In 1956, Haji Syed Sajjad Husain finally migrated from Fatehpur, India, to Pakistan with the remaining members of his family. By then the decision was no longer, in any meaningful sense, a choice weighed freshly against alternatives. Circumstances — the residency dispute, the rumors, the accumulated exhaustion of fighting on two fronts for years, the pull of children and grandchildren already building their lives in the country he had helped create — had made a permanent settlement in Pakistan not simply desirable but close to unavoidable.
He arrived a man past sixty, having already lived through an orphaned childhood, a self-made education, a fortune built and partly lost, a movement's rise from agitation to nationhood, and a Partition that had cost him a house, an office, and years of legal struggle merely to stand on solid ground again. He first settled around Lyallpur — the city now known as Faisalabad — working for a pharmaceutical distribution and cold-storage concern and living, for a period, in company-provided housing, a considerable comedown in material terms for a man who had once been a substantial landowner in Fatehpur district, and a comedown he is remembered to have accepted without bitterness, in keeping with the pattern his grandson would later describe: grateful rather than resentful, whatever his circumstances happened to be.
In time he was allotted a plot in Lahore, and eventually he moved into Muslim League circles in Karachi, where — and this detail matters more than it might first appear — he needed no introduction. He was already known there, recognized as one of the first Muslim League office-bearers from his home region in the years before Partition, a man whose name preceded him into rooms he had never physically entered before, carried there by three decades of newspapers, committee meetings, and hosted dinners in a district town most of his new Karachi acquaintances had never visited and probably never would.
His sons and younger family members began building their own lives in the new country, and education remained, as it always had been for him, the central non-negotiable priority. One son pursued medical training and would go on to earn an M.D. — the fulfillment of an aspiration Sajjad Husain had voiced for his family since his own boyhood spent teaching himself to read by whatever light was available. The family gradually re-established itself, marriages connected the household to other respected families, and Sajjad Husain, watching his children enter professional and family life on terms far more secure than the ones he himself had started with, took a satisfaction in it that the family remembers as genuine and largely uncomplicated — a rare, clean joy in a life that had, up to this point, rarely offered him anything uncomplicated at all.