Little did he know it, but finding the land for the site was to be the least of his challenges. The eventual construction costs would soar impressively, while Imran faced a barrage of criticism, much of it coming from the Karachi area, to the effect that the project was more about a giant ego trip on his part than about helping the sick and dispossessed of Pakistan. ‘There was negativity through envy,’ said Imran’s cousin, Dr Nausherwan Burki, who became the hospital’s first chief of staff. The scope for bribery and outright fraud was also apparent from an early stage. One alleged surgeon who sent in his CV for consideration was later revealed to be a ‘serial lunatic’ who had received his sole medical training by watching imported American television sitcoms. Other would-be staff were similarly sent packing, guilty, apparently, of some form or another of financial scheming that Imran and his board of governors found unacceptable. By mid-1989 fundraising was well under way, with an initial target of some $8 million. Twelve months later it became clear that the $8 million would barely cover start-up costs, and that Imran would be committed to keeping the enterprise afloat for years to come, if not for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s cricketers of the day were never quite certain if and when their officially designated captain would join them on the field of play. Sometimes only Imran himself knew much in advance whether he would deign to appear in a particular series. To call him the Frank Sinatra of the international sports world would be to confer a somewhat flattering sense of consistency on a player who seemed to rest, or retire, and then come back on roughly an annual basis. Of course, it’s also fair to say that he had rather more in the way of extracurricular activities than the average Test cricketer. A friend remembers Imran going up into the Pakistan highlands around October 1989 for a long weekend to get away from it all. In the event, on all three nights he stayed up until nearly dawn writing his hospital development material. Back in Lahore, he spent most of the next month at the same task.
Imran, then, worked typically hard to see through a project taking place in a country where large-scale capital works tended to attract the attention of interest groups, politicians seeking rewards for providing the necessary building permits and contractors earning grossly inflated sums to work outside their strictly prescribed hours. He read every available regulation on Pakistan’s national healthcare system, an impressive feat in itself. He also visited dozens of clinics and doctors’ surgeries around the country. The existing situation was ‘a disaster’, Imran concluded. Years later he would recall going to one state-run hospice in Lahore where ‘three or four small children suffering from cancer had to share a filthy bed’. There were no funds for modern equipment or even the most basic sanitary requirements, although, curiously enough, the government was able to maintain its own lavishly furnished hotel-cum-infirmary for members of the ruling party and senior military officers. By contrast, Imran vowed to provide treatment for anyone who needed it. Under his proposals, all patients would receive hospital service and follow-up care irrespective of their ability to pay. Although the basic start-up costs were met by private donations, Imran’s plan inevitably brought him into contact with a number of national and provincial officials of the administration now headed by president Ghulam Ishaq Khan and his prime minister Benazir Bhutto. By all accounts, the ensuing meetings followed much the same pattern as Imran’s sessions with the national cricket selectors. If the bureaucrats balked at his requests, he just asked for more. There was nothing unusual about a Pakistani citizen being rebuffed by his appointed representatives. What was novel was a citizen who, when repeatedly rebuffed, refused to back down.
An example of how Imran ‘lorded it over the game of cricket in Pakistan’, to quote the then president, came in his approach to the competitively dubious but well-subscribed one-day internationals staged in the desert fastness of Sharjah. Immediately after having hosted Australia, the Pakistanis flew in to take part in a triangular tournament against India and the West Indies. Despite a number of high-level requests, Imran declined to join the party, citing his lack of match fitness, along with his apparently waning enthusiasm for instant cricket. A fortnight later, Pakistan were in action in the 45-overs Wills Asia Trophy, where they narrowly lost to the Indians. Still no Imran. Yet in March 1989 he was back in harness for what would appear on the face of it to be the even less alluring two-leg Sharjah Cup series against Sri Lanka. Pakistan won the showdown 2–0. As usual, Javed Miandad was the man who had led his country when Imran wasn’t available, and who stood aside again when he was. ‘It was a strange arrangement,’ in Javed’s measured description. ‘I became used to the charade. Imran was always able to call on me when he was captain; but when I was captain, I didn’t have the same luxury.’
Imran had exercised supreme autocratic power on behalf of the Pakistan team, and over the team, for nearly seven years, but it was power he never particularly enjoyed. As we’ve seen, there were recurrent clashes with the home board and its various sub-committees and panels. Try as he might, he only rarely had the luxury of a close working relationship with his national co-selectors. Imran hardly ever managed to get his way without a fight, and his apparently highhanded methods and attitude to what he saw as ‘meddlers’ and ‘incompetents’ only added to official unease about his leadership. Among the players, there were those who worshipped Imran and those who feared or even loathed him. By and large, they weren’t lukewarm. Over the years he’d had well-publicised disagreements with Majid, Zaheer and Javed, to name only the three most obvious. In 1989 he finally managed to fall out with his old bowling partner Sarfraz Nawaz (by no means a unique achievement on Imran’s part), Sarfraz slamming the phone down on him following a heated exchange. It was much the same story in Pakistan at large: he was either fanatically popular or the target of nearly psychotic abuse. And he was still single, which was considered eccentric in a society that put the premium on settling down from an early age to marry and raise a family. As even the Star, which had directly contributed to the phenomenon, was to remark, the Pakistani public ‘appear[ed] to have the ultimate love-hate relationship with Imran’. For much of the past 15 years, he seemed to have figuratively been either in the village stocks or at the head of a triumphal procession such as no Roman emperor could have dreamt of.
So it may have been with a degree of relief that Imran sat out the 1989 English summer, giving him his first extended break from cricket of his own choosing in two decades. He was apparently approached to play for Yorkshire, of all unlikely clubs, and there were protracted talks about him turning out on a limited basis for Middlesex. Nothing came of them. The popular assumption, at least in The Times, was that it was ‘madness’ for the world’s leading all-rounder to voluntarily miss out on the action. But the madness was not without method. From March to October that year he was based in London, and seems to have had no trouble in filling his time. There was more work to be done on the hospital appeal, with Imran tapping both commercial organisations and a number of his celebrity friends for support. Mick Jagger gave a reported £20,000. Other activities included hunting and shooting, visiting Tramp and continuing to serve as a spokesman for Save the Children and UNICEF. He was also beginning to speak more and more often, in somewhat Delphic terms, about the iniquities of life both in Pakistan and the West. To at least one Lahore newspaper, it would later seem that Imran’s politicisation had been the logical result of ‘coming into close and prolonged contact with the physically beset’ in the course of his hospital research. The hint of things to come was enough to lead the current premier, Benazir Bhutto, to remark that her Oxford contemporary would make a ‘valued’ public servant.
Meanwhile, he was still squiring a formidable number of attractive young things, quite apart from Susannah Constantine, around town. Whenever the cameras caught him with the latter, there seemed to be a boyishly happy leer on Imran’s face. Whether or not the couple were ever engaged, as some speculated, he invited her to go with him on a Test tour of Australia that winter, where, in a
ll innocence, she once suggested that Imran might care to lead his opponents out on to the field of play as a gesture towards her favourite charity. (He declined the offer.) Back in England, Constantine took Imran to shooting parties at various country houses, where he once distinguished himself by appearing in a ‘hideous sweater with pheasants on it. It went into the bin,’ said the future co-host of What Not To Wear. Within a year or so, the couple had drifted apart. If anything, Imran seems to have then only stepped up his love life, while shunning anything remotely resembling a commitment. ‘And why not?’ an intimate friend remarks; ‘he was a bachelor, so why grudge it to him? And no one was ever hurt.’
The women? One or two of them may have had longer-term designs on Imran, but everyone understood soon enough that there was nothing doing. One overnight acquaintance recalled having been ‘distinctly unmoved’ when he allegedly shouted out the wrong name (‘his own name’, in some scurrilous versions) during sex. But on the whole an atmosphere of good humour and urbanity prevailed. ‘I wasn’t a saint,’ Imran conceded, reflecting on this phase of his life. ‘But nor was I a typical playboy. I didn’t drink, smoke or dance, and I never went out of my way to have a great social life. I kept to a few places I knew. If you were flying off for a wild weekend in Paris or somewhere, I wasn’t interested.’
In the midst of these other activities, Imran had begun studying the Koran. His renewed interest in the subject came in the wake of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the subsequent offering of a large sum of money by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the 86-year-old Supreme Leader of Iran, to suborn the murder of the author and his associates. Rushdie’s Japanese, Italian and Norwegian translators would all duly be killed or attacked, while Aziz Nesin, his Turkish translator, was the intended target in a July 1993 massacre when a mob of protestors set fire to a provincial hotel where he was staying. On that occasion 37 people died. Imran was to remark of The Satanic Verses that it led him to a fresh respect for his religion, and that ‘people like me, who were living in the West, bore the brunt of anti-Islam prejudice which followed the Muslim reaction to the book’.
Back at Tramp in the summer of 1989, sitting with the club’s owner and a small group of friends, Imran had given one of them the tip that he wouldn’t play international cricket again. He had spoken of the ‘humiliation’ of dealing with the BCCP bureaucrats. Most of the media weren’t much better. However, two compelling factors now combined to help change Imran’s mind. His cousin and patron Javed Burki had been made chairman of the Pakistani selectors, while his hospital board of governors were similarly keen for him to return to high-level competition as a platform from which to publicise the cause. The result was that Imran agreed to lead Pakistan in the six-nation MRF World Series, also known as the Nehru Cup, staged over three weeks that autumn in India. Even the Karachi press went into raptures at the news. Over and above the genuine enthusiasm for his return, there was a simple reason for the sudden outpouring of goodwill. Without knowing it, Imran was employing what social psychologists call the contrast principle. Another example of this phenomenon would be the plumber who, after gravely examining your leaky bathroom pipe, and muttering about the ‘cowboys’ let loose on it last time around, informs you you have a serious problem but that, given time and effort, he can solve it. By and large even the most battle-hardened consumer will be pathetically relieved at the end result, which is sold to him much like a miracle, and all too glad to pay the bill. Which is to say that certain members of the Pakistani media had apparently come to realise how much they still needed Imran only when he had begun to make himself unavailable. They had good reason to be grateful for his latest comeback. Imran led Pakistan to victory over the West Indies in the Nehru Cup Final, played in front of 100,000 spectators in Calcutta. He was both man of the match and man of the series, leading some to wonder what he might have done had he been fully match fit.
On 10 November 1989, Pakistan played India in front of a sold-out house at the Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore, on behalf of the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital fund. The event raised an immediate 2,902,600 rupees (roughly £250,000), with some twice as much again coming in matching pledges over the next two weeks. The Indians then began another full-scale Test series against Pakistan, their 10th. A civil war having erupted in Kashmir, the contest attracted its fair share of public attention on both sides, and seems to have been another challenge that Imran felt unable to miss.
In the event, India’s third non-military tour of their neighbour in six years proved sadly anti-climactic. All four Tests were drawn. Imran got his way in insisting on neutral umpires, but failed in his bid to adjust the actual hours of play. ‘The first sessions were generally something of a lottery, if they happened at all, because more often than not we found ourselves having to bat and bowl in a heavy morning mist,’ he told me. Several early runs were scored by the expedient of pushing the ball past the bowler and snatching a quick single while the fielders tried to find it. There was a generous amount of external participation as a whole, with the fourth Test at Sialkot repeatedly delayed both by rain and by the crowd pelting the players with rocks.
At 37, Imran now seemed to be coming into his own as a batsman. If the situation required, he could deal in what Wisden called ‘bloodless efficiency’ and even a Boycott-like intransigence. One quite celebrated England all-rounder told me that bowling to him in the 1987 home series had been like ‘bouncing a rubber ball off a wall’. Equally at home going in anywhere between Nos 3 and 9, Imran could also announce himself, as he once did to Kapil Dev, with a languid pull for four off the first delivery he received, and liked nothing more than a good hell-for-leather run chase. In short, he had it all, as anyone who had seen him hit Wayne Daniel over the Lord’s outfield, some temporary seats and a pile of builders’ supplies and into the back of the ‘Q’ Stand bar could attest. Imran’s batting average over the first five years of his Test career was 19.42; in the five years after he took on the captaincy it hovered around 44, while from 1987 until he retired, the figure rose to 67.60, which was to mingle with the likes of Gavaskar, Richards and Border. Accountancy isn’t everything, but the numbers are perhaps worth mentioning if only because they tended to get prominently splashed over the Pakistani media. In the first innings of the first Test, at Karachi, Imran scored 109 not out in a three-hour, slow-fast march which included 17 fours and a six. He would end the series with an average of 87.33; and this wasn’t one of those statistics flattered by a run of not outs and did-not-bats — when he swaggered out to the middle to face Kapil and the other Indian bowlers, ‘he actually looked like he’d score about 87’, one of them recalled.
Meanwhile, some of the zip may have gone from Imran’s bowling, but at 23 his hand-picked successor Wasim Akram was making a fair go of replacing the irreplaceable. Wasim took 18 wickets in the series, more than any other bowler on either side. And yet another prospect was coming up behind, fast. A few weeks before the series began, Imran had turned on his television and seen an impressively brisk 17-year-old turn his arm over in an otherwise forgettable fixture between United Bank and a similar institution. The teenager in question, Waqar Younis, had already caught the eye of the Pakistani Under-19 selectors. But Imran, recognising true firepower when he saw it, insisted that Waqar be fast-tracked through the ranks and straight into the senior team, where he responded by taking four for 80 in the first innings of his debut against India. A further 369 Test wickets would follow before Waqar was finished. A sign of Imran’s confidence in his two protégés, and possibly also of self-confidence, is that he now generally preferred to let Wasim and Waqar take the new ball. If and when the batsmen had seen off the opening pair, Imran himself would stride up, all business, and consent to bowl half-a-dozen overs off a smooth, deceptively short run which still let him hit the crease with a high-jumper’s elevation, the whole performance followed as often as not by an ear-splitting appeal. It remained a thrilling thing.
A mark of Imran’s stature came
when India Cricket magazine decided on its list of its five international players of the year for 1989–90. As a rule, it seems fair to say that this particular publication had tended to favour its native sons: since the annual tradition began in 1946–47, some 65 per cent of those honoured had been Indian born, although there was generally some provision for a particularly distinguished visiting Englishman or Australian. A total of four Pakistanis had been included in the previous 43 years. So it was a gracious gesture now for the magazine to move to recognise Imran, who had ‘contributed so much not only to his country, but to world cricket’. Back home, the main Karachi weekly joined the chorus. ‘The national captain cannot, should not — must not — retire,’ it insisted.
The hortatory blast had little, if any effect. As Imran made abundantly clear to friends, he was now just playing for his hospital. The fact that he had no remaining professional ambitions and that ‘I genuinely don’t care about breaking records’ came up repeatedly, although he was known to add in passing that, after four failed prior attempts, winning the World Cup might be nice. After more muscular pressure from the two Burkis, one the chairman of selectors and the other the hospital’s chief of staff, Imran did agree to tour Australia in December 1989. At least one major Karachi-based manufacturer had gone on record with the somewhat vaguely worded promise to make a ‘substantial donation’ to the Shaukat Khanum, ‘if only our boys will turn on the style against Allan Border’s side’. Imran remarked to a colleague that he would take this as a firm commitment, whether they meant it that way or not.
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