Dina Wadia had once penned a note narrating her last meeting with her father Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The daughter’s love is evident in her loving description of her father in which she calls him an ‘affectionate’ man.
“My father was not a demonstrative man but he was an affectionate father,” she wrote in the beginning. “My last meeting with him took place in Bombay in 1946.”
According to Dina, Quaid-e-Azam had just come from New Delhi where he was preoccupied with the most pressing engagements concerning Pakistan.
Dina described how when she and her children were about to depart, Jinnah hugged Dina’s child Nusli who was then two years old.
“The grey cap (Jinnah’s) caught Nusli’s fancy and in a moment he had put it on his grandson’s head saying, “Keep it my boy.””
Dina wrote that she remembered the kind gesture because it was ‘characteristic of his sensibility and consideration for me and my children.”
In the note, Dina also mentioned how some critics were very wrong about Jinnah when they assumed that he was an arrogant man when in reality he was a private individual, just like her.
Despite falling out with her father, Dina displays no resentment in this heartfelt note. The love she felt for her father despite their strained relationship is evident in her note.
“He was never false to himself or to others in private or public life,” she wrote. “On matters of principle, he always stood firm.”
She ends with a very true and thoughtful sentence in the end: “No Jinnah, no Pakistan.”