Wasim Akram’s memoir ‘Sultan’ is old wine, new sparkle

Rohit Mahajan

Books by Gideon Haigh — perspicuous essayist and biographer, cerebral commentator on cricket, and much else — are marked by sparkling prose and breadth of cultural and historical allusions. This one is different, and it’s all the more credible for that — for it’s a collaboration with a cricketer who clearly benefited little from formal education, who was a naive ‘pendu’ (‘villager’, in the words of his own friends) despite growing up in Lahore, despite being the son of a man who lived in England for a year.

In ‘Sultan’, Haigh is a credible voice of Wasim Akram — probably the greatest fast bowler of the last four decades, bar Malcolm Marshall — telling the story in the words and manner suited to the subject. Haigh’s empathy and eye for detail, and Akram’s obvious forthrightness, have produced a highly readable book.

Early in ‘Sultan’, Akram muses about the mad randomness that made him an international cricketer. “I returned to the room… reflecting on the chances involved in my being about to play first-class cricket: first being spotted in the street, then being singled out in the nets.”

Akram had to move into his maternal grandfather’s house after his parents separated. The displacement was phyical and mental, from Model Town to Mozang, a less privileged colony 10 km away. The grandfather was a vegetable seller, “money was scarce and we were often hungry”.

At Mozang, “there were no parks and gardens there, just very narrow streets, very near neighbours, and always frenetic activity”. Did this turn out to be a boon? Geography and location are impactful — would Akram have been an athletic, outdoors boy if he’d been living in an isolated mansion in, say, Karachi? Since there was little room indoors, “a lot of life was spent outdoors, in the streets and on our rooftops”. The kids were always outdoors, playing. It was on the streets that a random passerby on a cycle stopped and told Akram: “You’ve got something. You could be a cricketer.” The random man wasn’t so random — he had played for Pakistan Customs and was a member of Ludhiana Gymkhana Cricket Club, and Akram, then in the “hiatus between school and college”, became a club regular. Then, in a short period marked by bewildering randomness and swiftness, and after being noticed by a succession of cricketers with greater influence, culminating in Javed Miandad, Akram became an international cricketer. A boy who was still sleeping with his doting grandmother was playing for Pakistan!

There’s little that was unknown about the Akram story, but the manner in which it’s told, with directness and forthrightness, is refreshing — the transformation of a gauche ‘pendu’ into a smooth, ever-smiling internationalist.

Akram bares himself as the tough, macho Punjabi man who, “for a long time”, was a bad husband to his first wife Huma and a bad father to his sons. For a man who comes from a male pride culture, Akram must have found this difficult to relate, but he does: “I was the classic Punjabi male parent: I turned up occasionally, scattering gifts, but left the burden of child-rearing to my wife…” He writes he “developed the traits of selfishness and laziness”, but exonerates himself a bit and shrugs off responsibility by adding they are “endemic to athletes”. He admits to getting addicted to cocaine, and, because of hurt pride and “lure” of his partying lifestyle, he “briefly” contemplated divorcing Huma when she confronted him. Her death a few months left him devastated, and it seems marriage to an Australian woman, Shaniera, later turned out to be the saving of him.

The book also serves as his defence against the taint of match-fixing, which clings to him primarily because Justice Qayyum, the judge who investigated and penalised cricketers in 2000, later said he didn’t want to ban Akram because “I had some soft corner for him”. Akram also lays into teammates he had problems with, such as Saleem Malik, Aamir Sohail, Rashid Latif and Rameez Raja.

Akram’s mentor Imran Khan looms large in this book — he breathlessly talks about his influence, his “presence, his beauty… In 1985, he looked like a god: the face, the hair, the physique”. As Imran’s “project”, he would be privy to his wild lifestyle in the 1980s and 1990s but, rightly, it would be wrong to squeal on his mentor; but, a bit surprisingly, Akram briefly relates one instance in which an unnamed woman flew Imran and Akram in her own plane to an island, where Imran and she disappeared. This non-essential disclosure, worded innocuously, serves to buttresses Akram’s credentials as a reliable chronicler.

Luckily, while Imran has been exploiting religion to the hilt after a life devoted to partying and pleasure — and while Shoaib Akhtar has visions of a bloody conquest of India, and Waqar Younis spouts homilies on religion — Akram doesn’t indulge in any virtue-signalling… For now.

Even if this book is not lit by great epiphany or staggering revelation, no work of Haigh’s is less than very engaging. One can’t help feeling, however, that it would have come out as much more nuanced and thought-provoking as a biography than a ghosted autobiography of a great cricketer.