Business, for Sajjad Husain, never entirely stopped being a going concern even as his public commitments multiplied, and among his ventures in this later Indian period was the management, and eventual sale, of a timber yard in Kanpur — a business considerably removed, in its daily mechanics, from the military meat contracts of his Calcutta years or the newspaper offices of Allahabad, but consistent with the same underlying instinct: a willingness to enter a new trade, master its particulars, and make it work.
Timber, in a rapidly modernizing India, was a business tied directly to construction, to the railways, to the expanding infrastructure of towns and cities that needed lumber for everything from scaffolding to furniture to the beams that held up new schools and hospitals — some of them, quite possibly, among the very institutions his own philanthropy had helped fund. Running such a yard required the same qualities that had served him in every other enterprise: an eye for a fair price, a low tolerance for waste or dishonesty among the men handling the inventory, and the patience to manage a business that, unlike a political campaign, offered no dramatic victories or defeats, only the steady daily accounting of wood in and wood out.
The eventual sale of the yard, occurring as his attention and his family's circumstances turned increasingly toward the difficult question of whether and when to migrate to Pakistan, reflects a pattern that recurs throughout his business life: he built enterprises with real seriousness and let them go, when the moment required it, without the sentimental attachment that sometimes prevents a self-made man from recognizing when a chapter has closed. The timber yard had served its purpose. When larger circumstances demanded his full attention elsewhere, he did not cling to it out of habit or pride. He closed the accounts, settled what needed settling, and turned to face the next difficulty already gathering on the horizon.