MUSCAT, 1 April 2005 — While compatriots are busy celebrating Pakistan’s well-deserved emphatic victory over India in Bangalore to draw the three-Test series, I am being driven back to the City of Gardens of 1979 which has since been transformed into an IT marvel.

Bangalore was the venue of the first Test of the 1979-80 five-Test series, marking Pakistan’s first visit to India in 16 years. The media hype was there to be felt all around, but nothing like the furor created by satellite television which has mushroomed this past decade or so to ridicule the geographical barriers between the two cricket-mad archrivals. All that you need is to sit before a small screen available even in a remotest village.

Asif Iqbal, waiting to sing swan song in Calcutta, the site for the final Test, was leading Pakistan in his own swashbuckling style. On the other end was Sunil Gavaskar, getting hungrier for runs by the day. In his own words, The Little Master “would not loft a ball until he has reached 50”. Until then, he would live on ground shots to epitomize self-control and discipline hardly known to any other batsman. You don’t succeed for nothing.

So much happened at the packed Chinnaswamy Stadium, as it does in a Test match spread over long five days - from morning to evening. (Can you pick any other sport engaging a spectator even a fifth of this endless duration? That alone is a tribute to a game called cricket, created by the sun-starved English, little knowing that it was going to become a big issue, no a mini-war, between India and Pakistan, not long ago under the British Raj).

What remains fresh in my mind is Imran Khan’s bowling, fast and fluent, to say the least. Clouds were hovering around in a cool November breeze. And the world’s long-haired, handsomest athlete, making his first appearance in an uninhibited India, was fully exploiting the conducive conditions to a hearty applause. (If I am not mistaken, it was Imran’s 26th birthday and he could not have celebrated it in a more befitting way — away from home.)

Imran Khan later went on not only to lead Pakistan to a series win against India in India, but also fetched the elusive World Cup for his country in 1992 to cap his illustrious career, culminating in the establishment of a world-class cancer hospital in memory of his mother. It was hard to imagine another sportsman in contemporary, or even distant history, boasting such an accomplishment on and off the field. Hats off to the man from Mianwali.

I have chosen to eulogize the legendary Khan (whom I have known from close quarters) to mark Pakistan’s fabulous victory over India in Bangalore rather deliberately. I wish he had not joined politics - something I have only been saying verbally. He is too straight and too blunt for a game starkly contrary to cricket - ungentlemanly. The contrast becomes even sharper in a country like Pakistan known for turncoats. The cancer hospital was more than enough for posterity to eternally thank a forefather.

And what I miss most on this occasion is Omar Kureishi, the gem of a person, who died the other day in Karachi to leave behind a legacy of his own. He was possibly the only non-English writer who would portray the nuances and intricacies of cricket in chaste English, at times better than purists. To read him was to adore him, whatever your geography, whatever your likes and dislikes.

Only he would have done justice to the task of delineating a victory carved out by Inzamam ul-Haq and his equally revitalized boys in a city Kureishi flew in, along with Farooq Mazhar, another gem of a person, to watch the World Cup semifinal between India and Pakistan as special guests - an eventful sojourn he narrated in what was possibly his last column before disappearance. If someone who combined patriotism with professionalism, read journalistic excellence, in our part of the world, to look universal, it was Kureishi (who I am sure would have joined me to say that Imran Khan is too good a soul to join politics.)