Miss Jinnah had first lived with her brother, for about eight years - till 1918, when he got married to Ruttenbai. Upon Ruttenbai's death in February 1929, Miss Jinnah wound up her clinic, moved into Jinnah's bungalow, and took charge of his house. Thus began the life-long companionship, which lasted till Jinnah's death on 11 September 1948.
In all Miss Jinnah lived with her brother for about twenty-eight years, including the last nineteen years in his life, which, by all accounts, were the more critical, the more trying, years in all his life. In her Book: “My Brother” she has given a detailed account of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s life from his birth till last breath.
Some excerpts from her Book:
“. . . . .Being a rich locality, there lived in Kharadar a midwife who was considered to be among the best in the city, whom mother engaged in advance, and it was her hands, trained in the medical college of every day experience, that brought into the world my mother's first child, a boy; the day was a Sunday, and the date was 25th of December in the year 1876.
The baby boy was weak and tiny, having slim, long hands, and a long, elongated head. The parents were seriously worried about his health, this little baby that was underweight by quite a few pounds. They had him examined by a doctor, who said that, except for his weak appearance, there was nothing physically or organically wrong with him and that his health should give the parents no cause for concern. But a doctor's reassurance can scarcely set at rest _a loving mother's fears and anxieties.
There arose the question of naming the child. So far, living in Kathiawar, names of the male members of our family had been so much akin to Hindu names. But Sind was a Muslim province, and the children of their neighbours had Muslims names. The two were agreed that Mohammad Ali would be an auspicious name for their first born, and this was the name they gave him.
My mother was intensely fond of Mohammad Ali, and in spite of the fact that six other children were born to her, she continued to the end of her life to look upon Mohammad Ali as her favourite child. Rahemat, Maryani, Ahmed Ali, Shireen, Fatima, and Bundeh Ali were to be her other children, in all, three sons and four daughters.
Cares of a flourishing business weighed heavily on my father's shoulders, but my mother insisted that the two take Mohammad Ali to the durgah of Hassan Pir in Ganod, ten miles from our village, Paneli, for the aqiqa ceremony. As a child, my mother had heard miraculous tales concerning devotees that believed in the supernatural powers of this Pir, who was buried at that durgah. Her mother's intuition made her believe that a great future awaited her Mohammad Ali and she wanted to take him to Hassan Pir's durgah, where iri the traditional manner of those days his head would be shaved ceremoniously and the mother would make a wish, invoking the blessings of the saintly Pir for its fulfillment. At first my father tried to get himself excused, saying he could ill-afford to be away from Karachi for over a month, but his, obduracy melted in the warmth of his young wife's pleadings. And so, with their baby boy, a few months old, the father and mother booked seats by a sail-boat that would carry them from Karachi to Verawal, a port in Kathiawar, braving the rain and winds that might be encountered on the voyage.
The frail boat with a plentiful load of passengers ran into a storm and tossed about like a plank of wood in mid-ocean. There was concern and anxiety among the people on board, and panic under such conditions is always infectious. While my father looked at the skies above, wondering when the storm would blow over, giving the boat a calm passage, my mother held her little boy close to her heart praying for the safety of her fellow-voyagers among whom was her darling, Mohammad Ali. After the storm a strange calm descended on the ocean, and the boat sailed on merrily to its destination. Days later my mother told father that in those anxious moments she had made a vow that if they reached their destination without mishap, she would stay a day longer in Ganod, praying and thanking God for His mercy at the shrine of Hassan Pir.
When the boat put anchor at Verawal port, and they had set foot on terra firma, they hired a bullock cart to take them to Ganod, a distance of a few miles. So after a stormy voyage across the Arabian Sea and after a jerky jolty bullock cart journey, my baby brother, Mohammad Ali, sat in the arms of my mother, surrounded by our numerous relatives, ready to have his head shaved at the durgah of Hassan Pir, in fulfillment of the vow made by my mother.. . . .. .. “
“. . . .. .Mohammad Ali was now about six years old, and my parents engaged a teacher to teach him Gujrati at home. They thought he was still too young to be sent to school, and the nearest school was at quite a distance from our house, a distance which they thought was too much to be covered on foot by a boy of six. He was indifferent to the reading lessons that he was made to do, but positively loathed to enter the realm of addition and subtraction, passing his hour with his tutor as an unwarranted infliction. He was more at home when he was playing with the boys of his age in the neighbourhood, among whom he established reputation as being proficient at games. They in their childish minds looked upon him as their leader, and he intuitively felt that he was their superior. However, when he was about nine, he was put in a primary school, where he had to compete with his classmates at the time of examination.
He was disappointed to find that other boys defeated him, securing more marks than he did. He, who had always looked upon himself as superior to other boys at play, found that he could not be the first in his class. On the one hand, he had to abandon his play for so many hours a day to attend school, and on the other hand these hours at school did not yield to him the honour of being the topmost pupil. He developed a childish aversion for books and school, to the horror of my father, who was anxious to give his son a sound education in order to enable him to join his own business after he had passed his matriculation examination. My mother, who had a blind faith in the destiny of her son, frequently saying, "My Mohammad Ali is going to be a big man; he will be very clever; better than the other. boys", found her dreams tumbling down to the ground.
Mother cajoled him to be regular at school and to give serious attention to his studies, saying that way alone he would rise in life and be a big man, standing head and shoulders above the others.. . .. .”
Within about two months, he was fed up with office work, and he one day surprised my father, "Father, I don't like office work".
"What would you do then, Mohammad Ali?" "I would like to go back to school."
My father was very happy, but he tried to conceal his pleasure by maintaining an unruffled appearance. "You see, my boy", he said, "there are only two ways of learning in life."
"What are they, father."
"One is to trust the wisdom of your elders and their superior knowledge; to accept their advice; and to do exactly as they suggest."
"And what is the other way, father?"
"The other way is to go your own way, and to learn by making mistakes; to learn by hard knocks and kicks in life."
The boy Mohammad Ali listened attentively. This incident explains the characteristic of the Quaid, who upto the last days of his life preferred to go his own way.
Back at school, he was a completely transformed child, no more inattentive, indifferent, and lagging hehind his classmates. He wanted to make up for the lost time, as boys of his age and even younger than him had gone ahead of him. He took to his lessons with a vengeance, studying into the late hours of the night at home, [and] determined to forge ahead. My father was very happy to see Mohammad Ali take seriously to his studies. One day he encountered his boy's class teacher on the road and asked him how his son was faring at the school. The teacher said, "He is coming up. But I must tell you the boy is horrible in arithmetic."
This completely disappointed my father, who already knew that his son was not a child prodigy, as the boy's mother fondly believed, nor would his son prove to be a precocious young man. He had already failed to impress his tutors as a pupil of great promise; they thought that with hard work he would manage to pass his examinations, possibly to be devoured in the anonymous ranks of office-clerks. But my father wanted him to be good at mathematics, as accounts were the back-bone of business, and he wanted the firm of Jinnah Poonja & Co., to keep on forging ahead as a going concern, when his son took over business from him. "Poor at mathematics", my father mused. "I wonder what the boy will be!"
But my mother's faith in Mohammad Ali was not to be shaken. She said, "You wait. My Mohammad Ali will do well, and many people will be jealous of him."
My father decided he should be guided by what appeared to him to be in. the best interest of my brother, rather than by the intuition of his wife. He thought it better to put him in a school far from their house, as his classmates in the primary school at Kharadar had a disturbing influence on his attendance at school, tempting him always to abandon books for marbles, tops, gilli danda and cricket. Sind Madrasah-tul-Islam, a high school about a mile from our house on Newnham Road, the only one that Muslims of Sind could boast of, founded by Khan Bahadur Hassanali Affendi, was the school he decided his son should join.
Mohammad Ali was about ten years old, when my father got him admitted in Sind Madrasah as a student in fourth standard Gujrati. Records of the school show that he was in serial order the 114th boy to be admitted.. . . .”
The Book is very interesting and reading it helps to understand personality of that great man we call QAID-E-AZAM.
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