Cricket finds its way into most of Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s novels. In Kartography (2002), Javed Miandad’s last-ball six is used to evoke an unexpected turnaround. A suspicious character bears startling resemblance to Mike Gatting. And in her last novel on the legacy of the Zia years, Broken Verses (2005), a cricket game depicts the improvisation of Karachiites to find a sense of community and recreation in their unique urban landscape. Residents of an apartment block gather in the parking lot in the evening, their cars lined up with headlights on maximum strength, and confidences are exchanged, with attention duly divided with the cricket.So Shamsie was naturally thrilled when international cricket returned to her city in March 2004, with the opening match against India in that “friendship series”. “Finally there was a game in Karachi and we could watch it,” she recalled on a recent visit to New Delhi. There was so much security. She remembers sitting in the Hanif Mohammad stand when an “incredibly loud cheer” went around. She looked, and saw a group of Indian spectators with the tricolour, and other spectators “just standing and cheering” them.It was a sign of things to come. By day’s end, India won a keenly contested tie, and Shamsie says, “I have never seen a Karachi audience so happy with a game they’d lost.”It was a sign that “something has shifted” — in the way Indians and Pakistanis wanted to interact with each other.Cricket has, it can be argued, been the arena in which so many of the major issues in Pakistan have played out. Today, the combined toll of a shock exit from the World Cup and Bob Woolmer’s death is reflected in the departure of captain, chairman and selectors — and the institutional crisis coincides with street protests in Pakistan’s cities over the sacking of the chief justice. To make a parallel would be facile. Cricket is just a game. But it does provide clues to institutional weaknesses and the problems that accrue with “authoritarian leadership and patronage of cricket”.While reporting on India’s tour of Pakistan that spring of 2004, one could find in the local media hints that something — to re-use Shamsie’s phrase — was shifting. Remember, Dina Wadia, only and estranged daughter of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had just visited Lahore for one of the one-dayers. Hotels in Lahore and Islamabad were filling up with tourists and media crews covering something other than war in Afghanistan and extremism. (In stark contrast to the travel advisories that came after a blast outside the team hotel prompted the visiting New Zealand team to abandon the series in May 2002.) The desire for interaction had always been there, noted Karachi-based journalist Beena Sarwar, no regime can command its citizens to embrace visitors. “I think the Pakistanis are eager to show that they are not as black as the western and possibly Indian media has been painting them,” she said, “that they are normal, fun-loving people, who are not fundamentalist — in the extremist, militant sense — and they welcomed the opportunity to prove this.” Mushahid Hussain, a former federal minister, wrote in a column: “These cricket matches brought out the best among the Pakistani people. If the cricket series may have greatly helped to remove some of the stereotypes held among Indians regarding Pakistanis, the cricket matches were uplifting from the point of view of Pakistanis’ self-image as well since these debunked the portrait of Pakistan and Pakistanis often portrayed by a ‘cribbing culture’ that always sees the glass as half empty.”By all indicators, by tour’s end, the isolation that came with military rule, evidence of the post 9/11 blowback, and a military standoff with India was history.A year later, in the summer of 2005, a twentysomething advertising executive would articulate the intense effort spectators made to pull off the transformation at the cricket stadium. “I was at the two one-day matches in Lahore last year,” Aaliya recalled over an after-dinner ice cream in Islamabad. I had fun, she said, but I just did not have the energy to concentrate on the cricket. We were making such an effort to keep up the cheer, to welcome visitors from India, that we didn’t even notice that Pakistan had lost.By then, officials at the Indian High Commission would count the collateral benefits through the ad-hoc conscription of their spouses to handle the thousand-fold increase in issuance of visas.Cricket in Pakistan does not draw anywhere near the kind of spectators and sponsors it does in India. The Pakistan Cricket Board also does not have the kind of clout and autonomy the Board of Control for Cricket in India enjoys. But the relative lack of organisation and facilities brings unexpected — though, as many would argue, in no way proportionate — advantages in terms of the brute flamboyance and raw talent. In an essay ‘Pakistan: identity and tradition’, Australian sports historian Chris Valiotis points out: “The demise of traditional grass-roots cricket, along with a lack of infrastructure, sustainable coaching programmes, and a domestic competition that has historically encountered numerous organisational and financial problems, has meant that vernacular cricketers from poorer backgrounds are given little opportunity or incentive to alter the playing skills of ‘informal’ village and urban cricket. The sudden rise from obscurity that many of them make — an outcome of traditional patronage patterns where senior players with some authority are free to select and recruit payers of their choice — has given rise to a distinct Pakistani style of cricket that challenges the traditional norms of international cricket. This style of cricket is risqué and flamboyant.”It is not a coincidence cricketers who have graduated from tape-ball cricket have perfected the skill of reverse swing. Or that it was Imran Khan, with the immense self-belief reinforced by his lineage, who took an untested Inzamam-ul-Haq to the World Cup in Australia in 1992.There are many more where Inzamam and the now benched Shoaib Akhtar came from. Pakistan cricket’s challenge is to somehow professionalise this raw talent, without stifling it.
