mong the qualities that make Ruttie a good Urdu novel, its language stands out above all. The author, Zaif Syed, has a remarkable command of Urdu: his language is precise, authentic and creative. Creativity is often sacrificed for authenticity, but Syed strikes a fine balance between the two.

Flow is another aspect of creativity. It emerges from the harmonious, melodic arrangement of words in novel ways, creating pauses amid the noise and allowing suggestion to do more than explanation.

Syed seems to believe that the story is the defining feature of a novel. His focus, therefore, remains on the unfolding events and the most effective way to narrate them. He avoids venturing into the uncharted territory of his characters’ psyches. For him, the events of the story largely remain observable occurrences in the external world.

Syed unfolds not only the love story of Rattanbai Petit (Ruttie) and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, from its beginnings to its tragic end, but also evokes the places where their love flourished and gradually turned to tragedy. The people and places of the time become witnesses to their story.

The novel opens with a melancholy melody by Frédéric Chopin at the ceremony marking the establishment of Pakistan in Karachi on August 15, 1947. The same melody had been played on the day of Ruttie and Jinnah’s wedding. Political and personal boundaries blur and a surreal blend of personal melancholy and national jubilation creates a striking contrast. This reveals a side of Jinnah that defies his towering national stature and remains largely absent from his popular historical image.

The narrative also brings to life places such as Sir Dinshaw Petit’s magnificent house in Darjeeling, Bombay, the Taj Mahal Hotel, South Court and Paris. It introduces the people connected in different ways with Jinnah and Ruttie: Ruttie’s cat, Kajal; Dwarka Das; Chaman Lal; Rosie; their daughter, Dina; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; Sir Dinshaw Petit; Jamshed Tata; and others.

The novel employs a post-modern narrative technique, telling its story through the voices of several narrators. In this respect, Zaif Syed appears to have been inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, which tells the story of Sixteenth-Century miniature painters in Istanbul through the voices of the characters and other entities involved in the narrative.

The technique may seem simple, but it is difficult to execute. The novelist need not tell the entire story, but can focus on a few episodes, leaving readers to imagine the rest. Most fragments are three to ten pages long. The challenge lies in distributing the story across these sections and providing answers to questions raised in others.

The strength of such a post-modern approach lies in presenting the story through several perspectives rather than a single viewpoint or interpretive framework. Syed has selected his narrative fragments with care and considerable effort. With the exception of the first chapter, the plot is largely linear, with events unfolding in chronological order.

The sequence begins with Jinnah’s meeting with Ruttie, then sixteen, and her father, Sir Dinshaw Petit, in Darjeeling, where Jinnah asks for her hand in marriage. Dinshaw obtains a court order declaring Ruttie a minor and prohibiting Jinnah from meeting her. Jinnah awaits the court’s decision. Ruttie celebrates her eighteenth birthday in grand style at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Bombay, where she marries Jinnah, whom she calls J. She moves into his home, South Court, and her father disinherits her. Ruttie decorates South Court, takes an interest in cooking and entertaining, and becomes involved in politics. Three years later, the couple begins sleeping in separate beds. Their daughter, Dina, receives little attention from either parent.

Ruttie has always loved animals and now comes to see her cats and dogs as family. Her family consists simply of her and these beloved companions. In the eighth year of her marriage, she moves into Suite 611 of the Taj Mahal Hotel. Jinnah arrives two months later and quietly settles all her hotel bills. Ruttie falls ill and travels to France. A few days later, Jinnah joins her, takes a room and looks after her for several weeks. They return home, but Jinnah remains emotionally distant, increasingly absorbed in his political activities. Ruttie, meanwhile, takes Veronal, reads the poetry of Oscar Wilde and other poets and writes poems of her own. She joins Annie Besant’s Theosophical Society but soon becomes disillusioned with it. She dies at the age of twenty-nine.

She leaves behind a host of questions about the circumstances that led to the death of love and, ultimately, her own death. These questions are gradually buried beneath the sanctified image of Jinnah that emerges from his leading role in the freedom movement. Is there no room in national histories for personal and existential struggles? This is the question the novel compels its readers to ask.

The circumstances of Ruttie’s decline are narrated through the voices of Dwarka Das, Chaman Lal, Kajal the cat, Rosie and Gandhi, but not Ruttie herself. Some episodes are also related by Jinnah’s driver, Sabir, who conveys the news of Ruttie’s death. Her death is portrayed with considerable restraint.

Various strands of Ruttie’s story, many documented in historical works and personal memoirs, are skilfully brought together. Zaif Syed has undertaken extensive research for the novel, consulting not only books about Jinnah and Ruttie but also studies of the political and social history of the period between 1918 and 1929. He has researched the places in which the story unfolds and paid close attention to clothing, food, social activities, dance, music and books. He has sought to make the novel correspond as closely as possible to the historical record. At the end, he provides a bibliography of the books consulted in writing it. It would be unfair not to acknowledge the extent and care of his research.

Despite its post-modern narrative technique, the novel is, in essence, a work of faction — a blend of fact and fiction. The documented facts about Ruttie and Jinnah are presented in fictional form. By facts, of course, I mean information preserved in historical books and personal memoirs. These are largely external facts, consisting primarily of events: what happened, when and where. To lend further authenticity to the account, Syed has incorporated newspaper clippings.

The final chapter recounts the terrifying attack on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel involving Ajmal Kasab and connects it to Jinnah and Ruttie’s story simply because they share a location. This could have been omitted, but is not entirely out of place.

The question, however, is whether the painstaking collection of historical facts, presented through an accomplished narrative, has enabled the author to write an excellent novel. In my opinion, Ruttie is a good novel, indeed a very good one, but it does not quite achieve excellence.

The novel could have been far more compelling had the author overcome his hesitation to challenge the protagonist’s almost sacrosanct image and resolved the tension between fidelity to historical fact and the imaginative freedom of fiction. This would have allowed him to probe the characters’ psychological depths and reveal some difficult human truths. Although the story is told from different perspectives, Syed seems reluctant to make full use of this freedom. The narrators could have helped him explore the uncomfortable truths underlying Ruttie and Jinnah’s tragic love story.

The novel does offer some clues as to why a romantic love affair turned into a tragedy. One reason was the considerable age difference between them. Jinnah, twenty-four years older than Ruttie, appears to have experienced physical and sexual disenchantment within three years of their marriage, after which he moved to a separate bed. Ruttie needed the sustained, passionate love of a man who was emotionally and physically responsive. Given his age, political commitments and constant demands on his time, Jinnah was unable to offer her the intimacy she craved and deserved.

These indications do not reveal a more troubling truth: why did the forty-year-old Jinnah defy the wishes of a distinguished Parsi family to marry a sixteen-year-old girl? Was he genuinely seeking a teenage girl’s love, or was he determined to win her over as if she were a case to be argued and won? The question is alluded to indirectly, but with such caution and restraint that the very soul of fiction is stifled. Had his lawyerly nature overshadowed his masculine self? Perhaps men, more broadly, sometimes approach love like hunters, pursuing their prey, subduing it and then losing interest.

If Jinnah was genuinely in love, why did he allow one of the most beautiful and intelligent women of his time to die before his eyes? Why did he not explore the depths of her suffering? Did he imagine that she would become his political companion? Did he truly understand the mysteries of a woman’s heart?

Jinnah appears to have been exceptionally conscientious in his conduct towards Ruttie. He regularly and discreetly paid her hotel bills at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. He spent several weeks in France nursing her. He tried to save her from death, but why did he fail to grasp, with the urgency the situation demanded, that she was steadily moving towards it?

The novel should also have explored why love so often comes to an end so soon. A sense of moral responsibility alone cannot save a person from emotional failure. Another question worth pursuing is why a woman as intelligent as Ruttie, who read literature and possessed a keen mind, succumbed to despair rather than finding a way to understand and navigate the complexities of a relationship between a man and a woman. Why could her intelligence not save her? Could she not have left the relationship and saved herself? Was she trapped between her commitment to the original promise of love and her conviction that rebelling against her father had been morally justified? Had she been crushed under the weight of remaining faithful to that commitment and believing that her decision had been ethically right?

Dina raises another important question. The daughter who embodied the love between Ruttie and Jinnah was deprived not only of their love but also of their attention, as though she scarcely existed. Why did Ruttie, who regarded pets as members of her family; fail to include her daughter in it? Had she lost the capacity to communicate with human beings? Could it be because Animals listened to her without arguing back?

Some might argue that these are questions for psychology and philosophy rather than the novel. They may indeed belong to both disciplines, but they also belong to the novel.

If a novel refuses to explore the inner truths of its characters and their complexities, confining itself to recounting the events that befall them, it should be regarded not as a novel in the fullest sense but merely as an interesting narrative. A story is the raw material of a novel; it must be transformed into a finished work that explores the existential crises of its characters.

The novel is a literary form uniquely equipped to confront the most difficult questions and most terrifying truths of human existence. Without this engagement, the very justification for the form is called into question.

Ruttie

Author: Zaif Syed

Publisher: Tilismaat Publications

Pages: 286

The writer is a Lahore-based Urdu critic and short-story writer. His latest book is The Journey of Ideas.