(Bombay, February 20, 1929 – Rattanbai's Death and Jinnah's Unraveling)
---
The Cough That Wouldn't Stop
The sound first reached Fatima through the clinic walls in late January—a dry, hacking cough from the Petit mansion next door that grew progressively wetter, more desperate. She knew before the doctor confirmed it: consumption. The same disease that had taken their mother, now come for the girl-woman who had danced through their lives like a firebird.
When Fatima forced her way past protesting servants, the scene stole her breath. Rattanbai, once Bombay's brightest social light, lay shriveled in a canopied bed, her famous curls matted with sweat. The room reeked of camphor and decay.
"You shouldn't be here," Rattanbai whispered, each word a struggle. "It's contagious."
Fatima rolled up her sleeves. "I'm a doctor. Contagion is my business." She pressed a stethoscope to the paper-thin chest. The rattling confirmed her worst fear: advanced tuberculosis, both lungs drowning.
"Where is Jinnah?"
Rattanbai's smile was bitter. "Delhi. Negotiating with... I've forgotten who." A coughing fit seized her, blood spotting the handkerchief. "The nation always comes first."
---
The Telegram That Went Unanswered
Ratti gravely ill. Return immediately. - Fatima
Jinnah received the message during a critical session of the Central Legislative Assembly. He read it, folded it precisely, and continued arguing against the Public Safety Bill. It was Liaquat Ali Khan who noticed his hands trembling.
"Jinnah, if your wife—"
"My wife understands duty," Jinnah snapped, but he left the chamber an hour early.
The train from Delhi to Bombay took thirty-six hours. He spent them drafting amendments, the rhythmic clacking of wheels providing counterpoint to his racing thoughts. Not again. Not like Emibai. Not another deathbed I arrive too late for.
---
The Last Conversation
He found her sitting up in bed, bizarrely lucid. The famous Petit diamonds glittered at her throat—a final act of defiance.
"You came," she said without accusation.
Jinnah stood frozen in the doorway, his briefcase still in hand. "The doctors—"
"—are useless. But your sister has been kind." Rattanbai gestured to the bedside table where Fatima's meticulous charts recorded every fever spike, every milliliter of sputum.
Jinnah approached as one might a wild animal. "We'll take you to Switzerland. The mountain air—"
"Stop." Her voice, though weak, held command. "I need you to listen."
He knelt—the great barrister brought to his knees.
"First, Dina." She gripped his wrist. "Let her choose her life. Even if she chooses... badly."
He nodded, unable to speak.
"Second, your Pakistan." She coughed, a horrible wet sound. "It will cost you everything. But build it anyway."
"Ratti—"
"Third." Her eyes, fever-bright, found his. "You never loved me. Not really. You loved that I loved you."
The truth hung between them, brutal and undeniable.
Jinnah's composure shattered. "That's not—"
"It's alright." She touched his cheek, leaving a blood-smudge. "I never loved you either. I loved the man I thought you could be." A final, terrible honesty. "We were both in love with ghosts."
She asked for morphine then. When Fatima administered it, Rattanbai whispered, "You'll look after them both, won't you? My difficult husband and my motherless daughter?"
Fatima could only nod.
---
The Vigil
The last night, Jinnah did something unprecedented: he sent for Dina. The nine-year-old arrived in nightclothes, her confusion turning to terror at the death-room smell.
"Papa?"
Jinnah gathered her onto his lap—a gesture so unlike him that Fatima's throat tightened. Together, the three Jinnahs kept watch as Rattanbai's breathing grew shallow.
At 2:17 AM, Rattanbai's eyes flew open. "The music," she whispered. "Can't you hear it?"
There was no music. Only the sea's murmur and Dina's stifled sobs.
Rattanbai's hand fluttered toward her daughter. "Be... brave..."
Then the long exhale. The silence.
---
The Zoroastrian Problem
Death brought logistical nightmares. As a Parsi married to a Muslim, where did her soul belong? The Petits demanded traditional dokhmenashini—the Tower of Silence. Jinnah insisted on Muslim burial. The theological debate raged over her cooling body.
Fatima ended it by summoning Sir Dinshaw. The old man looked decades older.
"She converted to Islam for you," he told Jinnah accusingly.
"No," Fatima corrected gently. "She never formally converted. She remained Zoroastrian in her heart."
A compromise was reached: a quiet Muslim burial at night, with Parsi prayers recited privately. The hypocrisy would haunt them all.
---
The Shattering
At the graveside, Jinnah performed his duties with robotic precision. He threw the first handful of earth, recited the Kalima, accepted condolences without hearing them. Only when the crowd dispersed did the dam break.
Alone with Fatima in the moonlight, he collapsed against a neem tree. The sounds he made were animal—raw, guttural sobs that shook his entire frame. Fatima held him as he hadn't been held since childhood.
"I killed her," he gasped between wrenching cries. "The stress... the politics... I killed them both..."
"Both?" Fatima asked, though she knew.
"Emibai and Ratti. I marry them and they die." He looked at his hands as if they were stained. "What curse do I carry?"
Fatima grasped his face, forcing him to meet her eyes. "Listen to me. Emibai died of cholera. Rattanbai died of tuberculosis. You are not God. You do not have that power."
But he wasn't listening. The great unifier, the man who would partition a subcontinent, had been partitioned himself. Something in him broke that night that would never properly heal.
---
The Daughter's Question
Days later, Dina found Fatima burning Rattanbai's diseased bedding in the garden.
"Will Papa die too?"
Fatima turned, shocked. "No, beti. Why would you think that?"
"Because he doesn't eat. And he talks to Mummy's photograph." The child's composure was more frightening than tears. "He says he's sorry."
That evening, Fatima forced her way into Jinnah's study. He sat in darkness, Rattanbai's favorite shawl draped over his shoulders.
"Eat," Fatima commanded, placing a tray before him.
He pushed it away. "I don't deserve—"
"Damn what you deserve! Dina needs a father, not a martyr!"
For a week, she managed the impossible—running her clinic by day, managing Jinnah's household by night, comforting a grieving child in between. She became the family's spine.
---
The Political Resurrection
The summons came on March 3rd. Liaquat and other Muslim League leaders stood awkwardly in the foyer.
"The Simon Commission," Liaquat said. "We need you to draft the response."
Jinnah stared blankly. "I'm in mourning."
"India doesn't pause for grief," Fatima said from the staircase. She'd dressed him herself that morning—a small victory. "Go."
He went. But something had shifted. The man who returned from Rattanbai's death was harder, colder, less forgiving. The idealist who'd believed in Hindu-Muslim unity had been buried with his wife. What emerged was the realist who would demand Pakistan.
---
The Legacy
Months later, Fatima found Dina reading her mother's diary. The entry was dated their wedding day:
"Today I marry a monument. Pray God I can also marry the man."
Fatima closed the book. "Your mother loved him very much."
"I know," Dina said with unsettling wisdom. "That's why it killed her."
Outside, Jinnah paced the veranda—a solitary figure rehearsing arguments for a country that didn't yet exist. The two women watched him through the window, bound together by loss and love for this impossible man.
"He'll never recover," Fatima murmured.
"No," Dina agreed. "But maybe he'll build something beautiful from the ruins."
The sea wind carried the scent of jasmine and salt—the perfume of Bombay, of memory, of beginnings born from endings.
---
Historical Anchors:
1. Rattanbai's Death - Actually February 20, 1929 from tuberculosis
2. Burial Controversy - Documented conflict between Muslim/Parsi rites
3. Political Timeline - Simon Commission response indeed followed her death
4. Jinnah's Grief - His withdrawal noted by contemporaries like Kanji Dwarkadas
Key Themes:
· Grief as Transformation - How personal loss reshaped political destiny
· Women's Labor - Fatima's invisible emotional and domestic work
· Legacy of Love - How Rattanbai's death influenced Pakistan's creation