The later chapters of the original biography, as the family has preserved and described them, turn increasingly inward — toward solitude, toward the particular ache the Urdu literary tradition calls dard, the pain of longing that sits at the center of so much devotional poetry, and toward a final, abiding love of homeland that had, by this stage of his life, come to mean something layered and complicated: not one homeland but two, the Shahpur he had left behind in India and the Pakistan he had crossed a border to help build.
He composed, in these years, devotional verses that his family preserved as a memorial to this final period of his inner life — poetry no longer written for a political gathering or a Muslim League fundraiser, but for himself, and for the God he had spent a lifetime trying to serve through action rather than merely through words. Solitude, for a man who had spent sixty years surrounded by petitioners, guests, political allies, and a household full of children and grandchildren, was itself a kind of new territory, and the family's recollection suggests he entered it not with loneliness but with something closer to relief — the quiet, at last, in which a lifetime of action could settle into reflection.
And running beneath all of it was the longing for homeland that never fully resolved itself, because it could not. Shahpur remained, until his final breath, a physical place he could no longer freely visit, separated from him not by distance alone but by a border and a bureaucracy that had once nearly cost him his legal right to live in the country he had helped bring into being. Pakistan was his homeland too, chosen and paid for at enormous cost, the country where his children and grandchildren were building the futures he had wanted for them since his own impoverished boyhood. He loved both, in the complicated, unresolvable way that Partition forced an entire generation to love two homelands at once, and his late poetry — read now, decades later, by a family scattered further still, across continents his own century could barely have imagined — carries the particular ache of a man who never stopped belonging, in his heart, to a town he was never permitted to see again.