Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

At first, the relief was enormous. To think that it had cost her so much agony and anguish over so many years when it had been so simple all along—just shift into the room next to Sarojini's in the Taj and no one any the wiser for weeks to come. It was strange, as Sarojini observed, 'how few people have even an inkling of what has happened in the very heart of Bombay. Fortunately, everyone is used to seeing her here at all hours that no one suspects her being here with her cats and he at home alone.'

In fact, it was Sarojini who showed more distress than either of them. Everyone still believed that she had been instrumental in bringing about what was openly acknowledged as the worst mismatch in recent times, but Sarojini's conviction that 'Jinnah is worth it all' had never shaken. And what is more, despite their quarrels and differences of temperament, she had persuaded herself that the two loved each other as much, if not more, than when they first got married against such stiff opposition—had 'come to a better understanding' of each other, as she put it a few weeks later in her letter to Padmaja. It was not in Sarojini's nature to interfere in other people's affairs, especially matters of the heart, but this was too important to let things go their own way. The very shock of Ruttie walking out on Jinnah was enough to drive her frantic with worry. For a full two weeks after Ruttie came to her, she was unable to think of anything else, even forgetting to write her daily letter home to her children, something that was unthinkable for her even at the busiest of times. On the two occasions when she was able to pull herself sufficiently together to write a line or two, she either forgot to post the letter or sent it absent-mindedly to the wrong address. But by the end of the first two weeks, she had to admit that matters between the Jinnahs were beyond even her legendary peacemaking abilities. 'I don't know how to explain my long silence,' she finally wrote home to her two daughters from the Taj on 16 January 1928, after a fortnight's silence. 'I wrote a long letter to you in the train but forgot to post it. I sent a wire the other day but addressed it Station Road Bombay—so of course it never reached. All of which goes to show that my mind has been very distracted owing to various reasons. Ever since I put my foot on the station platform I have been in the thick of worries and anxieties not one of which belongs to me strictly speaking and though I have been longing to write or get home, I have literally not had one spare moment.'

'I am going to Calcutta on Friday,' the letter continued, 'and returning on the 27th. I've not made one note for the Kamala lectures. But I hope everything will take a turn for the better soon and I shall be less ground between the upper and neither millstone of other people's affairs.' And then, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst out with the secret she had struggled to keep: 'I think I should tell you—but it is so far as I could keep it so—quite confidential, that Ruttie is in trouble. It has I suppose been due and was due for years. What exactly has brought it to a head I cannot tell. Some slight incident in Calcutta apparently . . .' And then, without elaborating on what that 'slight incident' might have been, she goes on to recount what happened when they got off the train from Calcutta, returning from the Muslim League session, with Jinnah and Ruttie travelling as usual in a separate first-class coach by themselves: 'But on the platform, when we reached here, she told me she was not returning to South Court but coming to the Taj—and she has been here since the 4th in the room next to mine. I have done my best and can do no more. There is a point beyond which friends cannot interfere. No two people who really love each other are unhappy and bitter and will not come to any understanding. It is extraordinary how few people have even an inkling of what has happened in the very heart of Bombay. Fortunately, everyone is so used to seeing her here at all hours that no one suspects her being here with her cats and he at home alone. I am hoping desperately that things will come right; but who knows? Meanwhile I don't think you should write to her about it. The less said the sooner mended. But you can imagine my great anxiety.'

Her concern about Ruttie did not lighten her worries about her own two daughters coping alone at home by themselves, ending her letter with: 'My darlings, my heart is also with you. If I cannot write you will understand. Please take care of yourselves. If I know that you are doing that I shall at least be relieved of one heavy care. I will write again in a day or so. I have a Murshidabad sari for each of you. Mother.'

But it was another four days before Sarojini could bring herself to write home again. Perhaps because her younger daughter was away from home, having left on an all-India tour in search of employment, Sarojini was able to write more openly about the Jinnahs' breakup, having more confidence in Padmaja's discretion. 'I feel so unhappy about leaving Ruttie here alone and going away,' she wrote on 20 January 1928, just before leaving for Calcutta on her speaking engagement, in a letter brimming over with sorrow and concern for her 'poor child' Ruttie, whose depths of anguish and despair she was just beginning to discover: 'Nothing is settled about her except that she will not have any reconciliation but will go away with her mother to Europe in April. There is nothing that any friend can do at the moment since it's not just a sharp bitter quarrel as I had at first imagined, to be healed by time, patience, a little mutual toleration and a little mutual pardon for faults of temperament. But even we who have been so close to Ruttie and loved her so well never knew or guessed the deep underlying current of mutual unhappiness that began from the first day almost and has been gradually gathering strength, intensity and bitterness . . . She says that several times it came to almost breaking point (when I was in Africa) and she never meant to return and now she says “Don't force me back into slavery. Let me be free. Let me be free.” Poor child, she does not realize the price of such freedom! She is not unhappy now, only restless and longing to be free of all her shackles. She says her youth is going and she must live, that Jinnah cannot satisfy her mind and soul. He stifles her by his lack of understanding and his lack of the spirit of the joy of life. He has also an accumulation of grievances against her . . . She makes charges against him . . . and it is a story to which every one of the ten years has added a fresh chapter apparently. Latterly it seemed to me that both were settling down to a better understanding of each other and Ruttie herself felt that he was much more tender and tolerant and there were none of the bitter quarrels that had so disturbed and devastated the earlier years of their marriage. But I suppose with two such individual natures—fervent youth and rather dull middle age personified—the clash was inevitable. Jinnah is too old, she is too young and neither in spite of the real affection that has surely been between them, can make the necessary surrender with honour to ensure peace. Poor little Ruttie! I never knew then her brave spirit suffered fear. She never spoke and we never knew. I think it best that she should go away to Europe with her mother in April as already arranged. Jinnah too will be gone about the same time. And who knows—Time might after all be the great atonement for the years that these two have caused each other pain and misery through blindness of heart and vision.

But even in her anxiety to get them back together as quickly (and discreetly) as possible, Sarojini was forced to admit that Ruttie's decision to leave was not entirely unwarranted, as she had first thought: 'Meanwhile, curiously enough, Ruttie is much more normal than I have ever known her since her childhood. She eats and sleeps well and almost at regular hours. She is natural and herself as she never was in her own home. She keeps on saying "I am free. I am free." She wants you to know all her reasons someday for leaving Jinnah, for feeling she cannot go back again, as she puts it, “under this marriage ice”. But I told her that you should be spared the suffering it will cause you to learn—as I have only now learned—how difficult have been those ten years,” and here Sarojini alights on the real cause of what must have surely shaken her to the core, especially when she had so far assumed that Ruttie's unhappiness was of her own making, almost as if it was mere capriciousness on Ruttie's part and not to be taken seriously. The half a sentence is so casually inserted and then dismissed, as if not wanting to call attention to it, but there is no hiding the grave import of what she is saying: 'and how she even tried to put an end to herself deliberately . . .' And having said the dreadful words, Sarojini seems anxious to quickly change the subject without further elaboration, either because it was too painful a subject for her to dwell on or more likely, to spare Padmaja the details, knowing how it would affect her morbid and sensitive daughter: 'Well, Ruttie has only us really. Her own people are strangers to her. Her poor mother loves her but drives her distracted . . . She loves us and trusts us and so she comes to me for sanctuary, poor child. She feels safe here. Safe in her soul.'

In her general distress, Sarojini did something she had never dared before—tried to talk to Jinnah about it. It was a liberty she had never taken before throughout their long years of friendship, knowing how fiercely Jinnah resented any interference in his personal affairs. But her anxiety was too great to stop herself: 'Jinnah has grown so dumb. No one can even approach him. I think he is hurt to the core because she left him like that, almost without warning. In any case no one can interfere with him. He is too hard and proud and reserved for even an intimate friend to intrude beyond a certain point. All he says is, “I have been unhappy for ten years. I cannot endure it any longer. If she wants to be free I will not stand in her way. Let her be happy. But I will not discuss the matter with anyone. Please do not interfere.” And he is I suppose like a stone image in his loneliness and Ruttie is, although reveling in what she believes to be the beginning of liberty for her—Liberty costs too dear sometimes and is not worth the price . . . I am writing a line to Papi today. Poor child. She must like Ruttie be clamouring for “freedom”. This Freedom!!

What troubled Sarojini even more than their stubborn refusal to compromise was that neither Ruttie nor Jinnah seemed properly upset by what had happened. 'The really tragic part of it,' as she pointed out to her friend Syud Hossain a few weeks later, 'is that both seem so relieved.'

But neither was really as unemotional as they pretended to be. There was certainly more behind Jinnah's assumed indifference and show of relief than he let on. And Sarojini's initial suspicion that he was hurt to the core by Ruttie's sudden desertion was not entirely unfounded. Outwardly, he stuck to his old routine, driving himself even harder with no leisure even to feel his rage and humiliation at her unexplained desertion. There was more than enough to keep him busy for the moment. First, he had the split within the Muslim League to try and patch up. This seemed more urgent than working on his marriage because it was threatening to undermine his only remaining asset as a national leader—being the undisputed leader of Muslims in the country. With the split, the dissident Leaguers had gone over to the government's side, leaving him with no Muslim support for either the boycott of the Simon Commission or to reach a Hindu–Muslim settlement with the Congress. Grabbing the chance to hit him now that the chink in his armour was exposed, both the government and his opponents in the Congress began deriding him as a leader without a base. Facing increasing isolation, he fought back grimly, his proud spirit refusing to bend in order to placate his opponents.

It was the same on his personal front—his pride would not allow him to find a mediator nor could he personally humble himself by talking to Ruttie. Hurt mortally by what he considered her betrayal, he retreated within his shell, rejecting all offers from friends to mediate on his behalf. Within a week of their parting, he had left for a meeting of Muslim leaders in Lucknow without expressing a word of regret or remorse to her. He refused to talk about it, to her or to anyone else. The campaign he was leading to boycott the Simon Commission became his sole mission now, ignoring the fact that it was only making him more unpopular among Muslims.

As for Ruttie, he did not see or speak to her for the two remaining weeks in Bombay before he left for the new legislative session in Delhi in early February. The choice was clearly left up to her: to either stay on at the Taj if she wished or to return home during his absence in Delhi and go on as if nothing had happened. He certainly was not going to say or do anything to influence the outcome; it was as if it had nothing to do with him, as if he did not care. And he threw himself with more than his usual vigour into his political life.

But even that unfailing source of his well-being seemed bent on betraying him now. The first blow was in the Legislative Assembly where his efforts had invariably yielded rewards. But as the first sign of the frustrations that lay ahead, the government, without giving any reason, shelved the report he had so assiduously prepared on the Sandhurst Committee's recommendations, consigning all his hard work to the trash bin. Even Padmaja, cut off from politics in her sickbed, could sympathize with what he must have gone through at that moment. 'Poor Jinnah,' she wrote in a letter to Chagla from her sanatorium, 'the pronouncement on the Skeen [another name for the Sandhurst Committee] recommendations must be a bitter disappointment for him. He was so tremendously keen on it.' With the insight born of distance, or perhaps out of her more passive temperament, Padmaja could see the futility of his methods of fighting the government. 'I suppose it is just one more of the many humiliations we still have to suffer—a million protest meetings won't make any real difference. I am really beginning to wonder if it would not be more dignified for us not to utter any protests when these situations arise. We weep and cry and rant and threaten and protest and the government listens quietly and then simply does what it intended to do. But politics is a dismal subject . . .'

Dismal or not, Jinnah nevertheless felt compelled to keep battering either at the doors of the government or trying to reach a political settlement with the Congress, pouring all his energy into resolving the political situation rather than addressing his personal problems. Within a week of the government shelving the Sandhurst Committee's report, Jinnah's Delhi Proposals which everyone, including himself, thought would finally resolve the never-ending Hindu–Muslim differences, came up against heavy resistance at the all-parties conference. The proposals, when he had made them a few months ago, were warmly welcomed by the Congress and no one doubted that they would be cleared by the conference without any difficulties, considering that the subcommittee which had been set up to steer the proposal through the conference included two influential Congress leaders who were also his friends—Motilal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu. But even they were helpless, with the Hindu Mahasabha putting up a stiff resistance to every clause of Jinnah's deal. As Sarojini put it in a letter home on 13 February 1928: 'The political all-parties conference is driving me silly. Even at this critical juncture men will not relent . . . and haggle for small gains! I am sick with them and of them.' It was Jinnah who showed more patience than her, trying to get the members to see reason. But in the end, he too had to give up and walk out of the conference. Sarojini, watching helplessly from the sidelines as his Hindu opponents tore into his proposals, felt her heart going out to him, valiant till the last. 'The Delhi session was really Jinnah's session,' she wrote to Chagla after the conference had ended without conclusion. 'His personality dominated both the issues in the Assembly and in the All Parties Conference. Never have I admired him more than now. What dignity and courage in the midst of suffering—what patience, persuasion and real statesmanship he showed during the most trying period of the prolonged conference.'

Sarojini had arrived in Delhi a fortnight in advance of the all-parties conference in order to lay the ground for a consensus, and stayed another ten days while the talks were going on—almost a month without once going back to Bombay at a time when she badly wanted to be there for Ruttie's sake. But as with Jinnah, politics came first and last, with personal work relegated to the crevices of time in between political work and meetings.

The Petits had also come to Delhi, as was their custom every year at this time. In fact, the Delhi 'season' usually began with a grand party they hosted every year. But while they tried to go on as usual, it was clear they were shaken by this second blow from their daughter. They had obviously heard about it before anyone else, possibly from Sarojini who would have undoubtedly been anxious to rope in Ruttie's parents to deal with the crisis before the news got out, even if Ruttie wished to keep them out of it. And Lady Petit at least appears to have lost no time in reaching out to her daughter, even getting Ruttie to agree to join her on a trip to Europe for the summer. But her distress over her daughter's situation, especially her acute alarm over the child who was now living alone with the servants while Jinnah was away in Delhi and Ruttie staying with her cats at the Taj, had put a visible strain on Lady Petit. So palpable was the effect of the shock on her that the next time Sarojini met her, which was at the Petit's gala in Delhi, the usually elegant and very poised Lady Petit looked simply 'terrible', as Sarojini wrote to tell Padmaja the day after the party.

While leaving Bombay, Sarojini had promised Ruttie that she would be back to spend at least the few remaining weeks with Ruttie before she sailed for Europe with her mother. But there was a change of plans at the last moment. News arrived from home that Padmaja, whose health had steadily deteriorated over the past few months despite Sarojini's brisk remonstrations to shake off her weakness, was finally diagnosed with the dreaded tuberculosis. Dr Naidu decided to move her at once to a T.B sanatorium in south India until they could somehow arrange the money for an extended treatment in Europe. For Sarojini, who had long abandoned all family duties in service of the national cause, this was a maternal call she could hardly ignore. 'Courage Darling', she wired home directly from the Delhi Council chamber, almost the minute she got the news. And without waiting for the high command to release her from her various duties, Sarojini cancelled all her engagements for the next few weeks and prepared to set off for home at once: 'Returning home soon to look after you and make you well with love and care,' her cable said.

But even in her state of worry for her own daughter, thoughts of Ruttie continued to trouble Sarojini. Knowing how eagerly Ruttie would be awaiting her return from Delhi, Sarojini did not have the heart to go directly to Hyderabad without seeing her. She decided to reroute her train journey to Hyderabad via Bombay 'literally for a day, in case I can't get back to say goodbye before she [Ruttie] sails', as she explained in a letter to Chagla.

There was nothing in Ruttie's appearance at least to make Sarojini anxious. In fact, she seemed vastly improved in looks after the separation. As Sarojini wrote in a brief note to Padmaja from the Taj on the day she arrived, 'Ruttie is looking very lovely again.' There was also a letter waiting from Leilamani, who had recently moved to Lahore to take up a teaching job in a women's college. Referring to Leilamani's complaint about Ruttie continuing to cold-shoulder her because of their old quarrel, Sarojini added: 'Poor Papi is very hurt that inspite of a letter she apparently wrote, Ruttie remains cold and indifferent.' Characteristically, Sarojini left it at that, changing the topic to: 'Ruttie will feel very sad at my not being able to say goodbye to her when she sets out on her journey and her new life of what she calls Freedom.'

Radiantly beautiful as Ruttie had again become, Sarojini nevertheless continued to be concerned about her. All through the activity and bustle of shifting Padmaja to the sanatorium by train and the round of farewells that preceded their departure from Hyderabad, she could not rid herself of a nagging worry about Ruttie. And as soon as she had settled down in the sanatorium with Padmaja, she wrote to Chagla to ask: 'Do you see Mrs Jinnah at all? I am very troubled about her.' And then, as if to reassure herself more than him, she went on to say in the letter dated 2 April 1928: 'I believe in the French poet's saying, A chacun son infini [Each to his own infinity] and she will solve her problem in her own headlong way—it is headlong and headstrong—but youth will be served.'

This philosophical tone was certainly an improvement after her earlier frantic attempts to stop the news of the breakup from spreading among their friends. She had even written to Chagla then, cautioning him to keep his mouth shut. 'Be very discreet in all your dealings and conversations in regard to the affair that is causing all of us so much concern,' she had written to him on 5 February, four weeks after Ruttie left Jinnah and came to live at the Taj. And to take the sting out of her warning not to gossip, she added kindly: 'I know you are very discreet.'

But her main purpose in writing to Chagla from the sanatorium was altogether different. She needed to get in touch with Jinnah urgently before he too sailed for Europe as he had been planning to for some time, though without actually deciding one way or the other. The all-parties conference had ended with no consensus in sight and she knew that no political settlement was possible during his absence. She had left Delhi so hurriedly that she had had no time to even discuss with him which tactic they should now adopt in order to push his proposals through the Congress. 'Please let me know when he [Jinnah] returns to Bombay,' urged Sarojini in her letter, 'and also, should he finally decide to go to Europe, on what date he sails. You know his aversion to writing so you will please do this urgent commission for me.' And to underline the urgency, she added: 'Please wire me if Jinnah has returned.'

As it happened, Jinnah had already returned to Bombay even before Sarojini had written to Chagla. Ruttie had not moved back to South Court during his absence as he had been hoping, thinking perhaps her friends would instil some sense into her. Instead, she had prevailed upon Kanji to help her shift some of her things from South Court to a suite in the Taj, which she rented on a monthly basis, following the example of Sarojini and many others who lived in the hotel. Sticking to the plan she had made with her mother, Ruttie sailed for Europe with Lady Petit on 10 April 1928. Jinnah did not stop her. He could not—or would not—bend to seek a compromise with her. As he later admitted to an old Parsi friend who had been trying to bring them together: 'It is my fault. We both need some sort of understanding we cannot give.'

But the emotional toll of the past three months had left its mark on him. When Sarojini next met him, only twenty days after Ruttie sailed, she could see the change at once. 'Jinnah is looking very thin and aged,' she wrote to Padmaja on 1 May 1928, having just arrived in Bombay after settling her daughter down in the sanatorium.

Four days later, on 5 May, after resisting the idea of a holiday alone, Jinnah, too, had taken off for Europe. The courts had already closed for summer three weeks ago, and his hopes of reaching a historic political settlement with the Congress on the Hindu–Muslim issues had been effectively dashed by the opposition within the Congress; even his talks with the viceroy were useless. Tired of the constant struggle to hold his own while others combined forces to isolate and push him off the political stage, he decided a trip to England might not be such a bad idea, after all. At least, he still had friends in the British government who would perhaps be more amenable to reason.

It was the kind of voyage that he used to enjoy as a bachelor. On board with him were at least three friends—fellow legislator and a former Congress president, Sir Srinivasa Iyengar, another lawyer and politician, Tulsi Goswami, and a young friend he was very fond of, Dewan Chaman Lal, who he had once hired as an editor for the Bombay Chronicle and was now in the legislature with him. The three, especially the young and admiring Chaman Lal, were an ample audience for expounding his views on current politics. And while he did talk of nothing but politics on board, engaging even strangers on deck in political conversation, he was clearly not in the best of spirits. In fact, according to Chaman Lal, he cut a very lonely and despondent figure on board.

Midway through their journey, he had a sudden impulse. As Chaman Lal recalled, as the ship approached Port Said, Jinnah remarked that although he had passed through the Suez Canal countless times, either on his way to Europe or back, he had never stopped to see Cairo. Then he came up with a suggestion that was most unlike him. Why not they hire a boat and go to Cairo for the day, returning to the ship the same night before it took off the next morning? There was so much enthusiasm for Jinnah's suggestion, not only among his three friends but other passengers as well, that eventually a very large party set off at the crack of dawn in a fleet of taxis to explore Cairo. It was a trip that Ruttie had always yearned to make with him, travelling to unexpected places and living in a spontaneous way, open to new experiences. But it was Chaman Lal who made that trip with Jinnah, not her.

There were other instances during the same trip in which Chaman Lal began to see the more human side of his great friend. One memorable moment was when they stopped in the middle of the desert to relieve themselves. As Chaman Lal recounted: 'Suddenly the huge procession of cars stopped. The women went on one side and the men on the other; and we were standing easing ourselves side by side, Jinnah and myself, when a tiny little dog belonging to one of the ladies in this place came along from under the car, gave one look at this tall figure, Jinnah, he thought was a lamppost and started to utilize it for this purpose. Jinnah was as much flabbergasted as anybody!'

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 5, 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 becomes 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.'"

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 Hindus 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 February 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 few-tul 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.

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 few-tul 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 young 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, U.S.A. '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 so 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 . . ."

But she need not have worried about the gossip getting around. By the time Sarojini reached Bombay, five months had elapsed since Ruttie's dramatic end and no one seemed to care to even talk about it. Sarojini herself was instantly plunged into political activity, dragged against her inclination to Allahabad on Congress committee work. 'This is the first moment since I arrived the day before yesterday that I am actually alone and able to write a line to you,' she wrote to Padmaja on 24 July 1929 from the Taj in Bombay. 'You can understand that I have been literally drowned since I returned in floods upon floods of welcome letters, telegrams and the aftermath of all the communal quarrels that have broken out during my absence. I wanted to revolt against Congress and not go to Allahabad but the combined appeals from Panditji [Motilal Nehru] and [M.A.] Ansari are more than I can resist. Not because of the stupid A.I.C.C but because of the Hindu–Muslim situation. I don't want to go but I must and so I am going tonight.' Adding: 'Of course the day I arrived I went and saw Ruttie's grave and put all my garlands upon it. She is not under that mound of earth. You can begin laying down a red rose plant to be placed among the other flowering plants round her grave. She loved red roses.'

It was a whole month later before she met Sir Dinshaw and Lady Petit. They had aged visibly since she last saw them a year ago. As Sarojini wrote to Padmaja in her letter of 22 August 1929: 'I am sending you a photograph of Ruttie which Lady Petit has given me for you with a special inscription. I saw her for the first time today as she has been away. She is old and perfectly white-haired. The old man is an even more pitiful sight and he broke down when he saw me quite frankly. Lady Petit was very pleased when I said you were going to send a red rose tree from our garden for Ruttie's grave.'

Two days later, she left for Simla on her political work, where she met Jinnah and Fatima, who had moved in with her brother. 'Jinnah and Fatima dined here last night,' she writes in her letter dated 24 August 1929 (from Mount Stewart, Simla). 'Jinnah looked very worn and gray but Fatima full of society and new clothes and self-assurance living with her brother.'

Despite looking so worn, Jinnah was resolved to carry on as before, firmly shutting out all memories of Ruttie. But there was a part of him that had changed forever, and the next time Sarojini met him in Bombay, he surprised her by exposing a new side of him. 'Jinnah has acquired three magnificent dogs of the special breed that Paleale [illegible] produces,' she wrote to Padmaja on 1 September 1929, from the Taj, Bombay. 'He has come up with idiotic names like Edith, Assie and Montford. How Ruttie would have adored them! But Jinnah seems to have taken heartily to them himself and I think it will humanize him!'

But he did not go with her to visit Ruttie's grave. Returning from the Congress session in Lucknow, Sarojini made another trip to the Khoja cemetery in Mazagon, this time carrying the special rose bush Padmaja had sent from Hyderabad to be planted there. 'Yesterday I visited Ruttie's grave to take your rose-tree and put it near her head,' she wrote to Padmaja on 21 October 1929. 'Dr Masson went with me. It's been eight months exactly since she passed away. I miss her terribly, now and more I think as time goes by.'

Curiously enough, the child is not mentioned anywhere in either Sarojini's correspondence or that of her daughters for almost another year. This may have had something to do with Lady Petit stepping in and taking charge of the child, now nine, and suggesting to Jinnah that since he was mostly away in Delhi or Simla, she would be better off in a boarding school than at home alone. She even recommended the right convent school for her in the nearby hill station of Panchgani, where all Bombay's fashionable families sent their children. Jinnah not only submitted docilely to her suggestions, but was relieved to have the decision taken out of his hands, trusting Lady Petit henceforth with all major decisions regarding the raising of his only daughter. Although Lady Petit had not met her granddaughter till Ruttie's separation from Jinnah, the bond between grandmother and granddaughter was close and lasting. Still nameless, the child decided on her own to take her grandmother's name, Dina. And to this day, Dina tells her friends of how much she loved her grandmother and her deep gratitude for the way 'she took over completely and brought me up' after her mother's death.

By the following year, when Leilamani visited Panchgani and went to see her at her boarding school, Dina appears to have happily settled into her new life. On her first visit to the school, Leilamani could not meet Dina. 'Dina Jinnah is away for a couple of days but I will surely see her before I go or else have her here to spend the day,' Leilamani wrote to Padmaja on 9 September 1930 from Rasheed Manzil, Panchgani, the summer home of a family friend, Lady Abbas Ali Baig. The following week, on 15 September, in a postscript to another letter to Padmaja, she adds: 'Dina Jinnah spent the day here yesterday. She makes me nervous to look at her cos she's so much like Ruttie.'

But in temperament, Dina was nothing like her mother. Instead of killing herself trying to break through the icy walls of her father's reserve, Dina very soon learnt how to handle her 'Pop' without looking for anything more than he could give her. He was an indulgent father, denying her nothing except his time and of himself, but she did not seem to mind, describing him later in her life as 'affectionate but undemonstrative'. Two years later, when he moved to England with Fatima and set up home in Hampstead, Dina, too, moved with him but not to live at home with them. He had found a small private school for her in Sussex, run by a Mrs Frances Browne, where she quickly settled down, spending five happy but academically unsuccessful years—she failed the school certificate examination but learnt 'some self-reliance and poise'—until she had to leave suddenly, much to her distress, because the school abruptly closed down on account of Mrs Browne's health and financial problems.

But while Dina was at Mrs Browne's, she did spend her holidays with her father, who if he did not give her time, did give her the freedom to tease him. Dina took to calling him 'Grey Wolf' because of a book he was much taken with around this time—Grey Wolf: An Intimate Study of a Dictator on the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The story of Ataturk, born around the same time as Jinnah and rising from similar circumstances to create an independent Turkey, resonated so deeply with Jinnah that he could talk of nothing else but Ataturk for days and he even thrust the book on Dina, who at thirteen knew her own mind. She began chafing him about his passion for Kemal and nicknamed him 'Grey Wolf', and then 'cajole[d] him into putting a brief aside, with the plea, “Come on, Grey Wolf, take me to a pantomime; after all, I am on my holidays.”'

But that was about the only time in their life that he had the leisure to bond with her in whatever limited way. When they returned to India, Jinnah having sold his house in Hampstead and wound up his practice in London, he was again full of his great mission, and she was relegated once more to the margins of his life, allowed to do as she pleased, so long as she did not distract him at his work. At fifteen, alone at home with an aunt she did not get along with and no one to talk to except the servants, she spent her time visiting her grandmother, often staying overnight. Sir Dinshaw had died while they were in England, removing the last of any restrictions that Lady Petit might have had in receiving her granddaughter in her home. And when Dina was not at her grandmother's, she was out shopping —'roamed from one shop to the other for hours'. When she returned, Fatima used to take the driver aside to find out where she'd been and what she had bought. But Jinnah let her do as she pleased and spend as much money as she liked, his only restriction being to try and stop her from driving the car, which she did on the sly.

The only time father and daughter had a falling out was when she announced her decision to marry Neville Wadia, born into a Parsi family and heir to a fortune in textile mills, who had converted to Christianity. To have his only child marry a Parsi Christian would be a serious political embarrassment for Jinnah, and he tried to dissuade her. But finding her adamant, he then threatened to disown her.

Instead of relenting, it only made her more stubborn and she moved into her grandmother's home, determined to go ahead with the marriage even at that cost. He collapsed under the emotional strain, succumbing to one of his rare bouts of sickness. 'For two weeks,' one of his drivers later recounted to Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, 'he would not receive visitors. He would just keep smoking his cigars and pacing up and down in his room. He must have walked hundreds of miles in those two weeks.'

But soon he was back in control. 'After two weeks he resurfaced,' the driver said. 'There was no sign of grief on his face, nor any tension.'

But something about this quarrel with his daughter seems to have reopened his old wound which he still refused to examine. At such times, the only thing that gave him some relief, according to the driver, was to 'ask for a certain metallic chest to be brought to his room and unlocked'. It was full of Ruttie's clothes. 'The clothes would be taken out and sahib would gaze at them without saying a word. His gaunt, transparent face would become clouded. 'It's all right, it's all right,” he would say, then remove his monocle, wipe it and walk away.'

But there was no walking away for him, ever. In fact, according to Kanji, her death left such a deep wound that he changed completely, turning from a 'cheerful, pleasant and social friend with a dry sense of humour' to someone 'egocentric and sensitive to criticism'. He reacted to his wife's death so severely that he not only never mentioned her name ever again, but became so bitter that 'he could not stand abuse, ridicule, misunderstanding and misrepresentation of his actions and never forgave those who, unwisely and unjustly indulged in them'. It was Jinnah's bitterness, born out of his personal loss and disappointment, which travelled into his political life. 'This, I feel,' writes Kanji, 'is the correct analysis of Jinnah's political bitterness which lasted throughout the nineteen years he lived after his wife's death, and influenced his political life and opinions.' If Ruttie had been alive, Kanji was convinced, Jinnah would never have turned communal. Chagla, while agreeing to a certain extent—that Ruttie 'kept Jinnah on the right track so long as she was alive'—goes one step further in his memoir by holding Fatima at least partly responsible for Jinnah's transformation. 'She [Fatima] enjoyed Jinnah's diatribes against the Hindus, and if anything, injected an extra dose of venom into them.'

It was true, of course, that Jinnah leaned on Fatima for everything —even while playing billiards, according to the driver who spoke to Manto. Whenever Jinnah felt the urge to play this only indoor sport he enjoyed, Fatima had to come into the room with him to watch him play. 'If the shot went through as planned, he would smile triumphantly at his sister.'

But even Fatima was powerless when it came to influencing Jinnah's opinions. Once his mind was made up, as Chagla himself points out elsewhere, nothing in the world could divert him from his chosen objective: 'No temptation, no bribe, no pressure had the slightest effect.' He had taken up the cause of the Muslims as his mission and stopped only after he won. The effects of what he had done only sunk in later. Jinnah wept when he saw the refugees in the country he had just created almost single-handedly. But the tears were less for the refugees than for what he had just done—destroyed yet again that which he loved the most.