Sajjad Husain's first visit to the new state of Pakistan, undertaken as the country was still assembling its most basic administrative machinery amid a flood of refugees pouring into Karachi from every direction, brought him face to face with a version of officialdom he had not previously encountered — not the entrenched, predictable colonial bureaucracy he had spent decades learning to negotiate, but the improvised, overwhelmed apparatus of a state being built, quite literally, as it went along.
One episode from this period concerned his own travel papers. A misunderstanding over his documents — the exact nature of the confusion lost to the family's memory now, though its emotional weight is not — left his legitimacy as a traveler and, by extension, his standing in the new country itself, temporarily in question. It is not difficult to imagine the scene: a tired official behind a desk piled with paperwork, processing an overwhelming volume of refugees and travelers with insufficient staff and insufficient time, and a man used to being recognized on sight in his own district suddenly reduced, for a few anxious hours or days, to an unverified name on an uncertain document.
What the family remembers most clearly from this period, though, is not the anxiety of the passport confusion itself but the manner in which Sajjad Husain responded to it — and, more broadly, to the pressures of a new political environment in which even committed, lifelong supporters of Pakistan's creation could find their loyalty, their legitimacy, or their patience tested in unexpected ways.
He is remembered being asked, during this period, whether he would abandon a particular position he held under mounting pressure to simply let the matter drop and move on. His answer, preserved in substance if not in exact wording across the family's retelling, was direct: a person, he said, should not surrender a principle merely because the road toward defending it had become difficult. He was willing to endure inconvenience — considerable inconvenience, in this case — rather than compromise what he regarded as an obligation, whether that obligation concerned a disputed travel document, a point of political conviction, or simply his own sense of what fair treatment required.
This directness extended, the family recalls, even to his manner with senior figures considerably more powerful than the officials processing his paperwork. Age and reputation did not make him timid, and he could disagree openly with men who held far more formal authority than he did — not, the family is careful to emphasize, out of personal hostility or a desire to provoke, but because conviction, in his understanding, required a certain fearlessness to be worth anything at all. A man willing to soften his views the moment a powerful listener frowned had never, in Sajjad Husain's long experience of political and business life, been a man worth much in a genuine crisis. He had built his entire reputation, across three decades and two countries, on being exactly the opposite kind of man, and he was not about to change that now, in the very country his own convictions had helped bring into being.