Not every story the family preserves from Sajjad Husain's later years in Pakistan carries this weight. Some survive simply because they were, in their way, delightful — small enough to seem trivial and, for exactly that reason, unforgettable.
One such story is remembered simply by its two ingredients: lentils and salt. The precise occasion has blurred somewhat with retelling — a guest arriving unannounced, a household with less on hand than hospitality demanded, a meal that had to be stretched or improvised on short notice — but what survives clearly is the spirit of the episode: Sajjad Husain, in circumstances considerably more modest than the ones he had once commanded as a substantial landowner in Fatehpur district, treating a simple dish of lentils and salt with the same seriousness of hospitality he had once brought to feasts large enough to host Muslim League leaders and feed half a district.
It is precisely this continuity — the same generosity of spirit applied whether the table held a feast or a bowl of lentils — that the family holds up as one of the clearest windows into his character in old age. He had lost, by any material measure, a great deal in the passage from Fatehpur landowner to Pakistani migrant living, for a time, in rented and company-provided housing. What he had not lost, and what the lentils-and-salt story exists specifically to demonstrate, was the conviction that had underwritten his hospitality from the very beginning: that a guest's dignity did not depend on the size of the meal set before them, and that a host's obligation was to offer what he had with his whole heart rather than to apologize for what he did not have. Friends who visited him in these years, his grandson would later write, found him thankful to God, cheerful, intellectually alert, and able to fill even a modest rented home with warmth and conversation — and the lentils-and-salt story is, in essence, that description compressed into a single remembered meal.