India vs Pakistan | Ganguly's midnight walk to Lahore food street; Inzy's century goof-up: A first-person account

Of the several India-Pakistan tours, series, and matches that I have covered, starting in 1996, the cricketing highlight has to be swashbuckling opening batsman Virender Sehwag’s epochal triple Test century in Multan on India’s historic tour of 2004. And, the off-the-field high point for me also involved Sehwag. A few days after he reached the triple century with a six off Saqlain Mushtaq, he in his hotel room broke the news of his marriage, in confidence. This was so well guarded that even though he had got his wedding cards couriered to Pakistan, the media never came to know about it. I saw the cards lying on his bed.

A few days after having a quiet dinner with Sehwag in his Holiday Inn room, just a couple of hours after he hammered 309 in the Multan Test, I received a call from him to have another dinner with him. I wondered: What happened? On reaching his room, he broke the news and wanted me to assist him in making a list of the players he wanted to invite to his wedding. The list done, he handed one card to me, inviting me and my family to his reception at a New Delhi hotel.

To be honest, the first dinner we had on the day he smashed his triple Test century, to become the first Indian to do so, was completely accidental. On the first day of the Test, when he was unbeaten on 228, the dinner was fixed for the next day, knowing little that March 29 would turn out to be historic. But contrary to my expectation, there was no celebration in his room/hotel, except congratulatory messages and bouquets from then BCCI president Jagmohan Dalmiya and Hero Honda proprietor Pawan Munjal. Sehwag informed me that the BCCI had told him there would be special celebrations on the team’s return to India, something that didn’t happen.

India’s 2004 tour was historic because the team was travelling to Pakistan for a bilateral Test series after almost 15 years – thanks to an unexpected joint initiative by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf. It turned out to be the most colourful series I have been part of with the Indian team. Of course, it was also immensely successful on and off the field, with unprecedented scenes of bonhomie between local fans and the 8,000 fans who had travelled to watch cricket – and some just went there to see their ancestral homes – from India.

Indian cricketers indulged in a lot of shopping and often they were showered with gifts – from kaleens (rugs) to Peshawari chappals. Sehwag later revealed that he did shopping for his family members, keeping his upcoming wedding in mind. The icing on the cake was that India won both the Test and ODI series.

While in Lahore, almost all the Indians, including the cricketers, frequented the famous Food Street at least once in 2004. Captain Sourav Ganguly along with the Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Ravi Shankar Prasad, went there for dinner at around 1 am to avoid the glare.

On that eventful tour of Pakistan, a person of interest I met was the owner of the hotel where I stayed in Peshawar. He happened to be the son of one of the two partners who ran the Ashraf-Nanda Bus Service in the undivided India, in the Peshawar-Sialkot region. After the partition, the Nanda family founded the now-famous Escorts Heart Institute in New Delhi. Ashraf’s son showed me the old, black-and-white photos of the buses his father and Nanda owned, and even sent a letter to the then head of the Escorts Group, reminding him of the old ties between the families, through an Indian fan who had gone to Peshawar to watch the ODI.

A day after the ODI, I ventured out to see the ancestral homes of legendary Bollywood actors Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, and Shah Rukh Khan. Interestingly, all three houses are within walking distance of each other in the Qissa Khwani area. Shah Rukh Khan’s young cousin even offered me kahwa (special tea).

Two years later the Indian team toured Pakistan again, but the uniqueness of the 2004 visit could not be replicated. However, on the very first day of the tour, and just before the start of a warm-up match at historical Bagh-e-Jinnah in Lahore, a young member of the Indian team surprised me with a strange admission. That day was so cold that it broke the 40-year-old record, and it had apparently snowed a little overnight, completely covering the lush green grass. The cricketer walked up to me and admitted: “When we reached the ground early this morning, for a moment I thought to myself that the grass in Pakistan is white.”

My first visit to Pakistan was in 1996, to cover the World Cup. Though Mohammed Azharuddin’s Indian team played all its World Cup matches at home, until a crowd disturbance led to its ‘defeat’ against eventual winners Sri Lanka in the semi-finals in Calcutta, those who visited Pakistan received warm hospitality. That was the time when the popular Liberty Market in Lahore would reverberate in the evenings with “kine kine jaana Billo de ghar” (who all want to visit Billo’s house), the début album of Pakistani pop singer Abrar-ul-Haq that sold in millions. Released a few months before the World Cup, it became a best-selling album in South Asia.

Pakistan's tours to India

I have covered matches on Pakistan tours of India in 1998-99, 2005-06, 2007-08, and 2012-13. When Pakistan reciprocated the 2004 visit by touring India the next year, legendary batsman Hanif Mohammed, the first triple Test centurion from Asia, was among the visitors to Bangalore, where Pakistan captain Inzama-ul-Haq played his 100th Test. I discovered that Hanif Mohammed was very fond of paan (betel leaves) and he indulged in some shopping in Bangalore. Earlier, the Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA), in a warm and well-thought gesture, presented Inzamam with a 47-piece customised, handcrafted dinner set to commemorate the occasion.

The most exciting episode, however, took place on the Wasim Akram-led Pakistan’s tour of 1998-99. In the very first match of the tour, a three-day encounter between the visitors and the BCCI President’s XI in Gwalior, Akram declared the innings when the manual scoreboard at the Roop Singh Stadium wrongly showed Inzamam on 100. In the official scorer’s sheet, he was still batting on 98.

Realising their mistake, triggered by the wrongly displayed score, the Pakistani team management, headed by manager Shaharyar Khan, a well-known diplomat and former Pakistan foreign secretary, tried persuading politely the scorer to deduct two runs from the 124 by Yousuf Youhana (now Mohammed Yousuf) and add them to Inzamam’s 98 so that he could “complete” his ton. But the young scorer, Sunil Gupta, bravely resisted the request and rightfully declined to do it. “I couldn’t do it because the BCCI would have taken action against me,” Gupta had told me at the time. Shaharyar visited the press box to douse the controversy, saying that Inzamam would feel disappointed only if, at the end of his career, he would be struck on 99 centuries. Inzamam scored 45 first-class centuries and another 10 in ODIs in his career.

The 1998-99 tour also comprised a Test match of the Asian Championship, played in Kolkata. After beating India, the Pakistani team stayed one night at a five-star hotel in Delhi on its way back home. Their stay coincided with an anniversary celebration of the newspaper I was working with, and our management had booked the discotheque for that evening exclusively for us at the same hotel. When the Pakistani team, coached by Javed Miandad, came to know that the discotheque was out of bounds for the general public, they sought – and got permission from our management people to join us. Miandad enjoyed himself the most while Yousuf Youhana and Saqlain Mushtaq were the quietest as they sat and watched sipping orange juice.

Eventful 1998-99 series

Even before the Pakistani team had landed in India on the 1998-99 tour, some goons dug up the pitch at Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla Stadium, the venue of the first Test, protesting the upcoming series. To get time to repair the pitch, the Delhi Test was swapped with Chennai, which hosted the first Test. Pakistan narrowly won the Test despite Sachin Tendulkar’s 136. The spectators at the MA Chidambaram Stadium won the hearts of everyone when they rose in unison to applaud the Pakistani players as they ran a round of the stadium after their 12-run win. This warm gesture, Shaharyar Khan later admitted, gave him the idea of writing a book.

India, thanks to Anil Kumble’s all 10 wickets in the second innings, fought back in the second Test at Kotla as the two-match series ended in a 1-1- draw.

In the 50-over World Cup, the two cross-border rivals have clashed seven times and India have won all the encounters. It remains to be seen if Pakistan breaks the jinx on October 14 in Ahmedabad.

(The writer has covered cricket for over three decades, based in Delhi. He tweets at @AlwaysCricket)