MJ Akbar
Honesty is not quite the best policy in high society. It prefers scepticism. For the local Anglophiles whose day began in the evenings of Lahore, the classical city where Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi grew up, honesty was gauche, and naive. That made Imran Khan a paradox.
Born into privilege but deeply rooted in a Pashto culture inherited from his Niazi tribe, where honour is a defining virtue, he was temperamentally transparent. He had nothing to hide. Deceit invited disdain. The cultural affinities of the English-speaking elite, he said, had created a distance between the ruling class and the people. His presence was always in competitive demand at parties held on the snob heights of Lahore’s high society, but he was never quite ‘one of us’. He remained an outsider with an entrance ticket to the inside.
Imran means exalted, and that was his destiny. Success was in his genes. He was a star of his school cricket team at Lahore’s Aitchison College and then a Blue at Keble College Oxford. He was named captain of Oxford in 1974. Despite family wealth, looks and talent, cricket in the blood, and a cousin Javed Burki who scored a Test century against England, fluttering hearts on the sofa wherever he went, he forgot to learn snobbery.
Always the cynosure
It was not unusual to hear, as I once did at a party in Lahore, a young lady with flickering eyelids put it about that she had just sniffed away an offer of marriage from Pakistan’s most eligible bachelor. There were oohs and aahs, and many a well-done. The Khan might rule the playing fields across the British sports empire, but he was always kept at a fling distance in romance, never close enough for marriage. This young lady became a trifle invisible when Imran arrived later. The gossip reached him. He replied with a bemused smile. Imran was ever bemused and benign, never mean or malign. He was always happy to move away from the central whirl for a quiet chat, all too often interrupted by a socialite seeking his attention.
He was confidently sober at a time when high society was very high indeed and affability was measured in pegs or puffs. Imran Khan, always the cynosure, lived by his own rules. He never drank alcohol or did drugs. He did not consider religion a weakness of proles; he was a believer, and proud to be so. As he writes in his memoir, his parents were “easy-going Muslims”. His father took him to the mosque every Friday. They fasted during Ramadan. The family joined the annual urs to the shrine of a mystic Sufi pir, Mian Mir Sahib, legendary for both Muslims and Sikhs, where music and dancing were part of devotion.
“That is the kind of Islam that the austere Wahhabi branch, which has influenced the Taliban, opposes,” writes Imran in Pakistan: A Personal History. The young Imran had two questions about paradise: “Would I be able to play cricket in heaven? And would I be able to shoot?”
An alternative career
Public life was an alternative career path after his stupendous success as a cricketer and captain. If the ascent was glorious, the peak was heroic. He was nearly 40 when in 1992 he led Pakistan to an impossible victory in the cricket World Cup. What the world did not know was that he played the tournament with a ruptured cartilage in his shoulder. For six months after that tour he could not lift a glass with his right hand without numbing pain.
His second life began with fund-raising for the construction of the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital, named after his beloved mother, who had died of cancer. His close friend Princess Diana would later visit the hospital, which became functional in 1994. The next year he married Jemima Goldsmith. It was a brave decision, given the hardline attitude of fundamentalists, for Jemima was Jewish, daughter of Sir James Goldsmith. (London’s most exclusive nightclub Annabel’s was named after her mother.)
He was confidently sober at a time when high society was very high indeed and affability was measured in pegs or puffs. Imran Khan, always the cynosure, lived by his own rules
Imran Khan was a man of deep convictions. That was a year in which nothing could go wrong. In November 1995 Ian Botham sued Imran for libel for allegedly calling him and Allan Lamb “uneducated racists”. The trial came up before a biased judge. The cost of failure was bankruptcy, given legal fees in London. As Imran Khan has written, defeat would have forced him to ask his father-in-law for money, a prospect he hated. Imran Khan won.