Imran Khan Read online

  By 1954 Pakistan had manoeuvred its way into both the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and the South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), two US-sponsored consortiums designed to prevent ‘Red expansion’ in the region. (They were to prove of limited use in Vietnam.) Pakistan also soon adopted that unique combination of democratic procedures, military interference and Islamic ritual that still distinguishes the country. In April 1953 the state’s governor-general Ghulam Mohammad dismissed the elected civilian government and replaced it with a military ‘cabinet of talents’. A succession of governors-general, presidents and army chiefs were to remove a further nine civilian governments over the next 21 years. The 35 years since then have been characterised by direct military rule.

  Nor is there any simple distinction between law and religion in Pakistan, and consequently, as the West has recently come to see, the clerics often perform a political role. In 1953, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the largest and most articulate of the nation’s religious parties, began a concerted campaign to purge the community of what it deemed blasphemous or ‘fetid’ behaviour, and to establish a fully Islamic state. The ensuing violence brought on the imposition of martial law and the first of Pakistan’s recurrent constitutional crises. Although the details varied, the essential pattern of coups, military rule, violent deaths and ethnic strife came to characterise, if not define, the entire 62-year period from Partition to the present day. By the time Imran was old enough to take an interest in his surroundings, the struggle over the character and soul of Pakistan was well under way.

  As we’ve seen, he had the good fortune to be born into a society which traditionally favours boys over girls, the latter of whom then rarely even bothered to attend school: an officially estimated 23 per cent of females over the age of 15 were classified as ‘functionally literate’ in 1952, compared to 47 per cent of males. In a patriarchal culture like Pakistan’s, the birth of a son represents a potential source of income in old age, whereas a girl will eventually marry and leave. The Khan family were also well positioned in the Pakistani caste system, whose extremes were marked out by a small number of plantation-owning millionaires and morally flexible politicians at one end and the untouchables at the other. Of this latter category, rock bottom was represented by the humble domestic cleaner. There simply was no lowlier status in the Pakistan of the 1950s, and in those days no one would willingly marry a cleaner except another cleaner.

  Imran, by contrast, grew up from an early age in a gated community of substantial redbrick houses with neatly manicured lawns that took its name from his own great-uncle, Zaman Khan. It was as if ‘the most bourgeois part of Dulwich had been dumped down in Lahore’, I was told. Immediately outside the gates was a setting more familiar to generations of ordinary Pakistanis. The town of Lahore spread out around a number of bustling squares in a haphazard jumble of shops, bazaars, tenements, bungalows and garishly painted billboards. Most people travelled by public transport, or if they were lucky by either rickshaw or bicycle. The distinctive item of male dress was the bright-red ajrak, a flowing shawl worn over a knee-length shirt and baggy trousers. To this ensemble many men added an embroidered cap decorated with tiny mirrors. The women were generally veiled. To relieve the monotony of daily life, there were frequent melas, or fairs, in which a merry-go-round was usually erected in the market square and a travelling circus displayed dancing bears and monkeys. The Basant festival, unique to Lahore, took place each spring and featured elaborate kiteflying competitions with an added touch of the hyper-gamesmanship so integral to much of Pakistani life. What brought drama to the event was that at least on occasion the kite strings would be coated with ground glass, with the idea of disabling rivals’ kites by cutting through their strings in the air. Imran was ‘extremely proficient’ at kite-flying, I was told, though there is no evidence he was ever tied up in any unsportsmanlike conduct.

  In addition to the class system, many Pakistanis were divided by their attitudes to the departed colonial masters. For every kala sahib, there was an individual like Imran’s father, for whom Partition and independence had excited an almost religious zeal. By and large, both sides of the debate were broadly agreed on the supposed underlying racism of the West as a whole, and tended to be sensitive in cases where, to quote the Mashriq, ‘the white man [had] set his backside on the black man’. This attitude perhaps helps to explain why the ‘Beg affair’ was still being keenly analysed by the Pakistani sporting press 20 years after the event.

  In all, then, a political and cultural stew of a nation, a land with a violent hand and empathetic heart. Lahore, Pakistan’s second city after Karachi, offers a particularly rich visual patisserie of ancient and modern: the medieval garrison town with its forts and mausoleums, the so-called ‘Garden of the Moguls’, and its gaudily futuristic 1960s facelift — all concrete slabs and municipal offices built out of giant glass eggshells — so symbolic of the two Pakistans. Following Partition, the word was ‘clearance’, the result acres of dead tramway lines and rubble dumped into the green, still hair-oil of Lahore’s central canal. The town’s ambient smell, at least in winter months, is remembered as a combination of ‘coal fires, waste [and] the crisp tang of fatty foods’. In summer it was as if ‘the whole place had decomposed’. In the words of the architectural writer Simon Jenkins, ‘In no other world city have I seen so much magnificence so neglected … All Pakistan’s history is here, but disintegrating beneath encroaching shanties, cobwebs of wires and piles of rubbish.’

  Imran, then, grew up not only in a state in transition, but in its most obviously changed town: he would have been as aware of Lahore’s imperial past as he was of its squat, drab ghettoes and the abject poverty of tens of thousands of its inhabitants. For many, the hardship was institutionalised. Public assistance was rudimentary, at best; cancer, as Imran was to note sardonically, remained a rich man’s disease; and most local schools were basic, in one graduate’s words ‘fail[ing] to satisfy the most minimal academic or even sanitary requirements’. In later years, this always potentially riotous city was to be the scene of regular outbreaks of political unrest and violent anti-government demonstrations. Indeed, Imran himself may have inadvertently played a role in a noted breakdown of municipal law and order when, in May 2005, he took the opportunity of a press conference in Islamabad to draw attention to a Newsweek article about a Koran being flushed down the toilet by American soldiers. Some 17 people died in the subsequent street protests that took place both in Lahore and across Pakistan.* There was a pattern of broadly similar civil or religious disturbances throughout Imran’s youth, even if these tended to be less individually destructive. It was in Lahore that the Muslim League made the first formal demand for a separate Islamic homeland, and where the League subsequently conducted its vigilant campaign against the ‘fetid’ behaviour of non-believers. Several confrontations resulted, including a minor but well-publicised skirmish in May 1961 between local clerics and a group of provocatively dressed American tourists which ended ignominiously for the latter. I was told that the offending parties had ‘turned and run’. On this occasion the only casualties were two Americans who in their haste slipped on wet cobblestones, and one cleric who collided with a bicycle.

  Life in Zaman Park was less picturesque, perhaps, than in other parts of Lahore, but it differed little in terms of ritual. There was frequent obeisance to Mecca, as prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad. Although not excessively pious, on Thursday evenings Imran’s family periodically gathered at one of the many local shrines for the chanting of religious songs, and Mr Khan and his son are said to have ‘reasonably dutifully’ attended a mosque on most Sundays and state holidays. (In 1977 the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto changed the ‘day off’ to Friday, among other innovations.) As noted, Imran was also keenly aware of his Pathan heritage, which he could trace back 700 years. Some of his earliest known ancestors exhibited the same refreshingly independent streak that prevails right to the present. The Niazis had first come to prominence in the s
ixteenth century, when Haibat Khan Niazi was the Governor of Punjab, and helped to build the massive Rohtas Fort near Lahore. Against family advice, Haibat subsequently backed the wrong side in one of the frequent Pathan civil wars. He, his wife and brother were all killed, and their heads displayed on poles by the enemy commander, a popular practice at the time.

  Imran remarks that, despite their ensuing political eclipse, ‘the Niazis continued to think of themselves as a ruling race, and were known for their strong physiques’. There are some colourful if, perhaps, occasionally also tall tales of the family’s exploits over the years, particularly at the time of the Indian Mutiny. In the 1930s, a great-uncle of Imran’s named Khan Beg Khan served as a police superintendent in the Salt Range, some 320 kilometres (200 miles) west of Lahore. One winter, Imran recounts, some villagers reported that a leopard had been seen making off with their livestock, and appealed to Supt. Khan for help. ‘My uncle took three policemen with him,’ Imran says, ‘and rode off to see what he could do. They spotted the leopard on a ridge and my uncle began to approach, a pistol in his hand. By now the leopard, well used to terrorising the villagers, was quite fearless: it began to growl and hiss, warning my uncle not to come any closer. All of a sudden the leopard charged; my uncle fired and missed, and the next minute the leopard was on him. Two of the policemen ran away … Luckily my uncle was wearing a thick winter overcoat, and he managed to ram his watch down the leopard’s mouth as it tried to go for his jugular.’ Imran concludes his account by noting that his great-uncle had subsequently spent six months in hospital with his injuries, but had recovered and lived to be 100.

  Imran’s maternal tribe, the Burkis, were of similarly hardy stock. Like the Niazis, it was in their nature to respond to a challenge. An affront to their friends or themselves, especially one that called into question their nang, uncapped their ample reserves of anger and righteous indignation. The Burkis were among the earliest followers of the 16th-century Pathan chief Pir Roshan, who led a revolt against the Mogul emperor Akbar after he had declined to destroy some Hindu temples when given the chance to do so. This, too, proved to be a principled but ultimately ill-advised alliance: Akbar crushed the uprising and resettled the Burkis in camps around the Indian fort town of Jullundur, some 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of Lahore. Several of the tribe known thereafter as Jullandari Pathans were later to migrate to the mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan and Persia, and as far west as Turkey. In time, Zaman Khan would become the first Muslim resident of the small Lahore neighbourhood that was settled by the government’s Evacuee Property Board and effectively turned into a family compound in the years following Partition. By the mid-1980s there were 46 Khans and Burkis living side by side in the same development. Imran’s childhood friend Haroun Rashid describes it as a ‘very pleasant, upper-middle-class residential area [with] many large trees, old houses and a village feel to it’. In later years it earned the somewhat unkind nickname ‘Jurassic Park’ because of its inhabitants’ physical size and alleged mental shortcomings. The uniting family theme, once again, appears to have been a healthy lack of respect for any form of central authority, coupled with a broad streak of individualism or, on occasion, eccentricity. As a boy, Imran had fond memories of his uncle Ahmad Raza Khan, who was known to enliven proceedings at Zaman Park by rolling around on the floor with his pet leopard — something of a Khan tradition. According to a source who asked for anonymity, there had been one ‘heart-stopping’ moment when the animal broke free and ran out on to the street, pursued by Ahmad Raza, where it eventually ‘leapt through the window of a small house [and] chased an old lady off the lavatory’. Shortly after this incident, Mr Khan made a gift of the leopard to the Lahore zoo.

  Intelligent, well-off, reverent, but no more so than many diligent Muslim families, Ikramullah, Shaukat and the five Khan children never took their life of comparative privilege for granted. According to a cousin, it was a ‘paternalistic, unostentatious, self-effacing’ household. Ikramullah, a London-trained civil engineer, was in the habit of quoting the Koran’s teaching that ‘no one [was] above or below anyone else’, a principle he applied daily in his own life. To a junior colleague named Waris Sharif, ‘He was the most gracious man, and always paid you the compliment of listening closely.’ There were times when the family dinner table also included the domestic servants, hired hands, or even occasional passers-by seeking a handout, vivid instances of the tolerance and egalitarianism that stand out in the memories of friends and neighbours. The Khan children were positively encouraged to excel, if only because it was in their own interests to do so; there would be ‘no subsequent trust funds [or] large inheritances’. In later years, Imran was at pains to stress that he couldn’t possibly be a playboy, since ‘playboys have plenty of time and money. I have never had either.’

  For all that, he enjoyed a materially comfortable, urban — and, increasingly, urbane — childhood. No. 22 Zaman Park was a spacious, six-bedroomed brick home of 1950s-stockbroker decor. According to one visitor, there was a ‘teak cabinet the size of a coffin, woven farashi rugs and doilied armchairs’. A water buffalo grazed in the back garden. The family also farmed several hundred acres of sugar cane outside Lahore. Every summer they escaped the heat by decamping either to Ghora Ghali, near Islamabad, or to a resort called Murree in the foothills of the Himalayas, where Imran acquired a love of the ‘bright, crystal-clear climate’ and exotic wildlife.

  More important than material considerations, Imran grew up with a sense of inner authority that came from being the apple of his parents’ eye: the lovingly indulged only son. He clearly inherited qualities from both sides of the clan, the spiritual instinct and sporting prowess of the Burkis, and the dour application of the Niazis. The boy Imran displayed a masterful self-confidence from an early age.

  For the Khans, the summers also meant camping and shooting (game only) and ample scope for kite-flying, both solo and competitive. The last hobby seems to have become an increasing fetish, and I was told that as a six- or seven-year-old Imran had regularly run for more than 3 kilometres (2 miles) from one end of Zaman Park to the other, a contraption ‘painted like the Pakistani national flag’ fluttering above him. To add to the already punishing training regimen, he sometimes carried a pillowcase filled with rocks on his back. In later years when people asked Imran about his remarkable stamina, he always mentioned the kites: ‘I would sprint, not just jog along,’ he invariably pointed out. ‘It would often be like an obstacle course — over walls, hedges, fields, roads and ploughed land … My legs and knees got tougher and tougher.’ On a more sedentary note, Imran enjoyed his food, particularly the heavily spiced curries (the typical Pakistani is not a vegetarian), and most forms of local music. He was known to attend extended performances of Qawwalis, the mystic songs traditionally played on a stringed instrument called the sarangi that can take up to half-an-hour to retune between numbers, a more leisurely pace than that set even at the Pink Floyd concerts Imran later enjoyed. As well as Lahore’s spring festival he always looked forward to the Eid ul-Fiter, or Small Eid (as opposed to the more ascetic Eid ul-Azha, or Big Eid), a major religious celebration that marks the end of Ramadan, when families come together to share a meal broadly in the spirit of the American Thanksgiving. Lahore’s Aitchison College, which he attended between the ages of seven and 16, was a sprawling, tree-lined campus whose curriculum perhaps over-emphasised Britain’s former colonial glories. But compared to most local schools it was a bastion of learning, where Imran was once sent across the playing field into the 10-year-olds’ classroom to recite what one of them describes admiringly as ‘some long verse or some long poem’, which he did in an ‘already deep, mellifluous voice’. Other contemporary accounts recall Imran’s ‘inner poise’ or ‘seriousness’. A faded group photograph of the time shows a slightly chubby youngster with his dark hair combed neatly for the occasion, and a not entirely friendly expression on his face. Imran’s older sister Robina considered the international sex symbol o
f later years an ‘ugly little brute’ as a boy.

  What about cricket? Virtually from the moment Pakistan came into being, Imran’s maternal family was busy turning out a galaxy of players who adorned the national sport. (The Niazis, by contrast, reportedly thought the whole thing ‘boring’ and ‘uncompetitive … Hardly anyone [was] ever physically struck.’) Imran’s first cousin Javed Burki was already playing professional cricket in 1955, aged 17, and went on to make 25 Test appearances throughout the 1960s. Another cousin, Majid Khan, didn’t wait even that long; he made his first-class debut just a few days after his 15th birthday. Majid’s father was Jahangir Khan, the Indian Test all-rounder who once managed to kill a sparrow when it came into the path of his delivery as he was bowling against the MCC at Lord’s; the unfortunate bird is still on display in the ground’s museum. In a tradition that was to be significant to Imran, all three of these men went to England to complete their education at either Oxford or Cambridge University. No fewer than six other Khan cousins played at least some form of competitive cricket for a variety of Pakistan clubs (one of whom, Asad Khan, appeared in a single match for Peshawar against Sargodha in November 1961 in which he didn’t bowl, took no catches and was out for 1 — surely one of the shorter careers in professional sport). Literally dozens more, ranging in age from preschool to the long-ago retired, performed on a less formal basis for teams on either side of the national border. Before partition, the Jullandari Pathans had sometimes turned out 22 men to play each other in family ‘blood matches’. Imran’s uncle Ahmad Raza Khan, of pet leopard fame, himself a useful bat, served on regional Punjab committees and later became a national selector. In March 1965, he took his 12-year-old nephew with him to Rawalpindi to see the Pakistani Test side, for which both Javed and Majid were lucky enough to have been chosen. Pakistan beat New Zealand by an innings. On the last day’s play Ahmad Raza took Imran into the pavilion and told all his friends there that one day he would be ‘our greatest living cricketer’.