Opinion Dreams of Miandad

When the fancy of writing on cricket began to burn in me, Miandad’s was the first face that shot into my mind-scape — I even jotted a list of questions on a scrap of paper during a J-school exercise. I wanted to ask him about the monkey leaps aping Kiran More. That, in hindsight, was perhaps the genesis of my love for the game, its scope for pantomime and histrionics. Cricketing sensibilities were moulded at a more advanced age. So no matter how much he had been written about or talked to, I yearned to interview him and ask (or even irritate) him with that More question. Perhaps even be bullied out of the interaction so that I needn’t change my perceptions of him. A psychoanalytical piece on Miandad is a cricket writer’s dream — there have, of course, been several, blessed as Pakistan is with a generation of fine cricket writers — but the idea never goes stale. Moreover, by the time I plunged into journalism, my perceptions of Pakistan — though not of Miandad — had altered dramatically, the aggression displaced by a genuine affection, and a deep yearning to visit the country.

The love for Pakistani cricketers began as spontaneously as the loathing. Exactly four years later, in another tense World Cup match, when Saeed Anwar’s wrists curled an off-side bound Javagal Srinath delivery through midwicket. No single moment of cricket has captured my imagination like that. I was gutted when his dreamy knock ended and for the first time, I wasn’t really over the moon when Pakistan lost. That flick played over and over in my mind, and it’s still only played in the mind as the much-circulated highlight package

doesn’t feature that shot. It was also the exact moment, I realised (again in hindsight) my cricketing sensibilities reached puberty. In backyard cricket, then on, I batted left-handed, tried (and failed) at playing that stroke of a rare geometric flexing of the wrists.

Suddenly, Pakistan became deeply exotic. Supporting them in the late 1990s and through the early noughties became fashionable, an impulse quite in sync with the rebelliousness of teenage and early adulthood. There was something imminently likeable about their cricketers, foremost their artistry, the rare skills (some call it dark arts), almost mystical, that we could only marvel at. Their wonderfully moody performances made the whole experience of watching them coruscating.

The whole exoticism was fired up by the 2004 series, and the magnificent Pundits from Pakistan by Rahul Bhattacharya. Soon, I’d spent impatient hours waiting for the slow browser to load the Cricinfo despatches by Osman Samiuddin, who later wrote that seminal treatise on Pakistan cricket (The Unquiet Ones) and Kamran Abbasi, a doctor by profession.

But as much as these fine writers forged an idea of Pakistan, I realised that my opinion (even idea) of Pakistan is malformed, something coloured by a sort of second-hand nostalgia, over-romanticised perhaps, of faces primarily of the cricketing sphere (and of course, those of a few politicians, topped by Hina Rabbani Khar) and cities coloured by somebody else’s impressions and observations. Cities that are remote and intimate, or even imaginary like those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s. Cities that only exist in written words and TV screens. Cities that I might never visit in my career. At least, it has seemed so for most of my career, with the 2009 attacks (I had just completed a year of apprenticeship in sports journalism) in Lahore.

So the dream was nipped before it could become an obsession. But with international cricket returning to Pakistan last week, I can embark on this dream again. The dream just to meet the greatest cricketing bully of all time in teeming Karachi, and perhaps be bullied by him. Maybe, then, I’ll start loving Miandad, form my own judgment of him. Or maybe not. Until then, it’s like these lines from Pablo Neruda: “I love you like certain dark things are to be loved. In secret, between the shadow and the soul.”