Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
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 of 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’.
Even then, everyone in Pakistan seemed to either play or watch the sport that was one of the few truly unifying national activities. Lahore’s Iqbal Gardens, like many other municipal parks, would regularly host ten club matches at a time. Play typically started after breakfast, broke for a lengthy lunch, and continued right through the insistent call for maghrib prayers, signalling sunset. As Javed Miandad would recall, ‘The light was often so bad [the spectators] couldn’t follow the game, but still you kept making your shots.’ There was a particularly vibrant cricket scene in Lahore, where club and even school matches, particularly those where any sort of feud existed, regularly attracted upwards of 5,000 spectators, and became a nursery for the national side. Nine out of the 11 names selected to represent Pakistan in the country’s first ever Test played most or all of their cricket in Lahore. According to the fast bowler Mahmood Hussain, the long-running rivalry between the city’s Government College and Islamia College ‘was a good preparation for the competitive pressures of Test cricket. I always bowled better when the crowd was against me, as so often happened.’ Rising right up in the historical centre of town, the Lahore (later ‘Gaddafi’) Stadium, modelled on the Mogul school of ornate brickwork and arches — reminding some of a clumsily iced cake — opened its doors in November 1959, providing a visually striking symbol of cricket’s local importance. English readers need only to think of Lord’s, painted bright red, soaring out of the middle of Piccadilly Circus rather than modestly tucked away behind a wall in St John’s Wood, to get a bit of the feel. The sport was a prominent part of every young Lahorite’s life and, in fact, a focus for the entire community. It’s said by the Pakistan scholar and traveller Sean Sheehan that when the Test team was in action at Lahore ‘five hundred miles away, near the Afghan border, tribal members [would] huddle around a radio, listening with bated breath and roaring with delight at every run scored’.
Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2006, Imran recalled that ‘From when I was seven to when I was nine, I had dreams in which I would score 100 against England at Lord’s, leading Pakistan to victory. I desperately wanted to be a Test cricketer. I remember clearly wanting that, never thinking I wouldn’t make it.’ It’s a vivid and compelling story, told from the perspective of a fiercely patriotic, middle-aged Pakistani political leader. But some discrepancy exists between Imran’s Sunday Times account and the one he gives in his 1983 autobiography, whose opening sentence is, ‘The game of cricket and I travelled on distinctly separate paths for the first eleven years of my life … quite frankly, I agreed with my father that it was a boring game with too much standing around.’
It’s a small historical point, but one perhaps worth clarifying before we move on. In March 1959, when Imran was six (not seven, as he writes), his mother took him to see Pakistan play West Indies at Lahore’s old Bagh-e-Jinnah ground. It was a generally unhappy occasion, at least from the home team’s point of view. They were routed. The West Indies fast bowler Wes Hall tore through the Pakistan first innings,