IN CALCUTTA: ON AND OFF FIELD

There are a number of Imrans within Imran Khan.

There was the Imran who came permission-less from Delhi (who would dare arrest a Pakistan captain even though he did not a have a relevant visa for the city?) to Calcutta in 1982, a couple of months before the momentous 1982-83 series, and The Telegraph scooped the story with a front-paged picture of our man telling reporters how Pakistan would thrash India in the series to follow. He could have called a couple of reporters from Jang to his Zaman Park home and issued a press release but that wouldn't have been him; he was flying to another country, presenting himself to paparazzi and making a claim that would put Sunil Gavaskar's India immediately on the defensive.

As it turned out, Pakistan did beat India 3-0 and there is a nice roundness to the story that it all started the evening a reporter from The Telegraph was invited to Vinoo Nath's Ballygunge Circular Road residence to hear Imran subtly dropping the line of who would do what to who.

Sensing an opportunity, I suggested to the Associate Editor at Sportsworld that given our man's ability to seduce the headlines, it would be good for him to 'report' the forthcoming series for the magazine.

Tooshar Pandit of Sunday and yours truly were dispatched to make Imran an offer in Indian rupees that he couldn't quite refuse, which 36 years ago happened to be Rs 4,000 per Test match.

Imran wouldn't quite write his report; he would speak it. Specifically, he would speak each evening to Sportsworld's man on the tour (which again happened to be yours truly); more specifically, he would ask his ghostwriter to be present outside the dressing room within five minutes of the end of the day's play, following which Khwaja (generic name for all Pakistan dressing-room bouncers) would unlock the door, stand aside and one would walk inside to see Mohsin Khan delving deep into his 'coffin' to retrieve an abdomen guard, Abdul Qadir exaggerating the extent of turn to a curious team audience, Javed Miandad playing a prank on a snoozing Mudassar, and in the corner would be the King himself - distanced. And often lying chest down unclothed on the massage table, raising an eyebrow in acknowledgement of my presence, clearing his throat and beginning his delivery.

So that brings me to the second Imran I knew: the one who would not need any 'How did you feel when you scored a century?' kind of curiosity: you placed the dicta beside his forearm as the physio worked his oiled fingers through his gluteus maximus, he rested his chin on his arms, you stepped back, he explained the game sequentially as if talking to an invisible accomplice - and periodically interrupted his delivery with 'para'. He could have been a trademarks lawyer dictating a longish memo to a servile apprentice.

He would occasionally surprise with his le mot juste (right word for the occasion), as one discovered a few years later when he described the Karachi crowd as "not particularly ruly". Unruly I had heard of, but ruly...

The third Imran that I knew of was someone who never ducked a question. In the early Eighties, one tested him only with cricket ('Should you have brought Qadir on before lunch?') but the watershed was the Tavleen Singh interview for Sunday in 1983 (with Sondeep Shankar taking the most breathtaking portraits anyone has ever taken of him), where she virtually asked him about everything except cricket and the result of that interview (headlined 'Everything you wanted to know about Imran Khan but didn't know who to ask') was that a new dimension emerged: you could ask him about his anti-colonial identity and he would give you three juicy paragraphs that any editor made catchy blurbs out of; you could ask him about the way Pakistan treated its Mohajirs and he wouldn't look at the ceiling and say 'ummmmm'; there was a question about cross-sub-continental ties and he actually spoke about Pathan men coming from the mountains to seek Rajasthani women. Since this was well before we had been electronically networked with each other, no one was lynched and no one said 'We are offended...'

The fourth Imran was the aloof patrician. In 1983, after Miandad had been hit by a Lillee bouncer on the head during a double-wicket tournament at the Eden Gardens and taken to hospital (where he stayed three days), one would have expected a concerned captain to rush to the hospital and confer with doctors on the seriousness of the injury to his star batsman (he didn't); during the Nehru Cup in 1989, he permitted me to fly on the chartered aircraft with the Pakistan team from Jalandhar to Lucknow, where Abdul Qadir and Curtley Ambrose engaged in a terrifying physical fight (with captain Viv Richards seething in the kind of anger rarely seen on behalf of his fast bowler). Imran, who would be normally perched in 1A, looked back through the relatively empty aircraft, surveyed the damage from a distance, laughed and went back to sleep.

The fifth Imran was someone you could trust. During the fourth Test at Sialkot in 1989 when I asked him for a series wrap-up interview at the start of the first day, he merely said, 'Fifth evening, 4.45, dressing room'.

On the appointed evening there was a large crowd outside the dressing room; every journo was waiting to seek ' kaptaan's' series-closing comment.

He towered over their shoulders, looked around, saw me in a corner, motioned with his finger... and called me in.

And that is how I will remember the man who remembered. He wasn't evidently like one of us and yet he was. Wonder if he still is.

The writer is a former journalist with Sportsworld who knew Imran Khan