The remarkable thing about Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb was his attention to detail – not necessarily to things that pertained directly to him but to things that pertained to our personal lives. The one incident that is stamped on my mind about Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb concerns my decision to migrate from Surat to Ahmedabad in search for a living as a lawyer. At that time my brother

in law Aziz had a good legal practice in Ahmedabad and I felt that I would be making a safe decision in deciding to go there rather than to Bombay, where I would have no legal benefactor.

Everything was decided accordingly except for one issue.Syedna Taher Saifuddin would hear none of it. His singular insistence: Bombay! He would keep calling me for personal audiences at night and each time he would try and bring up the discussion of my moving to Bombay. After some time, it boiled down a question of my will or Syedna’s advice. I trusted the latter and left for Bombay.

While I was in Bombay, Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb did something interesting behind my back. He did his homework and found out that Esaji Vahanvaty was the leading counsel in the Bombay High Court at that time. So Huzurala called Bhai Eban Faizullabhoy and asked him to take a personal message to Esaji Vahanvaty with the words that “Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb yeh tamne salaam

pahunchhayo chhey!”

Bhai Yusuf later told me graphically that when he walked up to Esaji Vahanvaty and told him this, Esaji literally jumped out of his chair with the words: “Does Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb even know that someone by the name of Esaji Vahanvaty even exists?!”

To cut a long story short, Esaji sought a personal audience with Huzurala for the favour of being remembered and somewhere Huzurala must have woven my mention into the conversation. The result was that Esaji Vahanwaty took me on, I worked in his chamber for 13 years and learnt a lot under him.

It has been years, one has grown in one’s profession,acquired izzat, success and prominence and it is humbling to remember that all this has happened because of one man’s considerable foresight on the one hand and a deep interest in the welfare of his moomin subjects on the other. In retrospect, I will also concede that Syedna asked me to migrate to Mumbai because he would have foreseen that I would have always been under the shadow of my more successful brother-in-law and wouldn’t have been able to develop an independent image of my own.

-         Shaikh Yusufbhai Muchhala, Bombay