Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 7

  Her high-flown words of romantic verse, somewhat affected, seem to mean little—‘And what is this last song that your spirit has sung? Is it a song of passionate despair or “poignant sorrow”?’ And ‘Oh who shall satisfy your quenchless thirst, but yourself? If ever you desire to realize an ideal, it must be within yourself and then you attain what is known as self-realisation. So whenever you want to satisfy and appease your heart do it yourself. Let the bubbling red wine flow from the font of your soul, let it quench the thirsty heart.’ But under it all, was there perhaps a wistful longing for something she had yet to find? Why was it about her giving all the time, what about receiving? But she will not allow the thought to grow; she is in a hurry: ‘I would write more but I’m in haste.’

  After waiting another four days for a letter from Padmaja, Ruttie could no longer resist her urge to connect with her friend. ‘It will be a week on Tuesday since I returned from Lucknow,’ Ruttie wrote, aware suddenly of the exact number of days since she returned from Lucknow, in contrast to her usual vagueness about dates, ‘and very much more since you last wrote to me. And if I remember aright it is you who owes me a letter. But nay, there is no such thing as “owing” and “turns” with us. We write to each other when we feel inclined and not when convention demands.’

  On the surface, there is nothing much she says in her letter dated 7 January 1917 besides the usual things people said when they returned from a Congress session, even if her language was a little more lyrical than the average Congress attendee’s: ‘Well, and the great capital of the old nawabs of Oudh has had its Congress and Muslim League. It has listened to the cry of those children whose ancestors belonged to a proud and independent nation. The City of Mosques has welcomed the worshippers of the Lords Krishna and Buddha. It has heard the carefully measured words of the moderates, and the reckless indictments of the Extremists against an alien Government. It has thrilled to the passionate appeal of those nationalists who have sacrificed all at the feet of the Motherland. It has sobbed for the birthright of an Empire to be restored.’ There is certainly a new consciousness, inspired no doubt by the stirring speeches she absorbed so eagerly only a week ago and it would have been only natural for her to apply the speeches she heard on fighting for freedom to her own determination to fight for her right to choose her way of life and become an equal partner in the freedom struggle. ‘India has not yet realized that if the right of nationality and independence is attained through diplomatic parlance, or as a favour or gift, or as a reward for “the blood of her martyred sons”, it will be of no avail. We must fight for our liberty and not barter for it, not by pen and parchment but sword and dagger. Those men and women who bear the distinction of being the children of India, they must renounce all for the Motherland. Her daughters must devote their souls and glory in the life sacrifice of her sons and even fight side by side with those patriots whose blood shall gain India back her own crown of Freedom.’

  But the urge to speak of matters less impersonal suddenly gets the better of her and she changes track quite abruptly, referring to what one can only guess is her latest conquest: ‘But enough! I feel inclined to mark a lighter vein ere I close.’ She talks, instead, of another admirer of hers. ‘Oh yes! About that cockeyed pet, isn’t he too killing for words!’ But the real struggle is on another front altogether. She wants to talk easily and freely about, of all things, sex, but finds, to her dismay, that she cannot break past her own inhibitions. She begins in a roundabout way: ‘I asked your mother about the gentleman in whose house you are staying at present—I forget his name! But does he beat Nabi-ullah in—?’ and referring to Padmaja’s previous love interest, a prominent barrister and Muslim League leader called Syed Nabiullah, Ruttie verges on asking a question that she has never dared ask anyone before but which nevertheless is now uppermost in her mind—how good he was at . . . kissing perhaps? But she is struck mute with shyness despite herself and is forced instead to end her sentence lamely with: ‘I don’t know what has happened to me today. I want to write a certain word and I keep on, or rather my pen turns on to another!’

  What was it that was bothering her so much that she urgently wanted to share with Padmaja but simply could not pluck up the courage to bring up? Was it the utter lack of physical intimacy between her and Jinnah even after they had got secretly engaged? His temperament, first of all, was against it, being as he was ‘a celibate introvert who discouraged intimacy, timid of relationships’. But other men were in the same straits, especially if they led a public life. As someone who prided himself on being a sensualist but was nevertheless forced to remain celibate, Jawaharlal Nehru writes in his autobiography: ‘We considered ourselves very sophisticated and talked of sex and morality in a superior way, referring casually to Ivan Block, Havelock Ellis, Kraft Ebbing or Otto Weinninger . . . As a matter of fact, in spite of our brave talk, most of us were rather timid where sex was concerned . . . my knowledge for many years after I had left Cambridge remained confined to theory . . . I doubt if any of us attached any idea of sin to it. Certainly I did not; there was no religious inhibition . . . yet a certain shyness kept me away, as well as a distaste for the usual methods adopted.’ In a sense, Jinnah was more experienced than either Jawaharlal Nehru or Ruttie, having been married before, albeit briefly, when he was only fifteen and a half; but having been raised in an even more strait-laced age than either of the two, he would hardly venture to take any liberties with Ruttie before they were actually married.

  But there is so much else to look forward to, especially now that Jinnah too is back from Lucknow and has at least three weeks in Bombay before he leaves for the legislative session in Delhi. They can, of course, only meet at parties and other social occasions but there is no dearth of those in Bombay. Suddenly, Ruttie loves her social life—‘I have O such a gay week before me. I love gaiety, don’t you? I mean theatres, weddings, races, not “At Homes” and that type of affair.’ Her only anxiety is that her mother, who is about to return from her trip to Agra, might put an end to Ruttie’s outings: ‘Mother is returning today from Agra. I wonder whether she will find me looking better or worse. I caught chill in the train while journeying to Bombay’—evidently the price for stepping out for a walk on the platform in the freezing winter of north India—‘and the doctor has made out quite a formidable table of don’ts. You see it has affected the lungs which is not considered quite as insignificant as I think it. And I do hope Mother will not also think that I should be treated as an invalid!’

  Luckily for her, Lady Petit did not notice anything amiss. Ruttie’s next fortnightly letter, on 20 January 1917—this time to her ‘little friend Leilamani’—is full of the festivities of Bombay’s high season: ‘Well, little friend, I am going to the races this afternoon—and as I did not go to rest till late last night, I must just see if I cannot manage to snatch a few moments sleep ere I begin my toiletry.’ The ‘toiletry’—always a serious preoccupation, involving choosing the appropriate dress for the occasion and balancing a carefully put together look with an appearance of careless disregard for what one wore, and adding to it the right degree of eccentricity—must have been extra special that afternoon, considering that the chances of bumping into Jinnah at the races were extremely high. With his passion for horses, the races were one social activity he did not disdain.

  Padmaja had not yet returned from her visit to her friend’s home, and it is Leilamani’s thirteen-year-old neediness and prickliness that she is addressing rather than sharing confidences with the friend her own age. Evidently, her last letter quoting the younger girl’s highly poetic language back to her had not gone down well. ‘But what is the matter with you? Are you not well—I mean physically? Mentally, I know that you are suffering.

  ‘And, O Leilamani! How can you for a moment, even for a moment, think of me as mocking your letters. But I see that it was only a wayward and passing suspicion—but you mustn’t even for a breath of a second let such thoughts enter your mind and torture your heart. It is
wrong—very wrong! Truly does Oscar Wilde in his ‘De Profundis’ say that the great sins of the world are committed in the mind—or something to that effect.

  ‘When you are given a flower you do not think of the thorn. You revel in its beauty and feast in its fragrance. So is the friendship I have offered you like a rose and you must not only think of the thorn—the imaginary thorn in this case!’

  Was this philosophizing arising from more personal sentiments than Ruttie cared to admit? In the best of circumstances, Jinnah could not have made a satisfactory fiancé for a protected, sought-after society girl, brought up only for the pursuit of pleasure—the ‘Blue Flower’, as Sarojini fancifully, but not inaccurately, dubbed Ruttie. But in the three weeks since his triumph in Lucknow, Jinnah was busier than ever—political meetings, including a meeting of the Bombay Political Caucus with the governor, Lionel Curtis, and his own legal work to catch up with—leaving him little time to hang around in parties and clubs in the hope of a brief encounter with Ruttie. Clandestine meetings were, of course, out of the question, considering his political image. Yes, her rose had more thorns than she dared to count—and none of them imaginary.

  And when at last Padmaja’s letter came, Ruttie could no longer restrain herself from at least hinting at the turmoil and confusion within her. ‘Life has been such a medley of wild excitement and cold depression!’ she wrote to Padmaja on 27 January 1917. ‘And yet it has been so full—so full because of its hollowness! So empty because of its fullness!

  ‘I am joyous and I am sad. But they are the emotions of the soul—and not of the heart! By soul I mean temperament—I long for peace and yet I dread the very idea of it. I revel in the storming passions which burn and tear at the fibres of my being till my very spirit writhes in an agony of excitement. And yet were I asked the cause of all this I could only answer by that one word—temperament! Ay, you may almost call it a form of hysteria.’

  A wiser person would have perhaps discerned in Ruttie’s infatuation merely a young girl’s passionate yearning to break out of her empty, unreal life; that she was already on the brink of a realization that her ‘storming passions’ had more to do with her craving for experience to set against her imaginary world of romance gleaned from books, that she was reluctantly acknowledging that what she was going through was nothing more than an embarrassing ‘form of hysteria’. But her father was neither wise nor experienced in dealing with a daughter he barely understood. Among the last to find out the gossip that was doing the rounds about his daughter and Jinnah, and afraid of her headstrong ways that he could not handle, and knowing that it was too late to start laying down the law with her, Sir Dinshaw tried, instead, to stop Jinnah, but with disastrous consequences.

  Chapter Four

  There were two ways of dealing with this new problem of the nationalist times. One was the sensible, modern way—Motilal Nehru’s way. As one of the richest and most successful lawyers in the country, he did not believe in the old, orthodox Hindu tradition of not dining or accepting even a glass of water in a Muslim friend’s home, not even a paan, unless it was offered by a Hindu servant. Although raised as a conservative Kashmiri Brahmin and married to an orthodox woman from his own community, he had embraced the modern lifestyle with a vengeance. His sprawling home in Allahabad, Anand Bhavan, was divided into an Indian and Western side, with the latter run by an Anglo-Indian housekeeper assisted by Christian and Muslim servants. In keeping with the times, he hired an English governess for his two daughters, took them to the ‘hill stations’ for three or four months in summer where they could enjoy the pleasures and company that the English-style resorts offered, encouraged them to go riding, mingle with his guests, and laughed at those who predicted a dire future for raising his daughters ‘in the uncouth manner of the English’. He had always been fond of entertaining on a lavish scale, but while his children were still young, he had turned to politics and since then, Anand Bhavan had also become a hub of national politics. Guests, mostly political leaders, came and went but there was one among them living there more or less permanently—Syud Hossain, the personable young editor of his newly established newspaper, Independent.

  Syud was one of those ‘fiery progressives’ that Ruttie and her friends often referred to—Oxford-educated, clean-shaven young Muslim men who spoke English with an accent that did not betray their provincial roots and dressed fashionably in the English style. They were not just embarrassed by the old style of Muslim leadership—the spade beard and caps, and religious bigotry—but militantly nationalist. It was Hossain’s patriotic fervour that first caught Motilal’s attention; and when he was looking for an editor to launch his newspaper, he readily took on the young journalist so highly recommended by his friend, B.G. Horniman, the pro-Indian Englishman and founding editor of the Bombay Chronicle. But Syud, being delicately raised, found it difficult to rough it out in bachelor digs in Allahabad, and after a bout of illness, was invited by his employer to shift into Anand Bhavan.

  It’s hard to imagine that a shrewd man of the world like Motilal, a father who had the foresight to warn his young son not to get involved with any of the English girls he met while he was studying abroad, had so carelessly overlooked the consequences of throwing together a smart, sensitive, very dapper young man with the radiantly beautiful teenaged ‘Nan’, his older daughter. One reason why he may have been led into a false sense of complacency was that he had taken the precaution of betrothing her to his friend’s son while she was still in her early teens. Despite the jokes Motilal made in private on the orthodoxy of his own community, his daughter’s engagement was arranged in the traditional way by the two families, with the boy and girl having never met, or perhaps just seeing each other from a distance. But having got her engaged, Motilal was far too modern a father to rush her into marriage at twelve or thirteen, as other parents in his community were doing. It could also be that he relied too much on the women in his large household to instruct his daughter on the limits of her freedom. Nan had always been Daddy’s girl, loved and indulged by him, allowed to have her own way; but he was a busy man, combining a top lawyer’s practice with political leadership, and had to travel quite a bit. But since his wife and several elderly relatives besides Nan’s governess all lived in the house, it perhaps did not occur to him that she might be tempted to cross the line.

  But it wasn’t easy to keep vigil on the daughters of Anand Bhavan. It was a chaotic household, divided both socially and physically into Indian and Western halves, with trays of food going up to the rooms at odd hours and the family assembling together only at dinner time. Mrs Nehru’s domain did not extend beyond the Indian quarters, and whatever misgivings she may have harboured about her daughters’ unorthodox upbringing, she did not intervene in their activities. As a result, her elder daughter and their Muslim house guest advanced from friendship to intimacy without anyone in the large household noticing. Fearing perhaps that they could never win her father’s approval for the match if Syud went to him directly with a proposal, they decided to present him with a fait accompli. By the time Motilal discovered what was going on under his own roof—or more likely, was informed by the lovers—they had already got secretly married, but ‘in an informal way’, as Syud later confessed to his good friend and only sympathizer, Sarojini Naidu.

  Motilal prided himself, and justifiably so, on his judgement of character; and in this hour of crisis, he revealed an admirable tact and presence of mind. Within days, Syud was out of Allahabad, and within weeks, out of the country, having been sent abroad as a member of a Congress deputation to Europe. With the minimum of fuss and drama, the lovers were persuaded to give up their attachment. As his daughter later explained: ‘In an era that proclaimed Hindu–Muslim unity, and belonging to a family that had close Muslim friends, I must have thought it would be perfectly natural to marry outside my religion. But in matters such as marriage the times were deeply traditional, and I was persuaded that this would be wrong.’

  Part of the ‘persuas
ion’ included packing the two now-separated lovers off to Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. Getting Syud there was the easy part. Although Gandhi was not yet the supreme leader of the Congress that he was soon to become, Syud’s admiration for the Mahatma bordered on reverence; but winning over Nan was another matter altogether. It took the combined efforts of Gandhi—who happened to pay a visit to Anand Bhavan around that time and was naturally told of the domestic disaster that had recently erupted—and her parents, for her to take up temporary residence in the ashram.

  It was probably the first time that her parents were agreed on a scheme they thought was beneficial for their daughter, and they were right. No one could have done a more thorough job of teaching their daughter on what was expected of her than Gandhi. For the girl reared by an English governess since she was five, the first lesson was the ashram itself: ‘My heart sank when I first saw the place. Everything was so utterly drab and so unpleasing to the eye. I wondered how long I could survive there.’ Life in the ashram was not what she was accustomed to: ‘Rising at 4 am for prayers, we went to the chores of the day, which consisted of sweeping and cleaning our living quarters, washing our clothes in the river . . . There was work to be done in the dairy, and daily spinning.’ The food was unlike any she’d eaten in her life—no tea or coffee, and two meals a day which consisted of: ‘Several vegetables grown in the garden were thrown together into a steam cooker without salt, spice or butter and eaten with home-ground chapattis or unpolished rice’ whose sole purpose seemed to be ‘to kill one’s desire for food’. The only concession given to the girl accustomed to every luxury was not to clean the latrines which, being of the primitive kind, was ‘a task impossible to describe’. After another round of prayers at 6 p.m., with readings from the Gita and the Quran, it was early to bed because ‘there were only hurricane lanterns in the ashram, and it was not easy to read by their flickering wicks’. Her ‘bed’ was a bedding roll placed next to Gandhi’s outside his hut, where he talked to her about Hindu culture and tried to fill the gaps in her formal religious training by making her read the Gita and the Ramayana.