropped his suit and was visibly preoccupied with matters that had nothing to do with their daughter—from drafting a memorandum of post-War reforms that was widely discussed to presiding over the Bombay provincial Congress, besides defending B.G. Tilak in a high-profile sedition case. But the truth was there was very little the Petits could have done really to stop her—unless they expressly forbade her to go, which would in any case have only made her more defiant. As modern parents of the new century, they were expected to come up with some sounder reason than that they did not wish her to go, and there simply was none—especially when her Aunt Hamabai, as interested in politics as her niece, decided to go along as well.

  Not that
Ruttie’s parents were the kind to worry overly about Ruttie, preoccupied as they were with their own concerns. Sir Dinshaw, after making sure that his sister and daughter would be comfortably lodged in Lucknow and had their own transport, went about his own work, while Lady Petit left on a holiday to Agra with her friends, leaving Ruttie to set off for Lucknow with her aunt.

  Of course, not all parents of the new century, not even those who considered themselves thoroughly modern, treated their sixteen-year-olds with the same degree of laxity. There was Sarojini herself, despite being universally acknowledged as a model of a liberal parent because she encouraged her four children to speak their minds and express their wishes. She would not, for instance, think of getting her daughters betrothed or married at twelve or fourteen as most others were doing despite being educated; but nevertheless laid down strict rules for her daughters which she expected them to obey without question. ‘School is much the best place for both of you,’ Sarojini wrote to Padmaja who at sixteen was understandably keen to leave her boarding school and return home to Hyderabad, ‘where you have to obey certain rules and accept certain discipline however much you dislike it . . . but when you are at home you will be put on your honour to do what is right and pleasing and good for you without compulsion but because it is right that you should do so. Now think over what I have said.’

  But the Petits did not believe in imposing their parental authority on the children, leaving it to the staff they had hired at such expense to do the needful. It was Ruttie’s governess’s job, as far as they were concerned, to instil what was required in their daughter, expecting no more than that she be groomed into a young lady fit for their society. And now that she was of an age to wear saris and join her mother’s social circle, having outgrown her governess, it was really up to Ruttie what she did with herself, provided she observed the bare minimum of rules, such as taking care not to stay out too late according to her parents’ standards. There was a time when this very minimal expectation of her by her father, especially when it came to her education, used to incense her. The emphatic pencil lines Ruttie drew, for example, on the margins of the English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s memoir where Pankhurst describes her father’s indifference to his daughters’ education while he spent much thought and effort into sending his sons to college, show this clearly touched a chord. But now, of course, she would have been only too relieved at their casual negligence.