The study was almost dark when she came back to him.
Not as a ghost, not as an apparition—just as a memory that refused to stay politely in the past.
Outside, Sandalbar's night sounds went on: a distant bullock cart creaking, a Farabi's footsteps on gravel, the soft rush of the canal. Inside, Jinnah sat with an open file in front of him and realized he had been reading the same sentence for ten minutes.
You've left Montgomery, Bilal observed quietly in his head. Where are you now?
Jinnah's fingers tightened on the pen.
"Bombay," he said. "Before the War. Before everything became speeches and telegrams."
With her? Bilal asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Yes," Jinnah said. "With her."
He didn't speak Ruttie's name immediately. When he did, his voice softened almost imperceptibly.
"Rattanbai."
He let the name sit in the air, half-Parsi, half-Urdu, all his.
"She was a child when I first saw her," he said. "Sixteen. Sir Dinshaw's daughter. All lace and laughter. They called her the 'flower of Bombay' and for once I agreed with society's taste."
He almost smiled, faintly.
"She would come into the room like a small storm," he went on. "Talk too much, laugh too loudly, ask questions that made half the old men choke on their cigars. She had read more poetry at eighteen than many of them had read law in fifty years."
So of course you fell in love, Bilal said. You, who pretend to like order, fell for a monsoon.
"It was not… immediate," Jinnah said carefully. "I was forty. I was her father's friend. I knew the law; I knew the scandal it would cause. But she had a way of looking at you as if the rest of the room were unworthy of attention. It is… intoxicating, to be looked at like that by someone so young, so certain."
He paused.
"She admired my mind," he added. "I admired her courage. She was willing to walk into a room full of Parsi ladies and say, 'You are wrong,' without batting an eyelid. She was also willing to walk out of her father's house, out of her community, out of everything she had known, for me."
She converted, Bilal said. Changed her religion, walked into the storm with eyes open.
"Yes," Jinnah replied. "She waited until she was of age, to make it a legal blow instead of a parental one. Eighteen. She became Muslim, took the name Maryam for the record, and married me under law."
He exhaled slowly.
"The city exploded, of course. Petits and Tatas and half of Bombay Society howled. I was the villain who had taken their princess. She was the disobedient child who had dishonoured her house. For a time, we lived inside a siege."
You liked that a little, Bilal suggested. The idea of standing against the whole of Malabar Hill with just your briefcase and her on your arm.
"A little," Jinnah admitted. "We were very dramatic, in our own restrained way. Two stubborn people against the world. It makes for good newspaper gossip and excellent letters."
There had been letters, tender and careful, full of inside jokes and quotations. He could still see her handwriting: loops and flourishes that looked nothing like his own tight, legal script.
"So what went wrong?" Bilal asked gently. Because by the time we meet you, she is gone, and you are… colder.
Jinnah's jaw tightened.
"Nothing went wrong," he said. Then he corrected himself. "Everything went wrong, slowly."
He looked down at his hands, remembering.
"We were happy, at first," he said. "She tried to be a good Muslim wife in her way, and I tried to be a good modern husband in mine. We entertained. We went to the races. She dressed beautifully. I spent half my days in court, the other half in committee rooms. Then the War ended. Politics grew more bitter. Congress split and re-formed. I was in Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow, London."
He tapped the desk once.
"She was not married to a man," he said quietly. "She was married to an itinerary."
She was young, Bilal said. Twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four. You were in your forties, then fifties. That's not just years; that's different planets.
"Yes," Jinnah agreed. "She wanted conversation at midnight, poetry at breakfast, a husband who would look up from his brief and say, 'Let us drive to the sea.' I wanted silence after hearings, order in the house, and sleep when the work was done."
He gave a thin smile with no humour in it.
"She called me cold," he said. "I told myself I was disciplined. The truth is somewhere in between. I did not know how to… meet her at the level she needed. Affection, spontaneity, the thousand small reassurances that matter more than a single grand rebellion at eighteen."
He remembered the house in Bombay becoming a place of two climates. In one wing, his files, his tobacco, his measured footsteps. In another, her music, her Parsi and European friends, her shawls and French books, her laughter that grew more brittle over time.
"She began to stay out later," he said. "Parties, theatres, gatherings. Bombay society that had once condemned her now took her in as a fascinating scandal. They liked to have a tragic princess at their tables. She—"
He stopped, then continued more slowly.
"She was lonely," he said. "Lonely in a house where her husband was constantly absent even when present. Lonely in a faith that she had adopted but that did not yet feel like hers. Lonely in a city that judged her. So she reached for distraction. For friends, for dancing, for… anything that did not feel like empty rooms."
And you? Bilal asked. What did you do while she was drowning?
"I worked," Jinnah said simply. "It is the only thing I have ever known how to do when something hurts."
He rubbed his forehead.
"When she grew ill," he went on, "stomach pains, exhaustion, moods that swung like the monsoon, I told myself it was nerves. The doctors in Bombay said much the same. Rest, change of air, fewer late nights. We went to London; we went to hill stations. Nothing helped for long."
He did not go into the rumours; he ignored the whispers of morphine, of self-harm, of anything that could not be proven. In his mind, she remained a young woman whose body had simply worn itself out under too much strain.
"She wrote me a letter once," he said quietly. "Near the end."
He did not repeat it word for word; he did not need to. The sentences were carved in him.
"She told me," he paraphrased, "that the loneliness had become a physical thing. That my silences hurt more than any public criticism. That she had stood up against her father, her community, the whole of Bombay, for me—only to find that I was most absent where she needed me most. That was her charge. And she was not wrong."
Did you answer? Bilal asked.
"I tried," Jinnah said. "In my way. Formal visits, arrangements, inquiries with doctors, discussions about treatment. I sent flowers when I should have sent apologies. I argued about medication when she wanted a husband to sit by the bed and listen to her rage."
He drew a long breath.
"In the end," he said, "she died in a hotel room in Bombay. Fever, complications, a body that had been fighting too many battles at once. Twenty-nine. Our daughter barely ten."
Images rose unbidden—the funeral, the grave, the crowd held at a respectable distance while he, for once, could not maintain his usual barrister's composure. Tears he had not planned on showing anyone.
"I am not a man who weeps easily in public," he said. "But I wept then."
Because you lost her? Bilal asked.
"Because I lost the one person who had ever been willing to burn her whole world down to build a small house with me," Jinnah said. "And because, when she needed me to hold that house up from the inside, I was busy holding up the Empire's arguments instead."
He sat very still.
"I could tell myself it was duty," he went on. "That the country needed me, that the constitutional struggle required my full attention. That she knew she had married a public man. These are all convenient truths. They are also evasions."
So what is the truth, as you see it from here? Bilal asked softly.
"The truth," Jinnah said, "is that I loved her in the way a disciplined man loves: intensely, but without the language to express it in daily life. She loved me in the way a young woman loves: absolutely, and with the expectation that the beloved will be the centre of her hours. We both underestimated how much work it would take to bridge those two kinds of love."
He looked around the study—the neat stacks of paper, the precise order of pens, the absence of colour.
"She wanted a life with poems pinned to the walls," he said. "I gave her framed legal degrees instead."
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Outside, a dog barked once and fell silent.
Do you regret marrying her? Bilal finally asked. If you could move the timeline, would you spare her that pain?
Jinnah closed his eyes.
"No," he said, and there was steel in it. "I regret failing her in many moments. I regret not learning her language of need soon enough. But I do not regret that she chose me, or that I chose her. She was… vivid. She made my ordered life feel less like a corridor and more like a house with windows."
And now? Bilal asked. What remains of her in you, here, in this estate between canals and jungles?
"She is why I do not sneer at youth," Jinnah said. "Why I can look at someone like Bhagat Singh and see not just a nuisance, but a young mind burning too brightly for the room it was given. She is why I do not dismiss modern girls in Bombay who smoke or read foreign novels in public. I have seen what happens when you crush that spirit with too much discipline and too little understanding."
He glanced at the partly written Sandalbar notes on his desk—the plans for maternity huts, for schools where girls would learn more than just sewing.
"And she is why," he added, "I insist that if we are to build a new state, it must have room for women who do not fit neatly into the old boxes. Women who speak, who argue, who choose badly and then choose again. If we cannot bear them, then we do not deserve to call ourselves modern at all."
You're still talking to her, Bilal noted.
"Of course," Jinnah said. "Who else would argue with me about whether these curtains are an abomination?"
The faintest hint of humour touched his mouth, then faded.
He straightened the papers before him, the movement precise as always.
"That is enough for tonight," he said. "We have indulged memory. Tomorrow there will be petitions, reports, telegrams. Sandalbar does not pause because one man's heart does."
It never did before, Bilal agreed. But perhaps the man's heart is at least more honest about its scars now.
"Perhaps," Jinnah said.
He reached to extinguish the lamp.
For a moment, in the half-dark, he could almost see her again: white sari, violet blouse, a book in her hand and mischief in her eyes, walking into a room full of cautious men and lighting it like a match.
Then the light went out, and only the sound of the canal remained.