Imran Khan:
Out for a Duck
I interviewed Imran Khan twice: once in 1989, when he was still a bachelor-playboy and captain of the Pakistan cricket team; then again seven years later, after his marriage, when he had entered politics to campaign against corruption in Pakistani public life.
LAHORE, 1989
If you brought together Kylie Minogue, George Michael, Princess Diana, Ian Botham, Prince Charles and Joanna Lumley, bred them, and created some monstrous celebrity super-creature, that being might possibly figure in British gossip columns as prominently as Imran Khan does in the press of Pakistan.
The man is a National Obsession. He combines the status of royalty, the prestige of a cabinet minister and the gossip value of a pop star in a country which doesn’t have any royals, whose cabinet ministers are hopelessly corrupt and whose pop stars are mostly Indian, and therefore national enemies. Every chai-wallah in the country can – and will – give you a breakdown of Imran’s batting and bowling statistics, the details of his horoscope and a list of his girlfriends in pidgin English or Urdu, whether or not you ask him. His sex life is a matter of national speculation.
‘Imran Khan has too many girlfriends,’ my rickshaw driver announced on the journey from the border.
‘I’ve heard he has a soft spot for English girls,’ I said.
‘English girl, yes,’ replied the rickshaw driver. ‘Also Pakistani girl, Indian girl, German girl, Bangladeshi girl. Also they are saying Sri Lankan girl and American girl, French girl, Italian girl, Spanish girl, African girl and Chinese girl. All girl. Lots of too many girl.’
Those not busy worrying about his sex life spend their time trying to marry him off. ‘You see, he is intelligent, educated, and comes from a good family,’ explained the tweed-jacketed schoolteacher in the bus. ‘He’s a very eligible young man.’
More to the point, he is the captain of the Pakistan cricket team. He is the man who turned Pakistan from a very mediocre side in to what is now the world’s second-best team (after the West Indies), and he is also, in many people’s opinion, the best all-rounder currently playing. And he is all this in a country which is utterly fixated on cricket, a game everyone plays and which no one can ignore. Pakistani television is dismal even by subcontinental standards: so as far as entertainment goes there is pretty well only cricket and cricket and more cricket; it has a captive audience of hundreds of millions. The collective gasp as a Pak player is dismissed can be heard several miles in to Afghanistan.
When Pakistan beat India in the 1986–87 Test series, 150,000 people turned up to welcome the team at Lahore’s airport, lining the road in to the city for ten miles. Less than a year later, when India narrowly beat Pakistan in the World Cup, the newspapers reported twenty-seven coronarles and brain haemorrhages up and down the country, and Pakistan went in to national mourning for a week. No wonder then that General Zia personally intervened to beg Imran to come out of retirement, and that he later offered him a prominent ministry in his cabinet.
Following Imran around Pakistan, I soon discovered the extent to which his aura rubs off on those even distantly associated with him. Just having a copy of his autobiography in my hand got me through customs unchecked, and allowed me to change my traveller’s cheques at a special rate. Judicious dropping of his name provided free taxi rides, free meals, discounted hotel bills and enough cups of tea to rupture my bladder. In Sialkot, where every hotel for thirty miles was booked up for the Test match, mentioning the magic word ‘Imran’ got me the manager’s own room. It was handed over to me with the solemnity of a Papal Indulgence. ‘Do not thank me, Sahib,’ said the manager. ‘It is not choice, it is duty.’
Imran Khan is, indisputably, a very good-looking man. I first saw him on the balcony of the players’ pavilion during the Pakistan v. India Test at Sialkot. He was leaning forward on to the balustrade, his familiar dark features and mane of coal-black hair offset by the white of his cricket jersey.
When, a little later, it was his turn to come out to bat, the already volatile crowd exploded in to an orgasm of cheering, horn-tooting, banner-waving and general unabashed idolatry. The people on the terraces leapt to their feet and began dancing and screaming and waving Imran’s picture, until they were commanded to sit by a nonchalant hand signal from their hero. But one section of the crowd refused to obey him. Pakistani cricket is strictly segregated by gender. The men may have got the hint, but no one was going to stop the normally silent Pakistani sisterhood from having their fling. From behind the canvas shelter of the women’s enclosure came a deafening racket of adoring screams and a slow, high-pitched chant in Punjabi.
‘What are they saying?’ I asked the man sitting next to me.
‘These ladies are saying that they want to marry Imran Khan,’ he replied, blushing slightly. ‘And they are saying that their love is like an ache in their belly.’
Yet Imran is in many ways an unlikely sex-symbol. When I arrived for supper at the house where he was staying, I had to sit waiting for five minutes while he finished his prayers. The names of the internationally glamorous may trip off his lips in his conversation (‘Sting and I never really hit it off …’ ‘Ian Botham’s just a common bully …’ ‘When Mick Jagger was here …’) but Imran is nevertheless a practising Muslim who prays to Mecca five times a day and goes to the mosque on Fridays. When he came to greet me, I expressed surprise at the intensity of his devotions.
‘I am a humble sinner like anyone else,’ he said. ‘But I have a very strong faith in God and try to live by the rules of the Koran.’
It was not the reply the gossip had led me to expect. But then again, it was not totally impossible to believe. Imran was sitting cross-legged on a divan, swathed in a voluminous white woollen salwar kameez and a matching Kashmiri shawl. His friends were sitting around a pile of rice and spicy chicken, eating with their hands. There was no alcohol: Imran is a strict teetotaller. Like everything in Pakistan, the meal was segregated. The men ate in the living room amid the Afghan carpets, the tribal pillows and the portrait of Mr Bhutto. The women prepared our food in the kitchen. Whatever he gets up to in England, Imran Khan is a Pakistani Muslim at home. I mentioned, as delicately as I could, that I had heard he was not always exactly puritan in his lifestyle.
‘Well, I am someone who likes to enjoy himself,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m not extravagant. I have simple tastes. I love the wilderness. I like shooting, I like walking. I don’t like spending my time in the South of France or Monte Carlo hanging out in nightclubs.’
He picked a lump of chicken from the pilaff and munched it thoughtfully. ‘I suppose I like a bit of both lifestyles. I spend summer in England seeing my friends – ten appointments a day – then come home to Pakistan in winter. Time slows down. I get mobbed if I go in to the streets, so my life here is very private. I have a close circle of friends who I see a lot of, but I hardly ever go out. I’m very shy. I get awkward if I’m recognised.’
Imran is an intriguing compendium of contradictions: extrovert and cripplingly shy, openly arrogant yet disarmingly modest, austere and sensual, jet-set yet oddly primitive. He can switch from one persona to another with remarkable ease. The cricketer and the gossip-column playboy are the familiar façades, the pious Muslim is another face. There is also Imran the Oxford graduate who has strong and fairly coherent political views, has written a very readable autobiography and is working on a travel book on the Indus.
Yet perhaps the most surprising aspect of his character is his tribal sympathies. Imran is a Pathan of Afghan origins, and is highly conscious of it (even if his critics like to point out that he doesn’t actually have more than a bare smattering of Pushtu, the Pathans’ tribal language). The friends with whom he was staying were Pathans, as was Zakir Khan, the only other member of the Pakistan team invited to supper. Imran’s cricket bat and sportswear are made by a company owned by a Pathan of his own tribe. If he eventually submits to an arranged marriage – which he thinks a possibility – it will o
nly be to a Pathan girl: ‘All my sisters have married Pathan husbands. If I let my father choose my wife, he would almost certainly choose a Pathan. My family came to the subcontinent from Afghanistan about five hundred years ago but we kept our identity by refusing to marry outside the tribe. That pride of race is deeply ingrained in every Pathan child.’
I asked him if he was therefore irritated by the entire country acting as his personal marriage broker.
‘I just can’t understand this massive concern for my marriage,’ he replied, throwing his shawl around his shoulders. ‘Whenever I’m doing badly in a match the crowds always start screaming, “You’re getting old, you should get married.” I’ve never yet understood why they think marriage would improve either my batting or my bowling. Then there’s the press. I seem to get engaged about three times a year. My father used to get upset when he woke up and read the news – thought I hadn’t bothered to tell him – but even he’s stopped believing it all by now.’
‘Is it just the Pakistani press?’
‘No. It’s worse in India. As a result I get about 80 per cent of my mail from India: these strange letters saying, “You appear arrogant and ambitious, your hair’s thinning and you’re not half as good-looking as you used to be. I just can’t work out why I’m in love with you.” ’
The next morning, a rest day in the Test match, Imran went duck-shooting.
It had dawned foggy and we drove fast through the early-morning mist, narrowly missing bullock carts, pack-donkeys and old men wobbling along on ancient bicycles. After a few miles we came to a border post. The Border Rangers stood to attention and saluted Imran. We left the car and transferred to an open-topped Suzuki jeep belonging to the Rangers. We drove along a straight poplar avenue, once the main road to Delhi, but closed since the Indian border was sealed at Partition. After a few miles we left the avenue, swerved off over stubble fields and arrived at the edge of the marsh.
The fat District Commissioner was waiting for us. He bowed to Imran, crossed over to our vehicle and signalled to the beaters sitting in another jeep. In convoy, we sped off along the causeways. In the near distance, over the marsh, you could see the line of conning towers that marked the Indian frontier. The District Commissioner pointed them out. ‘Better keep down. There was a border skirmish there last week. Three killed.’
Then one of the beaters blew his whistle. The front jeep skidded to a halt and the beaters leapt out and disappeared in to the marsh. Ignoring the Commissioner’s words of warning, Imran jumped on to the bonnet of the jeep. In the distance a small covey of black partridges broke cover. Imran fired twice. He missed with the first barrel, but brought down a male bird with the second, almost at the limit of the gun’s range.
‘It’s the hunter’s instinct,’ he said, beaming boyishly from the jeep’s bonnet. ‘I can never hit duck, because I hate the taste. But a black partridge in a spicy tomato sauce – it would be a sin to miss it.’
After a few minutes a beater appeared from the reeds holding the dead bird above his head. Its markings were stunning: black and red, with the white wingtips offset by the duff khaki of the chest. Imran took the bird and held it aloft. ‘The male is prettier in every species,’ he said, ‘except the human race.’
The Pakistanis are as superstitious as the Irish. The two nations share a phobia of spirits and witches as well as a love and reverence of hermits and healers and holy men.
Imran is no exception. He is the patron of a Sufi pir who, he believes, has the second sight. The pir spent five years naked above the snowline in the Hindu Kush with a wizened guru who taught him to control and discipline his gift. One day the pir returned unannounced to his village in the Punjab. Since then he has never left it except for a single pilgrimage to Mecca, at Imran’s expense. At the Ka’ba in the Great Mosque the pir saw the doors of heaven open and angels stream down to earth and back again.
Imran has complete faith in his pir, and has consulted him on all the important decisions of his life. It was the pir rather than General Zia who brought him out of retirement, and he never embarks on a team reshuffle or a romance without the man’s consent. ‘I have been consulting him for three years and he has never yet been wrong,’ Imran told me. ‘He has extraordinary powers. Everything he has said has come true.’
We drove to the holy man’s village through the evening Punjab. Smoke from dung fires rose from the villages, and the bullock drivers pulled their blankets around them as the sun ebbed and the shadows grew.
We were expected. Urchins clustered around the holy man’s door waiting for glimpse of Imran as he hopped out of the jeep and in to the darkness of the pir’s hut. Like a rabbit in to a burrow, I followed.
What surprised me was the normality of the man. I had expected an elderly, bearded hermit in flowing Old Testament robes. Instead, he was middle-aged, balding and a little plump. His face was honest, almost credulous, and he lived alone in a one-room dive, decorated with pictures of Imran, General Zia and the Great Mosque at Mecca. On one wall he had hung a Sindy doll still wrapped in its cellophane box and surrounded by tinsel. We exchanged pleasantries, accepted cups of tea, fended off the growing crowd outside, then got down to business.
Perhaps sensing an air of scepticism from my corner, the pir turned first to me. Without any prompting or introduction he told me, correctly, that there were six in my family – myself, my two parents and three brothers – then he advised me to stop wasting my time travelling and to get on with writing my book on Delhi. With his silent critic dumbfounded, he turned to Imran.
His visitor drew up his legs and sat cross-legged on the sofa. He had two questions for him, he said. Firstly he wished to know who had stolen a golden chain from his house six months before. He suspected one of his servants. The pir asked him a few questions about the date, the servant’s horoscope and the circumstances of the chain’s disappearance. He scribbled a calculation on a piece of paper, then announced that the chain had been stolen by a female visitor who had been staying that night. Imran nodded. There had indeed been a female visitor that night. The pir checked his calculations and got the same result. Finally, just to make sure, he asked Imran to write down the names of ten people who could conceivably have stolen the chain. Imran complied. The pir ripped the page up and folded the names in to ten identical squares. He got Imran to pick out one at a time, dropping each in turn in to the wastepaper bin. Sure enough, with the inevitability of a card trick, the name left at the end was Imran’s female guest. She, it seemed, was the thief.
Then Imran asked about the next day’s cricket. The Indians’ lead was less than two hundred, and Pakistan looked like snatching an easy victory. Did the holy man foresee any problems? The pir did a calculation, then checked it. His face fell. Imran, watching him closely, began to look worried. The pir did a last calculation, then turned to face his friend.
‘Imran,’ he said. ‘I’ve never lied to you. You must fight hard tomorrow. All is not lost. But the odds are against you. Very heavily against you. I cannot pretend to you that it is otherwise.’
The next day, as a vortex of vultures wheeled overhead, the game started sharp at eleven a.m. Imran scored three runs, and was then bowled a bouncer. As he ducked to avoid it, the ball caught the edge of his bat and went through to the wicketkeeper. There was silence over the entire ground. The umpire raised his finger, and Imran was out. After that the Pakistan batting collapsed. They were all out, for 170, a few minutes before lunch.
Five days later, the corridors of the Hotel Pearl Continental, Peshawar, were seething with cricket fans. They searched out the rooms of the Pakistani players with the instincts of bloodhounds, armed to the teeth with Instamatics and autograph books. Imran, staying under a false name at the very top of the hotel, using the back entrance and the service staircase, managed to elude them. But as an additional precaution he refused to answer the telephone, and had arranged to have his corridor blocked off by paramilitary police. Getting through to have a drink with him after the end of th
e one-day international was like a military operation.
Before long we were joined by our host for that evening, an elder of the Afridi tribe. Mohammed ud-Din Afridi – not his real name – was not at all my idea of a tribal elder. He was tall, sleek, good-looking, wore a crisp Savile Row suit and drove a white Mercedes. Heroin arrived in Peshawar about twenty years ago, and since then it has changed everything. According to Mohammed ud-Din, his money comes from ‘a family business’ and ‘electricals’. According to Peshawar gossip, Mohammed’s family business amounted to the two hundred goats his father used to herd, and everything Mohammed owns he has earned himself in seventeen years – he is still only thirty-seven. His money, so the gossip goes, actually comes from the opium-processing laboratories he owns in Landi Khotal at the top of the Khyber Pass. Whatever the truth, he is also a fanatical cricket fan, and he laid on a party for the captain of the Pakistan team like few that I have ever seen.
We crossed the checkpoint in to the tribal areas, and our Mercedes was joined by an escort of two jeeps filled with armed men and a swarm of motorcycle outriders. We drove for half an hour through the no man’s land of the tribal reserve until we came to Mohammed ud-Din’s palace. Thirty-foot-high walls reared out of the scrub, studded double gates opened before us, and we were presented with a view of a pleasure complex that could have been a James Bond set. Spotlit fountains rained down water in glistening waterfalls. A white neo-classical porte-cochère gave on to a Georgian mansion; it was whitewashed but otherwise looked as if it had been magically transported from Oxfordshire. On one side was a miniature marble mosque, on the other, partially lit by eddies of reflected light, the ha-ha of a deer park, filled with gazelles and peacocks. Round everything was wrapped the great crenellated walls, loaded with climbing roses, honeysuckle and jasmine.
Inside, two hundred of Mohammed ud-Din’s cousins, retainers and tribesmen were waiting. Huge baroque mirrors reflected glistening chandeliers; stags’ heads studded the walls between fans of nineteenth-century muskets and flintlocks; guards armed with Kalashnikovs flanked the doorways. Imran led the way, and after drinks had been served, we filed past the tribesmen in to the dining room. There, a forest of kebabs, skewered lambs and charcoal-roasted pullets had been laid on long trestles, amid great tent-flaps of naan.
The Age of Kali Page 29