Hafiz who became a cricketer

Series on the line. Game on the line. Pakistan’s pride on the line. 

Zaman Khan, all of 22-years-old and playing his maiden One-Day International, is given the ball after a long conversation between Pakistan skipper Babar Azam and ‘keeper Mohammad Rizwan. They don’t look convinced, but the deep end is always a fine place to separate wheat from chaff. 

Zaman - wide-eyed and anxious - is at the top of his bowling mark. There’s a prominent ‘Z’ marked out for him and his slingy action.  

The background shimmers to the torchlight of around 35,000 mobile phones at the R Premadasa at 1 am on Friday morning. Never mind that the game started on Thursday, the crowd still has the lungs on it. Moods oscillate between despair and joy while resting on a fabric of nail-biting anxiety.

The newest member in a long line of pace bowling savants has to earn his stripes. He has six balls to keep Sri Lanka from winning. Charith Asalanka and Pramod Madushan need to score eight runs to stop him from earning them. 

The first four balls are witness to two runs and a run-out. That leaves Sri Lanka with six runs to win from the last two deliveries with Asalanka on strike. Zaman’s fifth ball is a thick edge that temptingly floats between the ‘keeper and the vacant first slip and races to the third-man fence.

Zaman is on his knees. He slaps the ground a few times before he gets back to his mark. After all, he still has two runs to defend off the final ball. 

He’s been here before, not at the same level, but several times on his journey from being a tape-ball player from Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir to the Khettarama as Pakistan’s frontline seamer, he has been entrusted with a similar responsibility. 

Asalanka’s nonchalant flick to deep square leg for a double meant Sri Lanka would win, and Zaman would not have his moment. He made it plenty evident that he wasn’t pleased, but to a man raised to the sound of violence reverberating between the four mud-plastered walls of a room he calls home, this was a victory still.

Indian fast bowler Umran Malik and him are separated by 100 kilometres of what used to be tarmac, and their stories are, broadly speaking, much the same.  

Son of a daily wage labourer in Chakswari, Zaman was raised to be a Quran hafiz. In fact, he revealed in an interview recently that he does know the holy book by heart and recites it every chance he gets, but he gave up on the madrasa, it was eating into his cricket time. 

The problem with that was that he didn’t have a home to go back to once he took that call. He was picked up by Lahore Qalanders for the Pakistan Super League after his unique action and pace was found agreeable to talent spotters, chief among whom was former World Cup winner Aaqib Javed. 

He would eventually be called on to showcase his speciality, bowling at the death, when the Qalanders were defending 13 runs from the final over of the final against Multan Sultans. Zaman conceded 11 and received as many as four iPhones from his indulgent owners when he had not owned a device at all until then. 

Qalanders’ country-wide Trophy tour involved the team going to Chakswari. There’s a clip of Zaman’s father shaking his head in disbelief. There’s another of Zaman shaking in disbelief.

Who would have thought a hafiz would go from memorising scriptures to becoming memorable through his own script!