Khan, like a real-world version of Stannis Baratheon desper-
ately consulting the Red Woman in Game of Thrones, had begun
to see Pinky for “spiritual guidance.” The clairvoyant’s usual
fee for making the impossible possible, a senior media figure
in Karachi told me on condition of anonymity, was great vats of
cooked meat. These, he explained, over a Japanese meal, she
fed to the jinns she kept at her disposal.
“Jinns?” I asked, wondering if I had misheard.
“She has two jinns,” the media man said, serving me some
more soba noodles.
Then he came to the surreal story that is on the lips of every-
one in Pakistan, from senior diplomats and ministers to jour-
nalists and entertainers. Although Maneka has dismissed it
as mere rumor, the story has attained the status of fable—a
supernatural tale that seeks to illuminate a deeper truth. Once
Maneka had her prophetic vision, the media veteran told me,
no amount of cooked meat would suffice to fulfill Khan’s ambi-
tion. The voice in her dream was clear: If Imran Khan was to
be prime minister, it was imperative he be married to the right
woman—i.e., a member of Maneka’s own family.
In one version of this torrid tale, Maneka offered her sister
to Khan. In another, it was her daughter. Either way, Khan
demurred. Then Maneka went away to dream again. This time,
however, she was no bystander to someone else’s vision. The
voice in her head told her that she, Bushra Maneka, a married
woman and a mother of five, was the wife Imran Khan needed.
What Maneka now wanted from Khan was what every woman
had ever wanted from him: She wanted him.
Khan had never set eyes on Maneka, for she consulted her
followers from behind a veil. But this time, he acceded to her
vision. The stars aligned and Maneka’s husband, a customs
official, agreed to give her a divorce, praising Khan as a “dis-
ciple of our spiritual family.”
In February 2018, cricketer and clairvoyant were married in
a private ceremony. Six months later, Imran Khan was elected
prime minister of Pakistan, and Pinky Peerni, a character who
would stretch the limits of Salman Rushdie’s imagination,
was its first lady.
O
n the burning hot morning in April when my flight
landed at Allama Iqbal International Airport in
Lahore, I asked a man with a thickly dyed mustache
sitting next to me whether I needed to fill out an entry card.
“This is Imran Khan’s Pakistan!” he responded enthusiasti-
cally. Khan had promised “a new Pakistan,” and presumably
one feature of this utopia, my seatmate implied, is that nobody
has to fill out tiresome paperwork anymore.
Khan, both as candidate and prime minister, sounds like
populists everywhere, now inveighing against Westernized
“dollar-addicted” elites, now promising to fix the problems of
one of South Asia’s slowest-growing economies by bringing
home magical amounts of black money squirreled away in for-
eign bank accounts. But as much as his rhetoric resembles that
of other populists—from Narendra Modi next door in India,
to Erdogan in Turkey and Bolsonaro in Brazil—there is one
important difference: Khan is not of the people. If anything,
he belongs to an elite even more glamorous and rarefied than
the one he routinely attacks. As he said himself, in an article
he wrote for Arab Ne ws in 2002, “I was smoothly moving to
becoming a pukka brown sahib”—a colonial term denoting a
native more English than the English. “After all,” he added,
“I had the right credentials in terms of school, university, and,
above all, acceptability in the English aristocracy.” Unlike oth-
er populists in the developing world, Khan is a man guessing
at the passions of people he does not actually represent. Like
Trump or the Brexiteers, he underwent a Damascene conver-
sion, which, as he wrote, caused him to turn his back on “brown
sahib culture” and throw in his lot with the “real Pakistan.”
The man after whom the airport in Lahore is named was
easily the single greatest influence in Khan’s transformation
from louche fixture of the demimonde to political revolution-
ary. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a poet and philosopher, died in 1938,
a decade before the founding of Pakistan. But it was he who, in
1930, had first seriously made the case for why Muslims living
in British India needed a homeland like Pakistan, where they
could realize their “ethical and political ideal.” What seems
to have struck Khan hardest about Iqbal’s philosophy was his
idea of khudi, or selfhood, which Khan understood to mean
“self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence.” It was precisely
what Pakistan needed, Khan thought, to banish the shame of
colonial rule and to regain its sense of self. It would also, he
believed, armor Pakistan against its own elites, whose “slav-
ish” imitation of Western culture had instilled in them a “self-
loathing that stemmed from an ingrained inferiority complex.”
Indeed, it is Khan’s extensive personal experience of what
he now condemns as Western decadence that enables him
to rail against it so authoritatively. “An emotion that he feels
very strongly about is that we should stop feeling enslaved to
the West mentally,” said Ali Zafar, Khan’s friend and Paki-
stan’s biggest pop star. “He feels that since he’s gone there—
he’s been there and done that—he knows the West more than
anybody else over here. He’s telling them, ‘Look, you’ve got to
find your own space, your own identity, your own thing, your
own culture, your own roots.’ ”
During the weeks I spent reporting this piece in Pakistan,
I made repeated attempts to reach out to the prime minister,
but his political handlers seemed alarmed at the prospect of
resurrecting his past in the pages of a glossy magazine. In 2000,
Khan, then married to Jemima, had been the subject of a profile
in Vanity Fair that focused on his youthful escapades. When
I spoke to Zulfi Bokhari, a frequenter of nightclubs from the
London days who is now a junior minister in Khan’s govern-
ment, he sought assurances that my piece would be positive;
otherwise, he told me, it would be his ass on the line. A few
days later, Bokhari WhatsApped me: “Unfortunately the PM
has said he can’t do it right now. Perhaps in the near future.”
I first spoke with Khan at a party in London, when I was 25.
At the time I was dating Ella Windsor, a minor member of the
British royal family who was a family friend of the Goldsmiths.
To see Khan out and about in London—the legend himself—
was to understand how truly at home he was among the high-
est echelons of British society. The English upper classes adore
cricket—it is one of the many coded ways in which their class
system works—and the allure of the former captain of the Paki-
stani cricket team was still very real. The night we met, in late
summer 2006, Khan had come to a party at a Chelsea studio
overlooking the Moravian burial ground. On that balmy eve-
ning, surrounded by the silhouettes of plane trees, it was clear88 VANITY FAIR
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