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.
In addition to the class system, many Pakistanis were divided by their attitudes to the departed colonial masters. For every kala sahib, there was an individual like Imran’s father, for whom Partition and independence had excited an almost religious zeal. By and large, both sides of the debate were broadly agreed on the supposed underlying racism of the West as a whole, and tended to be sensitive in cases where, to quote the Mashriq, ‘the white man [had] set his backside on the black man’. This attitude perhaps helps to explain why the ‘Beg affair’ was still being keenly analysed by the Pakistani sporting press 20 years after the event.
In all, then, a political and cultural stew of a nation, a land with a violent hand and empathetic heart. Lahore, Pakistan’s second city after Karachi, offers a particularly rich visual patisserie of ancient and modern: the medieval garrison town with its forts and mausoleums, the so-called ‘Garden of the Moguls’, and its gaudily futuristic 1960s facelift — all concrete slabs and municipal offices built out of giant glass eggshells — so symbolic of the two Pakistans. Following Partition, the word was ‘clearance’, the result acres of dead tramway lines and rubble dumped into the green, still hair-oil of Lahore’s central canal. The town’s ambient smell, at least in winter months, is remembered as a combination of ‘coal fires, waste [and] the crisp tang of fatty foods’. In summer it was as if ‘the whole place had decomposed’. In the words of the architectural writer Simon Jenkins, ‘In no other world city have I seen so much magnificence so neglected … All Pakistan’s history is here, but disintegrating beneath encroaching shanties, cobwebs of wires and piles of rubbish.’
Imran, then, grew up not only in a state in transition, but in its most obviously changed town: he would have been as aware of Lahore’s imperial past as he was of its squat, drab ghettoes and the abject poverty of tens of thousands of its inhabitants. For many, the hardship was institutionalised. Public assistance was rudimentary, at best; cancer, as Imran was to note sardonically, remained a rich man’s disease; and most local schools were basic, in one graduate’s words ‘fail[ing] to satisfy the most minimal academic or even sanitary requirements’. In later years, this always potentially riotous city was to be the scene of regular outbreaks of political unrest and violent anti-government demonstrations. Indeed, Imran himself may have inadvertently played a role in a noted breakdown of municipal law and order when, in May 2005, he took the opportunity of a press conference in Islamabad to draw attention to a Newsweek article about a Koran being flushed down the toilet by American soldiers. Some 17 people died in the subsequent street protests that took place both in Lahore and across Pakistan.* There was a pattern of broadly similar civil or religious disturbances throughout Imran’s youth, even if these tended to be less individually destructive. It was in Lahore that the Muslim League made the first formal demand for a separate Islamic homeland, and where the League subsequently conducted its vigilant campaign against the ‘fetid’ behaviour of non-believers. Several confrontations resulted, including a minor but well-publicised skirmish in May 1961 between local clerics and a group of provocatively dressed American tourists which ended ignominiously for the latter. I was told that the offending parties had ‘turned and run’. On this occasion the only casualties were two Americans who in their haste slipped on wet cobblestones, and one cleric who collided with a bicycle.
Life in Zaman Park was less picturesque, perhaps, than in other parts of Lahore, but it differed little in terms of ritual. There was frequent obeisance to Mecca, as prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad. Although not excessively pious, on Thursday evenings Imran’s family periodically gathered at one of the many local shrines for the chanting of religious songs, and Mr Khan and his son are said to have ‘reasonably dutifully’ attended a mosque on most Sundays and state holidays. (In 1977 the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto changed the ‘day off’ to Friday, among other innovations.) As noted, Imran was also keenly aware of his Pathan heritage, which he could trace back 700 years. Some of his earliest known ancestors exhibited the same refreshingly independent streak that prevails right to the present. The Niazis had first come to prominence in the sixteenth century, when Haibat Khan Niazi was the Governor of Punjab, and helped to build the massive Rohtas Fort near Lahore. Against family advice, Haibat subsequently backed the wrong side in one of the frequent Pathan civil wars. He, his wife and brother were all killed, and their heads displayed on poles by the enemy commander, a popular practice at the time.
Imran remarks that, despite their ensuing political eclipse, ‘the Niazis continued to think of themselves as a ruling race, and were known for their strong physiques’. There are some colourful if, perhaps, occasionally also tall tales of the family’s exploits over the years, particularly at the time of the Indian Mutiny. In the 1930s, a great-uncle of Imran’s named Khan Beg Khan served as a police superintendent in the Salt Range, some 320 kilometres (200 miles) west of Lahore. One winter, Imran recounts, some villagers reported that a leopard had been seen making off with their livestock, and appealed to Supt. Khan for help. ‘My uncle took three policemen with him,’ Imran says, ‘and rode off to see what he could do. They spotted the leopard on a ridge and my uncle began to approach, a pistol in his hand. By now the leopard, well used to terrorising the villagers, was quite fearless: it began to growl and hiss, warning my uncle not to come any closer. All of a sudden the leopard charged; my uncle fired and missed, and the next minute the leopard was on him. Two of the policemen ran away … Luckily my uncle was wearing a thick winter overcoat, and he managed to ram his watch down the leopard’s mouth as it tried to go for his jugular.’ Imran concludes his account by noting that his great-uncle had subsequently spent six months in hospital with his injuries, but had recovered and lived to be 100.
Imran’s maternal tribe, the Burkis, were of similarly hardy stock. Like the Niazis, it was in their nature to respond to a challenge. An affront to their friends or themselves, especially one that called into question their nang, uncapped their ample reserves of anger and righteous indignation. The Burkis were among the earliest followers of the 16th-century Pathan chief Pir Roshan, who led a revolt against the Mogul emperor Akbar after he had declined to destroy some Hindu temples when given the chance to do so. This, too, proved to be a principled but ultimately ill-advised alliance: Akbar crushed the uprising and resettled the Burkis in camps around the Indian fort town of Jullundur, some 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of Lahore. Several of the tribe known thereafter as Jullandari Pathans were later to migrate to the mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan and Persia, and as far west as Turkey. In time, Zaman Khan would become the first Muslim resident of the small Lahore neighbourhood that was settled by the government’s Evacuee Property Board and effectively turned into a family compound in the years following Partition.
