This narrative closes where the original Gumnaam Sipahi closed — with the conviction, shared by everyone who took part in preserving it, that a life like this one does not need fame to deserve remembrance. It needs only someone willing to write it down before the last people who remember it are gone.
Dr. Syed Sajid Husain began that work in Urdu, drawing on family papers, photographs, correspondence, and decades of his own memory as a boy who crossed into Pakistan at his grandfather's side. This English narrative continues it, for a family now scattered far beyond the borders either country recognized in 1947, so that a grandson's grandchildren, reading in a language their great-great-grandfather never spoke fluently, might still meet the man who built a Masjid, fed a prisoner, refused a claim he had not earned, and insisted, against every discouragement his century offered him, that the next generation would have the education he never had the chance to receive himself.
He was, in the fullest sense the phrase allows a forgotten soldier of the Pakistan Movement. This book exists so that the word "forgotten" no longer applies.