Mohammad Ali Jinnah was forty years old, a successful barrister and a rising star in the nationalist movement when he fell in love with pretty, vivacious Ruttie Petit, the daughter of his good friend, Sir Dinshaw Petit, a prominent Parsi mill owner. But Ruttie was just sixteen and her outraged father forbade the match. When Ruttie turned eighteen, they married. Bombay society was scandalized, and Ruttie and Jinnah were ostracized. Sheela Reddy uses never-before-seen personal letters of Ruttie and her close friends as well as accounts left by contemporaries and friends to portray a marriage that convulsed society. A product of intensive and meticulous research in Delhi, Bombay and Karachi and based on first-person accounts and sources, Reddy brings the solitary, misunderstood Jinnah and the lonely, wistful Ruttie to life.