One night the future first lady of Pakistan had a dream. Visions
and prophecies were Bushra Maneka’s stock and trade, for she
was a female pir, or living saint. Known as Pinky Peerni to her
admirers, Maneka’s gift of clairvoyance had earned her a fol-
lowing well beyond her hometown of Pakpattan, a celebrated
spiritual center 115 miles southwest of Lahore. 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. “Spiritual guides,
or pirs,” Khan writes in his autobiography, “are quite common
in Pakistan. Millions of people, particularly in rural areas of the
country, follow them, consulting them on everything from reli-
gious matters to sickness and family problems.”
Khan was, if not a living saint, then certainly a living god.
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 practi-
cally all those nations where the Union Jack had ever
flown. 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. “For teams like Pakistan, India,
and the West Indies,” Khan writes in his autobiography, “a bat-
tle to right colonial wrongs and assert our equality was played
out on the cricket field every time we took on England.”
Into this gladiatorial arena, shirt open, eyes bedroom-y, hair
long and tousled, stepped Khan. He was one of those rare fig-
ures, like Muhammad Ali, who emerge once a generation on
the frontier of sport, sex, and politics. “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.”
Arrestingly handsome and Oxford-educated, albeit with a
third-class degree, Khan found the doors of the British aristoc-
racy thrown open to him. 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. 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. “He had a lot of
women in his life,” my uncle, Yousaf Salahuddin,
one of Khan’s best friends and a cultural institu-
tion in his own right, told me recently in Lahore,
“because he was a very wanted man. 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. If the fascina-
tion with Khan’s sexual prowess was fetishistic in
Britain, it was edged with racial pride in Pakistan.
As Mohsin Hamid, the country’s most famous
writer, told me in Lahore, “Imran Khan was a
symbol of emancipatory virility.”
In the mid-1990s, there was not a cloud on
Khan’s horizon. 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 dis-
ease. It was a massive philanthropic
gesture and the crowning achieve-
ment of a life showered with gifts. At
that juncture, it might well have been
asked what a clairvoyant from a small
town in Pakistan had to offer Khan that
he didn’t already have.
The short answer is politics. In 1996,
after years of turning down pleas from established
politicians and military dictators eager to align
themselves with his celebrity, Khan launched his
own political party. In its first election, the Paki-
stan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI—which trans-
lates as the Movement for Justice—won zero seats
in parliament. Five years later, Khan won one seat,
his own. Even by 2013, with his personal popular-
ity at an all-time high, the PTI won only 35 seats.
For 20 years, he had been telling his friends and
well-wishers that “the next time you come to Paki-
stan, I will be prime minister.” But four elections
had come and gone, two marriages had collapsed
in their wake, and the quest of this aging playboy
to be his country’s premier was no nearer its end.
It was then, or not long after, that Bushra
Maneka had her dream.
TIGER’S LAIR
Khan, circa
- In Pakistan,
his sexual
conquests made
him “a symbol
of emancipatory
virility.”
O
86 VANITY FAIR
