Kitabı oku: «Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician», sayfa 2

Why did he do it? In his mid-forties, Imran abandoned the comfortable career of the recently retired sports superstar. Tempting as it is to see his decision to enter the unforgiving world of Pakistani politics as a clean break from his past, I think the precise opposite is the case. If anything, it was a straightforward, logical progression. After nearly three decades in Pakistani public life, he’d acclimatised to the country’s peculiar political culture and was uniquely qualified to decry the practice of politics even as he prepared to embark on a political path. President Pervez Musharraf may well have been ‘the most corrupt [and] vile … the worst’ petty dictator of Imran’s acquaintance, but many of the cricket authorities with whom he came into contact every day of his playing career would have made a strong bid for second place. A few of the Pakistan board’s internal memos and various other ‘Eyes only’ documents from the early 1980s have survived. They still exercise a morbid fascination. Taken as a whole, their bloated and sadly unwarranted complacency, and at times breathtaking disdain for their own team make the England authorities of the day seem like paragons of competence. At least one of the senior administrators concerned was to be ignominiously removed from office, an experience that did no discernible damage to his considerable self-esteem. Writing in his autobiography, Imran was to note, ‘Too much is at the whim of powerful individuals. Nepotism and favouritism are rampant … If only those at the top would sanction a radical shake-up of our system, [Pakistan] as a whole would benefit. Unfortunately, their reaction to constructive criticism has never been all that impressive.’ He was speaking of the national cricket selectors, but it would be just as insightful and relevant an overview of his political career 25 years later.

The institutional turbulence of Pakistani public life, then, if anything merely perpetuated the hostile working environment of Imran’s playing days. This extended right through his career, and managed to blight even some of his greatest triumphs. Fresh from winning the World Cup in March 1992, several of the Pakistan players expressed dissatisfaction with their captain (who top-scored in the final itself), or more specifically with his reported suggestion that certain funds go to his hospital rather than to themselves. The Board of Control conspicuously failed to back Imran, with the result that he declined to tour England that summer, signalling the end of his 21-year Test career. Any cricket team can have a falling-out when things are going badly. It takes self-destructive skills of a high order to do so when that team have just become world champions. Four years later, the cup final was staged in Lahore and, perhaps predictably, ended in organisational chaos. The prize-giving ceremony turned into a shoving match between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who watched the melee with a frozen smile, and was eventually brought under control by police in full SWAT gear, against a backdrop of exploding smoke bombs and the widespread kindling of bonfires in the stands. This was not quite the ‘simple, dignified [and] appropriate piece of ceremonial’ the home board had promised in its pre-tournament literature.

Imran’s first year in charge of Pakistan had revealed him as a tough, decisive, sometimes impulsive captain, not immune to occasional erratic streaks yet fortified by common sense. His third Test in office, against England at Headingley, saw what Imran calls some ‘truly bizarre’ decisions by the English umpires, notably one that arguably cost Pakistan both the match and series. This was David Constant’s keenly debated lbw against the Pakistan batsman Sikander Bakht, a verdict which put those with long memories in mind of the Idrees Beg fiasco at Peshawar 26 years earlier. Of course, mistakes happen. But Imran was so stung by the incident that when Pakistan returned to England in 1987 he formally asked that Constant be appointed for only one Test, if even that, of the five-match series. At the time, Constant, still only 44, was widely regarded, at least by his employers, as being at the top of his game. The Test and County Cricket Board declined Imran’s request and then leaked details of it to the press, resulting in ever more colourful variants of Today’s ‘WHINGEING PAKIS’ headline at intervals throughout the tour. (Imran and his board were to prove similarly unresponsive to England’s concerns about the appointment of certain Pakistani umpires to officiate in the return series six months later.) By the time of the third one-day international, before the Tests had even begun, the tabloids were accusing Imran’s team of out-and-out cheating — not a charge any fair-minded man of some integrity, let alone one descended from a long line of Pathan warriors, was apt to ignore. And he didn’t. The repeated allegation was a blow Imran felt personally, if only because of its implied slur on his family honour — ‘The carping never let up. It got to me,’ he told a close English friend. Still, if the general intention of the headlines had been to undermine Pakistan’s or more specifically Imran’s confidence, they seem to have backfired spectacularly. If anything, they galvanised him. The tourists duly won their first ever rubber in England. Their captain, with 21 wickets, was the player of the series. As a rule, Imran wasn’t a belligerent man, but his back went up when he was attacked or put on the defensive. From then on things were never quite the same between the English cricket authorities and the world’s foremost all-rounder.^*

Since the generally tempestuous atmosphere in which Imran operated for so long is such a significant part of the story, it’s perhaps worth dwelling on this relationship just a moment longer. The folk memory of Pakistan’s England tour of 1987 has it that the visitors were ‘serial cheats’, ‘con artists’ who had ‘perfected the art of intimidation’ by histrionic appealing, frequently accompanied by the fielders ‘racing maniacally at the umpires [while their] English opponents could only watch in disbelief … Imran’s men were the most undisciplined team yet seen on these shores.’ This account perhaps requires correction. It’s true a certain petulance occasionally crept into the proceedings, and more than once Imran’s direct intervention was required to prevent what threatened to become a full-scale evacuation of toys from the visitors’ crib. But some background context might be in order. In trying to assess the barely concealed mutual hostility between the Pakistan team and most non-partisan observers, we have to acknowledge that both sides in the debate had ‘form’. That the Pakistanis could be a touch excitable was no newsflash. But the roots of their particular problem with specifically English officialdom were almost certainly deeper and more intricate than the Sun or Mirror let on, and included a whole gamut of neuroses, ranging from rank paranoia to what psychologists call a ‘morbid utterance of repressed infantilism’ — or resentment — towards the former mother country. It’s admittedly unlikely that many of the Pakistani bowlers decided to appeal quite as often as they did because of some sense of post-colonial, psychic frustration on their parts. But it would be fair to say that there was a mutual edge to the proceedings. Imran later reportedly remarked that the ‘utterly unprincipled and vicious smear campaign’ unleashed by his exposure of incompetent authority figures had been one of the hallmarks of his career.

The following list of incidents is by no means exhaustive.

The second Test, at Lord’s, of the England-Pakistan series of 1974 ended in some disarray when the tourists’ manager Omar Kureishi called a press conference to protest at the inadequate covering of the pitch, which had opened up a conveniently placed crack for the English bowler Derek Underwood to exploit. Kureishi’s opening remark was, ‘Gentlemen, I am not accusing you of cheating but of gross negligence.’ Harsher words followed, in the privacy of the Pakistanis’ hotel, over how such conditions could ever have existed at the ‘so-called headquarters of cricket’. It would be true to say that there was a broad tendency among many of the tourists, Imran included, to interpret such incidents in a racist light.

Two years later, the touring Pakistani captain Mushtaq Mohammad made much of the ‘absurd’ umpiring that he believed had cost his side the series. This time the venue was the West Indies. Seeming to confirm the Pakistanis’ impression of institutionalised bias against them from whatever quarter, the next major incident, in October 1978, came at Faisalabad. The final day’s play in a generally ill-tempered encounter between Pakistan and India was delayed by 15 minutes to allow the umpire Shakoor Rana to harangue several of the players. This was not to be an entirely isolated incident in Rana’s long career. Nine years later, standing at the same ground, he became embroiled in a discussion about gamesmanship with the England captain Mike Gatting. The language employed throughout the exchange was basic. Six hours of playing time were then lost while Gatting, to his very vocal displeasure, eventually composed a written apology acceptable to Rana. As a result of this and other perceived slights, the Pakistan board initially withheld a substantial slice of the guarantee money owed to their English counterparts. The England authorities replied by awarding £1,000 to each of their players by way of a ‘hardship bonus’, a move that did not visibly improve the host team’s mood at the post-tour press conference.

In April 1984, the International Cricket Conference (ICC) gave its blessing to a triangular 50-over competition between Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka held in the Asian equivalent of Las Vegas, Sharjah. The venue was the newly opened 24,000-seat United Arab Emirates Association stadium, set in a vast tract of arid wasteland where Bedouin had roamed not long before. Alas, the cricket itself rarely lived up to the surroundings. But the tournament was significant nonetheless, because it was the first ICC-sanctioned series to employ exclusively ‘neutral’ umpires — umpires, that is, born and raised anywhere other than the three competing nations. From then on, this concept of non-aligned officials became something of a fetish for Imran. In October 1986, he persuaded the Pakistan board to appoint neutral umpires for the home series against the West Indies, to the evident satisfaction of both teams. Despite this initiative, the England authorities stubbornly resisted the temptation to assign two independent umpires to each Test for another 16 years. To Imran, for one, the delay was unconscionable, and could have only one explanation. ‘It reeks of colonial arrogance,’ he wrote. In the meantime his entire tenure as Test captain was punctuated by a series of umpiring controversies, often involving home officials such as Rana as well as English ones such as Constant. Highly debatable decisions, incredulous stares, on-field exchanges of pleasantries, calamitous press conferences, and spurious but widespread allegations of gambling, ball tampering and even food poisoning — these were the backdrop to the most successful career in Asian sports history.

The combustible world of Pakistan cricket was also frequently enlivened by charges of match-fixing, much of it reportedly centred on the ground at Sharjah. The ever voluble Sarfraz Nawaz would be neither the first nor the last player to go public with this particular allegation. But whether Sarfraz’s claim was deliberate or compulsive, there is no doubt the Pakistan team were affected by it. Although Imran himself was above reproach, he was made vividly aware of the rumours on a daily basis, chiefly by a Pakistani press never inclined to ignore or bury a good scandal. In fact some of the most lurid headlines on the subject came not in London but in Lahore and Karachi. It reached the point where in April 1990, at Sharjah, Imran felt compelled to gather his players together in the dressing-room before the start of play in a one-day international and have each of them swear on a copy of the Koran that none of them stood to gain by Pakistan losing.

The gladiatorial atmosphere in which Pakistan typically played their cricket also, perhaps not surprisingly, contained an element of crowd participation. In December 1980, Pakistan hosted a Test against the West Indies at Multan; Imran took five for 62 in the visitors’ first innings. Late in the match the West Indies bowler Sylvester Clarke, apparently aggrieved at being struck by an orange peel while fielding on the third man boundary, retaliated by throwing a brick into the crowd. It was an incalculably cretinous thing to do, but, even so, the response was somehow peculiarly Pakistani. A press photographer’s close-up of a victim of Clarke’s assault bleeding from a head wound was blown up and became a popular poster in bus and train stations throughout the country. Some time later, disgruntled students invaded the pitch in the course of a one-day match between Pakistan and India at Karachi. Imran, who was bowling at the time, calmly assessed the situation, removed a stump, waved it under the nose of the lead demonstrator and reportedly offered to impale him with it. After that there was a loss of interest on the student’s part in prolonging his stay on the field. Sometimes the source of the trouble was even closer to hand; at Perth, in November 1981, Javed Miandad became probably the first player to threaten to brain another one during a Test, after Dennis Lillee had kicked him. Lillee later admitted to having also given Javed some ‘verbal’, but insisted the Pakistani batsman had ‘overreacted’; a not unheard-of development.

For Imran Khan, the perennially embattled cricket superstar, a career in politics must have seemed almost tranquil by comparison. It’s rare for a player not only to operate at that level, in what he once called the ‘toxic’ atmosphere of Pakistan sport, but also to have graced the game in its every format around the world, chiefly in England. Although Imran took some time to find his feet in his adopted home, several good judges were left in no doubt, even then, that his arrival on the scene marked that of a major new talent. In July 1975, a 19-year-old Cambridge freshman named Alastair Hignell walked out to bat in the university match against Oxford at Lord’s. Hignell had been away on an England rugby tour of Australia until the eve of the game, and ‘therefore had no idea what to expect from the bowler ominously pawing at the ground before starting his run-up somewhere in the mid distance. Sure enough, it was a terrifying barrage … At one point, I took the wrong option and ducked into a bouncer which hit the fleshy part of my ear and ricocheted past the wicketkeeper in the direction of the pavilion. I was hoping for a single to fine leg to get off strike, so set off immediately. As it happened, the ball hit the boundary wall before the fielder could intercept it, but for some reason the umpire, John Langridge, didn’t bother tapping his leg for leg byes and instead signalled four runs … As I was trotting by I pointed out that the ball hadn’t hit my bat, but had bounced off my ear which by now was red, swollen and throbbing painfully. “Listen, sonny,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, as Imran again limbered up in the distance. “You’re not going to be here long, anyway. You might as well take all the runs you can get.”’

* For the statistically minded, 83.3 per cent of the Tests Pakistan played under Imran’s captaincy thus ended in a win or a draw; Mike Brearley, widely regarded as the Freud of modern Test captains, scored 89.5 per cent, while for Imran’s contemporary Ian Botham the figure falls to 66.6 per cent.

* Reflecting on the incident, the veteran journalist Antao Hassan told me that ‘It was really a question of what’s now called ageism’; Saeed was already 31 when he was dropped — ‘virtually senile’ in a national cricket culture that puts an extreme premium on youth.

* David Constant declined to comment on his feelings, if any, about Imran when I contacted him in 2008. However, Constant’s sometime colleague Dickie Bird was happy to oblige. He told me that in his experience Imran had ‘play[ed] within the spirit and the law’ of the game, and that he had ‘never had a problem with him’.

TWO Of Hospitality and Revenge

‘Once, when I was 13,’ Imran recalls, ‘I was stopped by the police while I was driving my father’s motor car. Of course, I didn’t have a licence. So I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. I bribed the policeman. He took the money and I drove away again scot-free. But later that day the chauffeur, who’d been sitting next to me in the car, reported the incident to my mother. She was livid.’ According to at least one reliable account of the ensuing five minutes of ‘peak-volume drama’ this was, if anything, to underestimate Mrs Khan’s reaction. She ‘literally turned purple’. Those who witnessed (or even heard of) the fury of this normally serene, well-bred lady would long marvel at the scene, speaking of it like old salts recalling a historic hurricane. The gist of her remarks was that by resorting to bribery Imran had brought a terrible shame both on himself and his family. No punishment was too severe for this uniquely heinous offence. Had she had anything to do with it, he would have been sent to gaol. Imran’s spluttering attempt at a defence, in which he protested that other boys of his age had done the same thing — or would have done so, given the chance — was cut short by his mother’s abrupt verdict on the matter. ‘You’re not other boys,’ she reminded him, decisively. ‘You are a Pathan.’

The story illuminates Imran’s childhood, and perhaps his later life, on a number of levels. There’s the fact that his family even owned a car (which one party insists was ‘a sort of limousine — perhaps even a Mercedes’) in the first place, at a time when most Pakistanis travelled exclusively by the country’s notoriously congested train or bus network, if not on foot. At Partition in 1947 the entire Pakistan road system covered just 17,500 kilometres (10,900 miles), of which asphalt roads made up less than 20 per cent; as late as 1967, a couple of years after the bribery incident, the number of privately owned vehicles was estimated at only 240,000, more than half of which were motorcycles, out of a population of some 62 million. Then there’s the matter of the chauffeur, one of four servants employed in the Khans’ home in the exclusive Zaman Park suburb of Lahore, and the significant detail that the 13-year-old Imran had the sort of resources about him with which to bribe the policeman in the first place, let alone the chutzpah to pull it off. The hardship and rawness of the country as a whole, the family’s striving to ‘compete and contribute … [their] utter disdain of sitting around by the pool’, or of aristocratic languor of any sort, were real enough. But the five well-dressed Khan children, the car and the driver, the domestic help, the generous pocket money — all belied the later, well-publicised images of poverty certain Western political commentators would call on to promote Imran as a ‘man of the people’.

Clearly the key message, though, lay in his mother’s terse summation, ‘You are a Pathan.’ To her, as he later wrote, ‘that was synonomous with pride and honesty’. Central to the tribal identity of the Pathans (or ‘Pakhtuns’) is strict adherence to the male-centred code of conduct, the pakhtunwali. Foremost in this is the notion of honour, or nang, followed in turn by the principle of revenge, or badal. It would be fair to say that the two concepts are closely linked, as the pakhtunwali makes clear that offences to one’s honour must be avenged, or else there is no honour. Although minor problems may be settled by negotiation, murder demands blood revenge, and until recent times women caught in illicit sexual liaisons ran the risk of being severely beaten or killed by a male relative, part of a punishment ritual reserved for crimes of an ‘immoral’ nature known as karo-kari. Vendettas and feuds are also an endemic feature of Pathan social relations, and often handed down through the generations. There are said to be ongoing disputes today over land or women whose origins lie in the Middle Ages. On a more congenial note, the tribal code also stresses the importance of melmastia, or hospitality, and a complex etiquette surrounds the protection and entertainment of one’s guests. A Pathan is required to give refuge to anyone, even one’s enemy, for as long as that person chooses to remain under his roof. To fail to do so is a gross dereliction of nang. Although Imran was to adapt successfully to most aspects of the host culture while living in England, and certainly its more relaxed approach to karo-kari, the Pathan code as a whole remained integral both to the competitive cricketer and the man. His father Ikramullah Khan’s tribe, the Niazis, could trace their ancestry back to 12th-century India, and were still waging a guerrilla war against the Mogul empire when the latter transferred authority to the British crown 700 years later. His mother Shaukat’s, the Burkis, were a Turko-Afghan nomadic clan with a long commercial and military tradition, who turned to the Muslim faith; as Imran recalls, she was the devout one of the Khan family. Following Partition, a number of the Burkis migrated to Lahore, where they produced a remarkable sporting dynasty: no fewer than eight of Imran’s maternal cousins went on to play first-class cricket, two of whom, besides himself, captained Pakistan. As a rule, the Khans were intensely loyal, if not fanatically so, to their adopted country. They invariably spoke Urdu, not English, and were openly contemptuous of the kala sahibs (‘black masters’), the members of the Pakistani professional classes who shamelessly aped the mannerisms of the departed British. Taken as a whole, both the Niazis and the Burkis were formidable examples of the Pathan tribal ethic, whom training and instinct had taught to be tough, capable and self-sufficient even as they assimilated into modern urban life. The children of such people aren’t apt to be weaklings.

He was born Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi on 5 October 1952, not, as recorded in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and elsewhere, on 25 November. It was both traditional and somehow appropriate that there would be an ‘administrative foul-up’, Imran recalled, when he came to obtain his first passport, resulting in an official filling in the wrong date. Fitting, too, that he would be called Imran (which means ‘construction’, or ‘prosperity’), and be known by his monosyllabic paternal surname, with its tersely assertive ring. In Pathan culture, each tribe has a ‘khan’, meaning ‘lion’ or ‘chief’, at its head. The word is thought to come from the Turkish khaqan, which has the specific connotation of being a conquering warlord. Since Imran himself has dabbled in astrology and isn’t above consulting a clairvoyant before making a major decision, it might be added that he’s a Libra, and thus said to be freedom-loving, refined, idealistic, sincere, broad-minded, truth-seeking, expansive, flirtatious and virile, among several other virtues. Being both precocious and male (one sister preceded him, and three followed), he seems to have been doted on as a small boy. Without wishing to descend too far into the abyss of psychiatry, biographers always seem to recall Sigmund Freud’s line on these occasions: the dictum that ‘a man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror’ was undoubtedly true here. The young Imran was also something of a loner, by all accounts. At family gatherings his mother and others would sometimes notice him ‘drift[ing] apart from the crowd’ of relatives. Aged only three or four, a cousin told me, ‘he would always be off stargazing by himself’.

Imran’s birth preceded that of Pakistan’s international cricket by just 11 days. The national team played its first ever Test, against India at Delhi, in October 1952. The Indians won by an innings. Pakistan had also just embarked on its long and continuing history of political turmoil. The founding father and Quaid-e-Azam (‘great leader’) of the modern state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had died in 1948, some 13 months after independence. His hand-picked successor, Liaquat Ali Khan, was fatally shot by a Pathan fanatic at a public rally in Municipal Park, Rawalpindi, in October 1951. (The former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated just outside the same park 56 years later; the first medical worker on the scene was the son of the doctor who had tried to save Liaquat’s life.) Elsewhere, it was the era of the Korean War, H-bomb tests and Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe. In London the talk was of the perennial balance of payments crisis, as well as more pressing issues such as an electrical workers’ strike, pickets and power cuts. Agatha Christie’s stage adaptation of her radio play The Mousetrap made its West End debut in the week Imran was born half a world away.

Imran later told an English friend that he hadn’t had a particularly happy, or unhappy, childhood. Instead he described it as secure and serious. One assumes he meant secure in the family sense, because he was born into a world of violent change. The state of Pakistan was just five years older than he was, brought into being after the end of British rule, when two new countries were created to form predominantly Muslim West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with Hindu-majority India wedged in between. Even at the time, many observers had feared that the amputation of the subcontinent along religious lines would result in wholesale administrative chaos. It did. What ensued was some way short of a textbook example of smooth decolonisation. An estimated 700–800,000 people died in the riots that followed Partition, which also created some 14 million long-term refugees. It would be fair to say that, to many Indians, the very creation of Pakistan was seen as a violation of India’s geographical, cultural and religious boundaries. The two nations would enjoy an at best strained relationship, not least in the disputed sub-Himalayan outpost of Kashmir, and pursued differing alliances around the world. While India looked to the Soviet Union as a strategic ally, the Pakistanis sought support from the Americans by portraying themselves as tough anti-Communists with a British-trained military, based only a cannon’s shot away from the southern Russian border. In October 1952, President Truman spoke to a joint session of Congress of ‘halt[ing] Red expansion by helping develop the resources of the third world’, which he proposed to do by committing an initial $210 million-worth of military hardware and training, a somehow familiar-sounding gesture today.

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.