July 25, 2004

DR DILAWAR HUSSAIN was a PhD From Cambridge and in terms of formal education that’s about as high as Mount Everest.

He was an educationalist and when I first met him he was either the principal of the MAO College in Lahore or had been. He was also a Test cricketer, a wicket-keeper, a stodgy batsman and had toured England with Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram’s Indian team in 1936.

I saw him play only once and that was for the Muslims in the Bombay Pentangular. I remember him being felled by a bouncer from Shute Bannerji and after some running repairs had resumed his innings with a bandaged head. He was a heavy-set man and ran between the wickets with only one run in mind, the second would have been an imposition, an act of manual labour. Doctor Saab as we affectionately called him, was, however, a fierce competitor. He put a high price on his wicket. It was the job of the bowler to get him out and he wasn’t going to make it easy.

I first met him in 1955 and he was a member of the selection committee when India toured Pakistan. A Test match was played at Bahawalpur at the lovely Dring Stadium. There were, unfortunately, no hotels to speak of and the teams and the camp-followers were billeted at various palaces. Dr Dilawar and I found ourselves sharing one of these palaces and we would meet at breakfast. He was a man of a robust appetite, a gourmand. We would be served scrambled eggs on a large platter and after I had taken my share, he would ask me if I had taken enough in a voice of solicitous consideration. When I told him that I had, he would then reach out and place the platter in front of him and polish off the remaining scrambled eggs as the toasts kept coming. There wasn’t much conversation.

Dr Dilawar Hussain may have been an academic but he could have made a fortune as a stand-up comedian. He was a raconteur and once we got him started, there was no stopping him. He was the butt of his own jokes, his humour was of the self-deprecating kind. It is quite impossible to re-create in print the funny side of the spoken word. He was the second wicket-keeper on that 1936 tour, Navle was number one. Every morning at breakfast, Doctor Saab would earnestly ask Navle how he was feeling and on being told he was in the pink of health he would express his happiness and silently curse him. In one of the matches, C.K. Nayadu came in to bat and told Dr Dilawar to take most of the strike till he got his eye in. No problem Dr Dilawar had said and the next ball he received, he called C.K. for a single. He explained this by saying that C.K. would have gone on to make a century and get all the glory and he would have got nothing. In a festival match he played for the Maharaja of Patiala’s team, he scored a century. The Maharaja used to give a cash prize to the player making the most runs for his team. Mohammad Nissar was also playing, but he was a tail-ender and Dr Dilawar didn’t feel threatened by his batting. Nissar snicked a few and a relaxed. Dr Dilawar made a few comments about his batting. Nissar snicked a few more runs. He lofted a couple of sixes and was past his fifty. Dr Dilawar sat upright on his chair. “I started to shout a few hints to the opposition of how they can get him out. Nissar still continued to make runs. By this time I was on the boundary line and when he got into the nineties, I was on the ground, making field placings and bowling changes.” We were rolling with laughter as he described the scene. “It seemed fundamentally unfair. I was in the team as a batsman and he as a bowler. Yet he was going to claim the batting prize,” he said, still pained by the memory.

He took his college team by train to Amritsar and he had given money to each player for his train fare. None of them bought tickets and when the ticket collector came round they referred him to their manager who was travelling inter-class. Doctor Saab paid up and a small fine. When he upbraided his players they told that he should have negotiated with the ticket collector. “Negotiated? Do you take me to be a fool. I began negotiations with an unconditional apology.” Told in Punjabi and dead-pan, it was hilarious.

He was very respectful of the Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram but told us that he brought some gold cigarette-cases with him and he would present them to the opponents’ fast bowlers who would invariably bowl ‘Vizzy’ a full toss so he could, off the mark and never bowled him a bouncer. “A shrewd captain,” he would say. He said that the English found Indian names hard to pronounce and so they identified them by their fielding ability. When a ball went to a particular fielder the call would be “come two.” Or, “can’t throw come three.” The Indian players then became “come two” or “can’t throw.” Unashamedly, he told us how he had a player run out. “I was struggling and he was batting fluently and it made me look bad. It wasn’t fair and so I called for a single and did not move. He ran all the way down. I told him he had misheard my call and said sorry but he had to go.”

I used to tell him that he should write a book. Jamsheed Marker thought we should get him on tape and invited him to dinner at his Bath Island home, but the ambience was wrong and Doctor Saab was not a performing artist and he just “froze.” He needed a different kind of audience.

I grew very fond of him and there was a serious side to him and though Kardar very much selected the team, Kardar told me that his observations about players were sharp.

In 1967, Pakistan toured England and his son Waqar Ahmed was a member of the team. He did not tell me that he was Dr Dilawar’s son and he did not want to cash in on the celebrity of his father. Waqar was a quiet young man and he knew his limitations and as far as I could judge kept very much to himself. But playing against Worcester he was batting and the sun was shining gloriously. Too gloriously for Waqar and he appealed against the light, telling the umpire it was too bright! The local evening paper promptly headlined: “Pakistan Appeals Against Good Light.” May be he was a chip off the old block!

It was on that tour that we received the news that Dr Dilawar had passed away. I.A. Khan collected the players and we said a prayer for him. Most of the players were too young to have known of him. But he was a wonderful man and there was a special kind of sadness for me. I would miss the laughter that one heard when he would be narrating one of his stories. Laughter that easily could have been applauded for he was a raconteur beyond compare, to say nothing of a warm human being and a good enough cricketer to have played at the Test level while getting a PhD from Cambridge. That’s lot of things to be rolled into one person.

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