Every small town has at least one story that outgrows its own facts, retold so many times and by so many different mouths that by the time a grandchild hears it, no one can say for certain anymore which details are documented and which have simply accreted, the way a pearl accretes around a grain of sand that started the whole process and is long since buried out of sight. In Shahpur, one of those stories belonged to Sajjad Husain, and it concerned, of all things, a cow.
The precise sequence of events depends on who in the family is telling it. In one version, the cow was a stray that wandered onto property he had recently acquired, and rather than driving it off or quietly making use of an unclaimed animal, as many men in his position might have done without a second thought, he set about finding its rightful owner — a poor farmer several villages away who had given the animal up for stolen or lost weeks earlier and who arrived, by the time Sajjad Husain's inquiries finally located him, prepared to argue and instead found himself being handed his cow back, fed and cared for, with no payment asked in return. In another version of the story, the cow belonged to a dispute between two feuding families, each insisting it was theirs, and Sajjad Husain — already, by this point in his life, the man people in the district brought their unsolvable disagreements to — settled the matter not with a legal ruling but with a single sharp question that made the false claimant's story fall apart in front of the whole gathered crowd, the way his questions about a piece of prison meat or a missing item at home would fall apart other men's half-truths for the rest of his life.
Whichever version is closer to what actually happened — and the family itself, appropriately, no longer insists on choosing between them — the story survived because it captured something true about the reputation Sajjad Husain had built by this period of his life: that he was a man impossible to deceive and, at the same time, a man who would go out of his way to return something valuable to a stranger who had no way of ever repaying him. A cow, in a farming district in the United Provinces in the early twentieth century, was not a small thing. It was often a family's entire margin between subsistence and ruin. That his name became attached, in local memory, to a story about restoring one to its rightful owner rather than keeping it says a great deal about how the town around him had come to think of his character, long before he ever ran a newspaper or sat across a table from a Muslim League leader.