Frankness was, by every account that survives him, close to the defining feature of Sajjad Husain's personality — not tact withheld out of unkindness, but a fundamental conviction that honest speech, however uncomfortable, respected other people more than polite evasion ever could.
He could praise generously when praise was warranted, and the family remembers him doing so often and without stinginess, especially toward younger relatives who had genuinely earned it. But he could also criticize without elaborate ceremony when criticism was warranted, and those unfamiliar with him — a new acquaintance, a distant relative meeting him for the first time — might occasionally mistake this directness for harshness before coming to understand, as everyone close to him eventually did, that it came from the same source as his generosity: a refusal to treat other people as though they were too fragile to hear the truth.
His humor, more often than not, softened whatever edge his frankness might otherwise have carried. A sharp sentence, a well-timed proverb, an improvised remark delivered at exactly the right moment could make a point more effectively, and more memorably, than any lengthy lecture could have managed — a skill evident in nearly every anecdote the family has preserved about him, from the prison meat ration to the disputed cow to the chemist who learned, the hard way, not to shortchange a customer who noticed everything. Many of the memories that survive him do so precisely because the wording of his replies proved unforgettable to the people who heard them, passed down not as historical fact requiring verification but as the kind of family treasure that gets retold at every gathering specifically because the retelling itself keeps a beloved person present among people who never had the chance to meet him.
It would be a mistake to read this wit as mere entertainment, a charming personality quirk layered on top of the more serious business of his public life. The humor and the seriousness were, in Sajjad Husain's case, genuinely inseparable — the same mind that could turn a courtroom argument or a claims-office negotiation into a memorable phrase was applying, in both settings, the identical instinct: that the truth, delivered with enough wit and enough confidence, was harder for an opponent to dismiss than the same truth delivered with a raised voice and a scowl.