In the final years of his life, Haji Syed Sajjad Husain lived in a modest quarter in Karachi, Pakistan — rooms far smaller than those he had once commanded as a substantial landowner in Fatehpur district. A first-time visitor, told beforehand that this old man had once hosted Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan at his own table, might have expected something grander. Instead, they would have found a small sitting room, a shelf or two rescued from a much larger library, and a pot of tea already warming because he had heard the gate and assumed, correctly, that someone was arriving.
If his strength allowed, he would have risen to greet them himself, insisting on that courtesy for as long as his body permitted it. Within minutes, the smallness of the room would have ceased to matter. He would ask after the visitor’s family by name, recall some detail from a previous conversation that even they had nearly forgotten, offer an opinion on the day’s politics whether invited to or not, and find room for both disagreement and humor. In his company, that was simply how conversation moved.
This is the man at the center of this book. He was certainly the contractor who negotiated with British quartermasters, the newspaper proprietor who kept an Urdu press alive through years of financial uncertainty, the Muslim League worker who hosted future prime ministers, and the migrant who refused to claim more property than he had truly lost.
But before all of that, and beyond all of it, he is the man in the modest room: grateful rather than bitter, generous with what little remained, and still, at the end of a long and difficult century, more interested in the person sitting across from him than in anything he himself had lost.
His grandson, who spent years gathering the scattered record of this life into the book now before the reader, expressed the source of that labor simply: the memories associated with him are among the greatest treasures of my life. This book exists because that grandson — seven years old when he crossed a new border at his grandfather’s side — believed such a treasure should not vanish with the last people who remembered it firsthand.
The story begins far earlier than anyone seated in that modest Karachi room could have imagined: in a small town in the United Provinces of India, in 1893, with the birth of a boy who would lose his father before he was old enough to remember his face clearly.