July 6, 2003

WORCESTER was where visiting teams used to start their tour of England and where Bradman routinely made a double century. It was also the home of Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce and Royal Worcester, the makers of fine china. Indeed, it was a part of a visiting team’s programme to visit the factory and we did so. The factory had a ‘Reject Shop’ and as the name suggested any piece that had even a microscopic defect was sold at a considerably reduced price. I was in the throes of becoming domesticated and thought that it was a great chance to get a Royal Worcester dinner set. After the sales lady, all matronly smiles, had packed the dinner set I was told that the price was 800 pounds and would I be paying by cash or cheque? Neither, I wanted to say, I was going to get the hell out of there and I beat a hasty retreat making some lame excuse. It was all very well wanting to be a snob but snobbery came with a price-tag.

Pakistan had batted first and the ground had been bathed in sunshine as if to show that the English summer had a serious side to it. One of the Pakistan batsmen, Waqar Ahmed found the glare too much for him and he appealed against the light. The local evening paper had a headline: “Pakistan appeals against good light.” Waqar Ahmed was the son of Dr Dilawar Hussain, a Test cricketer and educationist and one of the most lovable characters I have ever known. Doctor Saab, as we called him could have taught Stephen Potter, who wrote the book on One-Upmanship, a thing or two on gamesmanship and he regaled us with anecdotes and which had us rolling in the aisles. There was no malice in the very funny stories he told about the players and captains he had played with but he reduced even cricket legends to human beings.

He would be batting with C.K. Nayadu and discovered that C.K. was uncomfortable against a particular bowler and would take a single to get away from the strike. Dr Dilawar considered this to be unfair. C.K. after all was the crowd’s darling and Dr Dilawar a lowly cricketer also ran. So when C.K. called for a single and trotted off, Dr Dilawar refused to budge and CK was run-out. On its own this was funny but Doctor Saab would embellish the story and describe the look on C.K.’s face, “like Caesar’s when he was stabbed by Brutus.” We would have some hilarious sessions with him. Kardar, Jamshed Marker and any number of an admiring audience. He always held centre-stage. Later on the tour, we got news that he had died. The news cast a great sadness and we offered our sympathies to Waqar Ahmed. I don’t think that Pakistan cricket has honoured him enough.

I met Asghar Khan in London and there was nothing special he wanted to see me about, just touch base and see how I was getting along. But more importantly when I was getting back. Also present was Group-Captain Waheed (Bill) Butt who was the Air-Attache at the Pakistan Embassy. He and I would become great friends. He was a man, “easy in his skin” as the Spaniards would say, without any false airs and no sense of self-importance. He was a thorough professional at his work and away from his office, he was a simple, decent man who had the gift of making friends easily. Although of Kashmiri stock, I have a vague recollection that there was some East Africa connection.

When I first met Peter Bostock he had been the aviation correspondent of The Daily Sketch and he had written an extremely flattering piece on PIA which, inter alia, was a dig at BOAC and BEA. Writing about a visit of Asghar Khan, he had suggested that the head of the two airlines should meet him and learn from him how to run an airline. He was married to the lovely Anne Beveridge, who was an eminent fashion journalist in her own right. Peter did not fit the stereotype of an Englishman and used to tell him that he deserved to be an Irishman.

The Daily Sketch had closed down and Peter was vaguely in public relations and it would not have surprised me if he was working for MI6. But he was an unlikely James Bond. He and Anne became good friends and I spent many a convivial evening with them and I remember they took me to a restaurant in Chelsee and they introduced me to a famous wrestler, Mickey something, I do not remember. But he was one of the stars who appeared as a wrestler on television and was one of the good guys because he always won. I got into an argument with him when I told him that professional wrestling was show business and not a sport. Peter advised that it was an argument that I would lose, physically! I lost touch with Peter but the next time I caught up with him was in Singapore and the next time was in Australia.

He and Anne had parted company, amicably for they both talked about each other, with great affection. Peter had married a Malay girl, no match for Anne in the beauty stakes but a demure, shy woman who was a full-time housewife. When I had met Peter in Singapore, he had given me a copy of a small book he had written. It was about fortune-telling from the lines on sole of one’s foot. “Of course, it’s bogus,” he told me, “but then so too is palmistry.” Somerset Maugham would have described Peter as a man of “raffish charm.” He was a warm, caring friend and he was always happy to see me. He always struck me as a man who was a stranger in his own England and Anne as someone who belonged nowhere else, except Fleet Street. She had once interviewed Lord Louis Mounbatten and had written about him as a man “wrapped in a Union Jack. Even his bed-room slippers had Union Jack on them,” she told me, with some amusement. Neither had any interest in cricket and I could claim that whenever I met them, it was to get away from cricket, which, sometimes seemed a good thing to do.

I had first come to England in 1951, in the bleakness of an English winter, the days were short and the night long. I had come from the United States where I had spent several years in pursuit of higher education in addition to other pursuits like growing up. It was natural to compare England with the United States, and England came off second best. But England is an acquired taste, like asparagus or avocado. I had, of course lived under the British Raj and the British had kept their distance and had had little to do with the ‘natives’ except rule over them.

But I had started to develop that special relationship with England, an intellectual affinity and I had grown fond of London. There were not many Pakistanis then in Britain, though the numbers were increasing and one could actually walk miles without coming upon an Indian or Pakistani restaurant. Not many Pakistanis came to watch their cricket team play. But by the 1960’s,the British were beginning to re-invent themselves and suddenly there were the Beatles and King’s Road and mini-skirts and it seemed as if the young had decided to be young and be “with it,” even it meant growing their hair long and smoking pot, a cultural mutiny.

But London had so much going for it that it was able to absorb all revisions without losing its core character. The tour was drawing to a close, only the Oval Test match remained and I was already trying to make the mental adjustment, from the England summer, tents of blue in the grey skies, the magical rows of flowers in Hyde Park and the county grounds to Karachi’s summer, hot and humid as a merciless sun beat down and being locked up in an office all day and getting into a routine.

In the meanwhile, Sardarji, my landlord would make his visits to collect his rent. When I told him that I would be leaving soon, he appeared distraught and said that he would miss me. To be on the safe side, whether I would consider paying the rent in advance of my remaining days? “Just a suggestion,” he had said. I told him that since I had been his valued tenant, he ought to allow me to live rent-free. “You are joking, of course?” he had asked with some nervousness. It may have been my imagination but he started to come to the flat more regularly just to check whether I had taken a powder, in the words of one of the characters of New York’s underworld. Take a powder to mean show up missing. Sardarji believed in the wisdom of the adage: trust but verify.

But I needed to stay focused on the cricket. And not allow my mind to go wandering. The days were not as short as they had been when I had arrived in London many weeks ago but they were long enough and the nights had become chilly, so that one shivered a little as one went out, into the evening. Hard as it may be to imagine, one can get lonely on a cricket tour.

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