The Lonely Jinnah

Inside the crowd-puller Quaid-e-Azam resided a very lonely person. Jinnah used to take long retreats, away from the noise of daily life, inside his quiet chambers, behind the walls of his home atop Malabar hill, in the detached environs of Simla and Kashmir or in the self-exile in London. This need for a measure of withdrawal was necessitated as much by his ever-weakening health as by the urge to reminisce Ruttie. The sudden departure of his lovely wife Ruttie stands out as one of the painful periods of his life. Jinnah, lovingly called ‘J.’ by Ruttie, was very secretive about his private life. Thus, one can only fantasize how he must have been seeking out those retreats to remember Ruttie, talk to her spirit, read Shakespeare to her and shed a few tears which the ‘Great Leader’ was not allowed to do in public by some unwritten rules. However, Jinnah did once break down in public. Kanji, Ruttie's closest friend, recalls, “...as Ruttie’s body was being lowered into the grave, Jinnah, as the nearest relative was the first to throw the earth on the grave and he broke down suddenly and sobbed and wept like a child for minutes together.” M.C. Chagla, Jinnah’s legal apprentice, adds, “That was the only time when I found Jinnah betraying some shadow of human weakness.”  There must have been many more such moments of love and longing in those lonely days and weeks of the Quaid-e-Azam. However, he aptly hid them from his millions of Muslim followers who, like many Pakistanis today, would take only a uni-dimensional view of this fascinatingly multifaceted personality.