Mr and Mrs Jinnah by Sheela Reddy

Author:Sheela Reddy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143439660
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2017-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

They had ample reason to hate each other. Ever since she left school nine years ago, Fatima had been encouraged by her entire family, including Jinnah, to groom herself into being her brother’s sole companion. And now, after having earned their esteem—not to speak of envy—by the close bond she managed to build with him, and after being accepted by everyone around her as the only woman in her beloved ‘Jin’s’ life, to be ejected so summarily from his home, asked to come and see him once a week like a poor relation—it was a state of affairs unlikely to endear her to the usurper of her brother’s heart. But Fatima was not the sort who would make a fuss openly in front of her brother—or anyone else, for that matter. Instead, she turned those weekly visits into a torture for herself and Jinnah, her grave, silent presence a constant reproach to him for his betrayal.

It wasn’t easy for Ruttie either, to be stuck with her dour sister-in-law for the whole of Sunday. Nearly seven years older than her, Fatima had little charm or sympathy, nor was she by any means anxious to please despite her friendless state. She was never really ‘herself’, as Sarojini once put it, having ‘always been so repressed’. Had she been younger perhaps, and not so disapproving of Ruttie, she might have tried harder to get along with her. There was a time, even at twenty, when she had been eager to reach out and make friends, and Sarojini, ever generous and warm, especially with the young and lonely, had suggested to her thirteen-year-old daughter that she befriend the lonely Fatima. ‘I am asking Fatima Jinnah to write to you,’ Sarojini had written to Padmaja from London in 1914. ‘She is twenty but very fond of you from all I told her about you in Bombay and as she is constantly writing about you to me, she may as well write to you and I hope you will write to her nice letters.’ But that penfriendship, if it ever began, seems to have died a natural death, given the difference in their age and temperament.

Ruttie, too, must have felt the difference, but she had put up with her sister-in-law as long as she believed that J was on her side and felt—like her—that Fatima’s presence was an intrusion and imposition on both of them. But lately, she had begun to doubt it—far from sharing her opinion of his sister, he regarded her with an affection that surpassed his love for any of his other four siblings, all of whom he kept at arm’s length, unwilling to share either his time or himself with any of them unless it was to give a handout now and then, when one of them was in obvious distress. And this too was done dispassionately, especially with his brother who was never allowed to drop in at the house, only visit him in his chamber. But with Fatima, it

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