Forty years to the day in 1971, a star was born when Pakistan took on England in the first of the three-match Test series at Edgbaston.

Only 23-year-old then and unknown to the cricketing world, he wielded such authority and presence in only the second Test of his career, that for the rest of his life he became a legend in his own lifetime.

He was none other than our own Zaheer Abbas whose magnificent innings of 274, the highest by any visiting batsman playing in his first Test in England, epitomised the art of batting and left an indelible mark on the minds of all those who had the pleasure of watching it.

I was among the lucky ones to have witnessed it, as I did most of his career, watching Zaheer plundering runs at the expense of hapless bowlers who tossed and toiled as he carved the greens of cricket grounds round the globe.

I had never met him before, nor had seen him play till he stepped out of the dressing room at Edgbaston after Pakistan’s opener Aftab Gul retired hurt on the third delivery of the first day of the Test after being hit by a snorter from fast bowler Alan Ward.

Frail, loose-limbed, bespectacled with long side-burns and a thick mop of hair, Zaheer walked into the middle to face the music. No one, not even the experts would have put a wager on him to tame the English attack for the rest of the day and beyond to announce his arrival in international cricket.

By the time he finished his stint at the crease, caught off a sweep off Ray Illingworth on the second day, the English bowlers were a tired, battered lot, dancing helplessly to his tune as he pierced the field hitting 38 boundaries, each one of them a gem, crested skillfully in the jewel by a master craftsman.

It was a sight to behold and a breathtaking experience, a spectacle which lit up the gloomy and overcast Edgbaston sky and sent the critics into raptures.

There was only a few anxious moments as he settled at the crease but once in his grooves, Zaheer played like a man possessed, whether facing the menacing pace and swing of Ward or Peter Lever or Ken Shuttleworth and Basil D’Oliveira or the spin of Illingworth or Derek Underwood.

His poise and elegance was remarkable as he stepped back to hit the ball with awesome timing between mid-wicket and mid-on or lunged forward to drive past the gaping cover or backward point.

Even when in a spot of bother, which he seldom was, Zaheer would never nudge and instead, would lunge forward to work his way out with a delicate push past the gully or point or with the roll of his wrist to flick the ball to the square leg region.

Even the greatest batsman of his time, Colin Cowdrey standing in the slips cheered his sensational stroke-play in admiration.

It is no exaggeration, but not before or since have I watched such artistry in batting, not even from the likes of Greg Chappell, Tom Graveney, David Gower, Mark Waugh or for that matter Mohammad Azharuddin, Viv Richards or Sachin Tendulkar. Zaheer’s silken grace as he drove, pulled and cut the ball with minimum of fuss or effort, was in a class of its own.

His passion for the game and hunger for runs hardly ever diminished as he became the first Pakistani batsman to reach 5,000 runs in Testcricket and ended his illustrious career with over 34,000 runs at first-class level.

If not for his devastating form, the Indian spin quartet of Srinivasan Venkataraghavan, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Erapalli Prasanna and Bishen Singh Bedi may have stayed in the game a lot longer.

It was Zaheer who destroyed them in the 1978-79 series in Pakistan with his magnificent display of batsmanship, scoring over 500 runs in the three Test matches.

His success with the bat was such that he still remains the only batsman of the sub-continent to have scored over 100 first-class centuries, 108 to be precise. No mean achievement this, not even the likes of Javed Miandad and Tendulkar can boast of the distinction.

He also remains the only batsman in history to have made a double century and a century in the same match four times and all being unbeaten innings, not even Sir Don Bradman could achieve that.

Aptly dubbed as the Asian Bradman, Zaheer nicknamed ‘Z’ was worthy of his billing. If the word genius is an attribute of the most skilled, then Zaheer indeed deserves it.

No one has summed up his skill and style better than John Woodcock, the celebrated cricket writer of The Times and the former editor of the Wisden Almanack, when he wrote these lines about Zaheer: “The most ruthlessly mechanical of them must have been the legendary Sir Donald Bradman, the most enduring was Sir Jack Hobbs with 197 first-class centuries, the most calculating may well have been Geoffrey Boycott, but none of them could have played with more ease and elegance than Zaheer whose batting gave as much pleasure in England when he was with Gloucestershire, as it must have done in Pakistan.”