IN 1956 the Cricket Writers Club toured what was then called East Africa. I do not want to write about that tour but about some of the characters who were on that tour. Hamid Jalal was the manager and he deserves a column by itself. Kardar was the captain and I have already written about him. About our hosts, I best remember the brothers, Bashir and Iqbal Mauladad. Bashir was very prim and proper, the Rotary Club type and snobbish in an upper middle-class way, yet he was an impeccable host.
Iqbal or Bali as he was better known was roly-poly, portly rather than fat. He was a white hunter and took tourists on safaris to shoot lions and rhinos. He was also into motor-racing driver. He had been a consultant to MGM when they were shooting films in East Africa and claimed to have known Ava Gardner. Years later I met Ava Gardner in Paris and asked if she recalled Bali?
“One meets so many people,” she replied. I changed the subject preferring to shoot my own line. But we adopted Bali as our mascot and he was with us throughout the tour. He had a handle-bar moustache and I never saw it droop. He was a man who had dignity while being hilarious at the same time. We would tell him that the team did not need a heavy-roller but would get him to walk about and down the wicket. He thought it a splendid idea and volunteered to do so. He was a barrel of laughs.
It was a happy tour and a few names spring to mind that contributed so much to the hilarity. There was first and foremost Yusuf Jaffer or Joe, as he was known. He was a wicket-keeper and should have been in Pakistan’s team that toured England in 1954. He was living in England, no doubt working out his disappointment and he joined the team in Nairobi and thereafter became my roommate. Each morning he would yell out in feigned pain and say that his back had given out. He did so even on the morning of the last day of the tour and when I told him that there was no more cricket, he leapt out of bed and asked, “Pal, what’s our programme for the day?” He kept wickets in our game in Mombassa and he showed glimpses of what a fine keeper he was. I told him that if he kept keeping like that he may become a regular member of the playing eleven and not the ‘tourist’ he and I were. This dismayed him. When we were leaving, he came to see us off at the airport. He was flying off to London the next day. As he embraced each one of us, there were tears in his eyes and the team members fell quiet. We too were going to miss him.
Of course, he belonged to the well-known Jaffer family and between our families there was a Pune connection and a common shared love of cricket. One of his brothers, Essa, rendered great service to Karachi cricket. I caught up with Yusuf in London when I went to cover Pakistan’s 1962 tour and he drove me to Harrogate where the team was staying for the Leeds Test. He drove an Austin-Healey sports car and it was a perfect summer’s day and we had the top down and Joe had his foot on the pedal and the countryside whizzed by. The only conversation I managed was to tell him that I was not in a hurry to get to Harrogate. But that was Joe. He liked to live his life in the fast lane.
And then there was Sher Khan. He was a civil servant. I first saw him play against India in a side-match at Sahiwal in 1955. He had slammed Subash Gupte all over the park and made fifty in both innings. All that could be said of his batting that it was hearty. I cannot recall how he got to be a member of our team but he proved to be a jewel in the crown. He had arrived at the airport when we were leaving dressed in a three-piece suit, looking very much like a sahib. It proved to be a little off-putting for the rest of us for we did not know whether to befriend him or keep our distance from him.
In East Africa, we were lodged with families and Ikram Elahi became his roommate. Two different people on the face of it but it was an inspired pairing and we learnt from Ikram Elahi that Sher Khan was more than one of the boys, he wanted to be the leader of the pack and he was wonderful company. Mahmood Hussain joined the team halfway through the tour and after Sher Khan’s first meeting with him, he told Ikram Elahi: “They told me that you had a screw loose but compared to Mahmood Hussain you are Allama Iqbal.”
On our way back we stopped in Aden to play a match. The hotel where we stayed had a sort of cabaret on its roof-top. Sher Khan and I spent an evening there. The cabaret had a singer who would not have caused a thousand ships to be launched but was easy on the eyes and she spoke in an accent we were not able to identify. She came and sat with us and Sher Khan assumed she was French and asked me whether I spoke the language. I said I had a smattering of it. “Tell her that your friend says she is very pretty,” he asked. I blurted out a few words and I could have been speaking Esperanto. She wasn’t French but a local girl who spoke English. “Tell your friend to speak to me directly,” she said. Sher Khan was floored and looked at his watch and said it was getting late and we should leave. “Yaar, it’s a clip joint,” he said in an effort to remove the egg on his face. We all enjoyed that tour but none more than Sher Khan.
I would like to write about Ikram Elahi in detail and may do so, just as I will write about Imtiaz Ahmed and Mahmood Hussain and most of all about Zulfiqar Ahmed. But let me stay in Aden. We played against a Royal Air Force team, which was made up of gooras. A good crowd had turned up and it was incredibly hot. We batted first and Alimuddin and Sher Khan opened the innings. After Alimuddin was retired, Ikram Elahi was sent in. There was booing and cat-calls. The crowd wanted to see Hanif Mohammad.
Ikram Elahi clouted the first ball, he received, for a six. He hit two more sixes in the same over. Sher Khan was retired and Hanif was sent in to applause. Hanif took a single and Ikram Elahi hit a few more sixes, one that was quite remarkable. He tripped as he charged to bowler but still managed to wave his bat and ball soared out of the ground. Hanif continued to bat correctly but now the crowd wanted Ikram Elahi.
We declared at tea, but a Wing Commander came into our dressing room. Smartly saluted Kardar and said that we would not be allowed to declare. The crowd had come to see us bat. The innings continued but the score was not kept. Kardar did not field the next day and since I was the twelfth man, I did. There was a Parsi couple in the crowd and fielding at third man struck up a conversation with them, speaking Gujrati. They too said that they spoke English and my pidgin-Gujrati sounded terrible.
IN 1956 the Cricket Writers Club toured what was then called East Africa. I do not want to write about that tour but about some of the characters who were on that tour. Hamid Jalal was the manager and he deserves a column by itself. Kardar was the captain and I have already written about him. About our hosts, I best remember the brothers, Bashir and Iqbal Mauladad. Bashir was very prim and proper, the Rotary Club type and snobbish in an upper middle-class way, yet he was an impeccable host.
