The residency dispute that followed his first crossing into Pakistan did not resolve quickly, and it very nearly collided, in a way that must have felt at the time like the cruelest kind of coincidence, with a medical crisis that put his life directly at risk.
On a later journey toward Bahawalpur, undertaken in connection with family and business acquaintances, Sajjad Husain fell seriously ill. What had begun as ordinary travel discomfort developed, over the following days, into something far more alarming — a condition that a doctor eventually diagnosed as requiring surgery, a bladder or kidney stone that had progressed to the point where delay itself had become dangerous.
He wrote, from what he understood might be a hospital deathbed, to his elder brother, Syed Abid Ali Sahib, explaining the situation as plainly and as calmly as the circumstances allowed and asking for guidance and support. It is not difficult to imagine the composition of that letter — a man accustomed to controlling every situation he entered, forced now to describe his own body's betrayal in writing, to a brother hundreds of miles away who would not receive the news for days and would have no way to act on it any faster than the postal service allowed. The family back home, receiving word only in fragments and only after a delay that modern communication has made almost impossible to comprehend, endured an agony of uncertainty that the letters themselves — practical, restrained, carefully composed to reassure more than to alarm — could only partially relieve.
A surgeon named Kanhaiyalal operated on him at a civil hospital, and Sajjad Husain, against the fear that had gripped his family for days, recovered. The relief that finally reached Shahpur, carried by a subsequent letter reporting that the immediate danger had passed, is remembered in the family's account with the particular tenderness reserved for news that arrives just late enough to have been genuinely feared lost.
But the illness did not simply end when the surgery succeeded. The extended recovery period it required became entangled with the residency dispute already working its way through the Indian bureaucracy — he now had to formally justify the additional time his medical emergency had cost him, explaining to officials with no particular sympathy for his circumstances why a man fighting to establish his legal right to be in the country had also, simultaneously, needed weeks to recover from surgery he could not have scheduled around anyone's administrative convenience. The matter was eventually settled in his favor, but not before it had cost him something that no legal resolution could fully restore: months of his life spent defending, simultaneously, his body and his citizenship, in two separate proceedings that refused to stay separate from each other.