My father on Lahore in the sixties, raising six kids, and Pakistan's drift

A birth six days after Pakistan, and a father lost at eighteen months

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing the guest in unusually personal terms: a 74-year-old career banker who happens to be his father, born in Lahore on 20 August 1947 — six days after the country itself. Within the first two minutes the conversation has moved past the formalities and into the central fact of Syed Hasan Sajjad’s early life: his own father died when he was about a year and a half old.

“After that, naturally, the family went through a fairly tough time,” he says. The household lived off whatever the late father had left behind, a small pool of capital that had to stretch. He credits the era as much as the family. A hundred rupees, he says, was enough for a decent month. He remembers sitting down with his mother from the age of seven or eight to do the budget — a child, in other words, who learned the household ledger before he learned algebra. The turning point came when his eldest brother started working. From there, the older brother carried the cost of his schooling, and the family’s footing returned.

Muzamil does not press for sentiment in this opening stretch. He lets his father lay out the architecture of his childhood — Flaming Road in Lahore, a small private school with dedicated teachers, a mother who loved Urdu poetry enough to invite poets to school functions — and then asks, simply, where he went to college.

Government College Lahore, a medical plan abandoned, and a chance-not-choice job

Syed Hasan Sajjad went to Government College Lahore, “the best college, then and now.” He had intended to study medicine. What happened instead is a story almost any parent of a teenager will recognise. Freedom found him before discipline did. Morning shows had just opened. Groups formed. His group, he says with dry honesty, “took less interest in studies and more in sports.” He did not qualify for medical school.

A relative offered the advice that redirected the rest of his life: pick a subject that travels. Economics and political science, a BA at Government College, marks strong enough that the university wrote to him about a new public-service stipend programme. He graduated in 1967, and then — in a line worth quoting in full — “job was a matter of chance, not a matter of choice.”

He took the first offer he received: United Bank. The acting manager at his first branch gave him a piece of advice he says he kept close for the rest of his career. Promotions taken on the basis of relatives, friends, and pressure will eventually run out. Promotions taken on the basis of work do not. “If you keep working hard, you’ll keep succeeding,” he repeats. “But if you take a promotion through connections, eventually you’ll just stop.”

He stayed at UBL for ten years — five at the Race Course branch, five at the Gulberg Market branch.

Saudi Arabia, the Gulf War, and a return to Pakistan with six children

The conversation moves to the middle stretch of his career. His father-in-law was in Saudi Arabia and helped arrange a visa. He joined Saudi British Bank in Jeddah and later Makkah, and stayed for roughly twelve and a half years. Muzamil lets him narrate the move back without much interruption. The Gulf War came. Friends pushed him to go to America instead. The arithmetic against America was the family itself: six children, and he was the sole breadwinner. Starting over from scratch in a new country at that scale was not, in his judgement, sensible. “We’ll go back to Pakistan,” he says he decided. “It’s our country. Something will work out, Inshallah.”

The return was January or February 1991. He had bought a house earlier through United Bank’s house-building scheme; the savings from Jeddah went into completing and re-establishing it in Murree Town. Then came a longer-than-expected job search — long enough, he admits, that the anxiety set in. The call eventually came from Askari Bank, one of the new private banks the government had just licensed. He joined as one of the pioneers. He retired from there.

When Muzamil asks why Islamabad rather than Lahore, the answer is simple. The family had grown used to Jeddah’s order, and Islamabad in the early nineties — clean, well-maintained, low on traffic — felt like the closest thing to it.

The Ayub years, and a country whose value was understood

Muzamil pulls the conversation back to the 1960s and asks for the texture of that decade. The answer is unsentimental. There is a famous video, his father says, of Ayub Khan’s reception in America. “No leader gets that kind of welcome any more,” he notes. Foreign leaders came through Pakistan. The country was understood to have value. Lahore Stock Exchange shares would float almost daily, with investors crowding in. There were dams being built. There was confidence.

He compares it to now with a single observation about civic life: in those years, a sexual harassment incident was not just rare, it was inconceivable. The society was conservative and middle-class in temperament. Elders were respected. Decisions were made jointly. Today, he says plainly, “even taking children to the park, you feel scared.”

Muzamil tries to extend the point into the question of intellectual tolerance — whether his father’s generation, with its debating clubs and student unions, was better at hearing the other side. His father, characteristically, narrows the claim. He did not personally attend much political or religious debate. But the texture of public life, he insists, was cooperative. Setting up a water sabeel in Muharram did not invite the question of who you were; whoever was thirsty drank.

Fatherhood, a working wife, and books on childbirth in the 1970s

The most personal section of the conversation arrives when Muzamil — himself a new father at the time of recording — asks what it felt like to become a father at twenty-eight, with no father of his own to model the role on.

The answer reframes the question. Financial provision, his father says, is partly outside any individual’s hands. You want to give your child the best of everything; you cannot always afford to. That is a constraint, not a failing. What you can control is the partnership inside the household. He credits his wife at length. She learned to sew the children’s clothes herself. When their first child was on the way, she ordered a book on childbirth and read it through. She did her own medical research as the family grew, to the point where, he says with a small joke, the children call her “Doctor Nisha Bhai” — the household’s first responder for a fever or a stomach ache.

Muzamil pushes on the harder question. Four children inside the first stretch, six in total. Did the burden ever feel unmanageable? The answer leans, again, on belief and on planning. The household never assumed the children needed new clothes; older clothes were passed down without ceremony. What money was available was spent on celebrations the children could attend, not on appearances. Putting four sons through university simultaneously — he calls it “a jihad” — was made bearable by the children themselves, who never complained that a friend had something they did not.

A silent eight-bedroom house, and a daughter who left in 1994

By this point in the conversation, the children have grown up and started leaving. The eldest daughter went to America in 1994. Then, one by one, the others.

The house, Syed Hasan Sajjad says, was bought on the assumption it would hold all of them. Two parents, six children, his mother — eight bedrooms. “And then the whole house went silent.” His wife, he says, “almost fell ill” from how empty it became. There were stretches, he says, where it was just the two of them at the dining table.

Muzamil asks, gently, whether the emptiness made him sad. The answer is the answer of a man who has thought about it. He told his wife at the time — and tells the audience now — that the children’s futures were better served by going. The opportunities available to them abroad would not have been available at home. “We can only pray,” he says. “We don’t know how long we ourselves have. But they have a whole life, a whole family, ahead.” Three of his sons are now in IT in the United States. He notes, almost in passing, that COVID forced them to extend a stay long enough that he and his wife received their own US green cards.

Computer science, parental aptitude, and not insisting on medicine

A short but pointed exchange sits inside the fatherhood section. All four of his sons studied computer science at FAST — at one point all four were enrolled simultaneously, “one coming out as another was going in.” Muzamil notes that this was unusual: most parents of that generation pushed their sons toward medicine, engineering, or banking.

His father’s reasoning is direct. “If their aptitude was for computers, and I had pushed them into medicine and they failed, they would have said you ruined us — we were going into computers.” Where the interest lay, that is where the child should go. It is not a complicated philosophy. It is, however, a deliberate one, and the conversation lets it sit.

A ten-year property case, and what Pakistani courts actually are

Later in the discussion, Muzamil turns to the family’s long experience with the courts — roughly ten years across the lower courts, the High Court, and eventually the Supreme Court, over a property dispute with the people they had bought their house from.

His father’s verdict is one of the bluntest passages in the conversation. “Going to court means that if you say black is black and the judge says no, it’s white, you have to accept it.” The lawyers, he says, sit comfortably; the file moves slowly. The opposing party in this case — on the losing end — simply did not show up. Illness one day. An excuse the next. A new date each time. “Just like dates are being given today,” he says.

What finally moved it was a single judge known for working at speed. The dispute was resolved. Asked for the name, he cannot remember it. The verdict on the system as a whole he can summarise in a phrase: “An experience that cannot be described in words.”

What a hundred-year-old Pakistan might look like

Muzamil closes the conversation with a question he often asks his guests. In 2047, when Pakistan is a hundred years old, what does his father think it will look like?

The answer is careful, and worth quoting in full. “If the people of Pakistan show a little responsibility and a little care — because the truth is that the majority of our population is more interested in cricket matches than in choosing who represents them. So in that sense, only Allah can have mercy. But there is hope from Allah that things will get better, Inshallah.”

It is not an optimistic answer in the political sense. It is, in the older sense of the word, a hopeful one — hope held in spite of the evidence, anchored in something larger than the evidence.

Muzamil asks for a closing word to the audience. His father’s request is simple. Pray for Pakistan. Work for Pakistan. So that the country flourishes, “because of which all of us are flourishing.” Muzamil signs off the episode with thanks, and a small line that lands differently than it would with any other guest on the show: “Thank you so much for coming on.”