Imran Khan

What was your ambition then in those early years? What was your cricketing goal, as it were?

Well, let me tell you, when I was playing school cricket, my ambition was to be the youngest player to play for Pakistan. I mean, I have to say here that my ambitions were always so high. When I look back, I mean, I'm I'm shocked at what I aimed for. Then when I actually played for Pakistan, I remember that, you know, people there were sort of other players in the team who were quite nervous. It was a first test against England when England was supposed to be invincible in nineteen seventy one. And you know, m I I mean other players now when I look back might have ambitions like you know they should just do okay. Mine was nothing less than to score one hundred rounds and get ten wickets in the match.

So what did you say to your family? [When you were eighteen you expected] to follow in the footsteps of your cousins and be educated at Oxford and then become captain of Pakistan and go back to your arranged marriage? Did you say, 'Excuse me, I don't want to do that bit of it,' or 'can we defer that for a while'?

Can we defer that for a while? My mother, every time I used to come back from a cricket season in England, she would say, It's time you got married. Now this is when I was twenty four onwards. So one day I told her, I said, listen, the day I'm thirty, You can just marry me to anyone. But then, you know, when you were twenty five, thirty seems so far away. When I was thirty, I discovered that, you know, I didn't want marriage. And so I explained to her that y and and well, I tried to make her understand that, you know, my life, it won't fit in with it. And really I at no stage felt I was ready for marriage.

You found yourself appalled, didn't you, at the lack of medical treatment in Pakistan?

Well, frankly, till nineteen eighty five. there was uh never any part of me that was touched as far as a medical uh health care in Pakistan went, or there was never ever any problem in my family. So When she First, she started complaining about pains in her stomach, and she went to various places to find out, have it diagnosed. They all came up with sort of the wrong treatment. Everyone, some said it's dysentery, amoebic dysentery, whatever. She, in fact, herself went to a certain clinic and said, Look, th there's a problem. I feel there's something, there's a blockage in one of my intestines. I actually can feel something there. And eventually they did the right test and found out that she had a tumor. Now by that time Valuable time had been lost. I got her to come to England, where she had it operated, but sadly It had just got out of the intestine and it spread, eventually reached her liver, and she died a very painful death. Now it was at this sta being A very close to her, and secondly, watching someone that close to her in so much pain The result was that it it I if I look back, it was like a watershed in my career, in my life. It suddenly changed me completely. I think it was not so much her death, but the pain she went through and the fact that it was needless. I mean, she had cancer of the intestine. It's one of the few cancers that actually can be cured very quickly, if caught early. Now, the other thing that made me realize was. That in the whole of our country, 110 million people, we do not have one cancer hospital. What I'm trying to do right now is this setting up a cancer hospital, which means, you know, I have never worked as much as this in my whole life.