It was a massive philanthropic gesture and the crowning achievement of a life showered with gifts. He had won the World Cup he had married an alluring social beauty he had, in memory of his mother, who died of cancer in 1985, opened Pakistan’s first hospital dedicated to the treatment of that disease. In the mid-1990s, there was not a cloud on Khan’s horizon. As Mohsin Hamid, the country’s most famous writer, told me in Lahore, “Imran Khan was a symbol of emancipatory virility.” If the fascination with Khan’s sexual prowess was fetishistic in Britain, it was edged with racial pride in Pakistan. In India, I have seen women from the age of just 6 to 60 going crazy over him.” In 1995, at age 43, Khan married Jemima Goldsmith, the daughter of the tycoon Jimmy Goldsmith, who is said to have presciently remarked of his son-in-law, “He’ll make an excellent first husband.” As a teenager, I remember gaping over paparazzi photos of the newly wed couple, including some of them in flagrante on a balcony in Marbella. “He had a lot of women in his life,” my uncle, Yousaf Salahuddin, one of Khan’s best friends and a cultural institution in his own right, told me recently in Lahore, “because he was a very wanted man.
The man who shunned the label of “playboy”-“I have never considered myself a sex symbol,” he told my mother in 1983-nonetheless left a long line of Khan-quests from Bollywood to Hollywood, with a pit stop in Chelsea, where his flat, with its tented ceilings of gold silk, was one part harem, one part bordello. Mark Shand, the brother of Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall, was among his best friends he was seen out on the town with Jerry Hall and Goldie Hawn if his second wife, the television personality Reham Khan, is to be believed, he took part in a threesome with Grace Jones. “Imran may not have been the first player to enjoy his own cult following,” writes his biographer Christopher Sandford, “but he was more or less single-handedly responsible for sexualizing what had hitherto been an austere, male-oriented activity patronized at the most devoted level by the obsessed or the disturbed.”Īrrestingly handsome and Oxford-educated, albeit with a third-class degree, Khan found the doors of the British aristocracy thrown open to him.
He was one of those rare figures, like Muhammad Ali, who emerge once a generation on the frontier of sport, sex, and politics. Into this gladiatorial arena, shirt open, eyes bedroom-y, hair long and tousled, stepped Khan. “For teams like Pakistan, India, and the West Indies,” Khan writes in his autobiography, “a battle to right colonial wrongs and assert our equality was played out on the cricket field every time we took on England.” Born in 1952 to an upper-middle-class family in Lahore, he had come of age at a time when cricket, the “gentleman’s game” so intimately associated with the spread of the British Empire, was turning into a blood sport, imbued with the tensions of a newly awakened postcolonial world. From the late 1970s, when my mother, a reporter in India, first interviewed him, to well into the 1990s, when he led the Pakistan team to a World Cup victory against England, he towered over the landscape of practically all those nations where the Union Jack had ever flown. Khan was, if not a living saint, then certainly a living god. Millions of people, particularly in rural areas of the country, follow them, consulting them on everything from religious matters to sickness and family problems.” “Spiritual guides, or pirs,” Khan writes in his autobiography, “are quite common in Pakistan. In 2015, Maneka had added to her growing list of clients the man who was the object of her prophetic dream: Imran Khan, the legendary cricketer and most famous Pakistani alive. Known as Pinky Peerni to her admirers, Maneka’s gift of clairvoyance had earned her a following well beyond her hometown of Pakpattan, a celebrated spiritual center 115 miles southwest of Lahore. Visions and prophecies were Bushra Maneka’s stock and trade, for she was a female pir, or living saint. One night the future first lady of Pakistan had a dream.