The legacy of Younis

During the recent domestic T20 tournament, two fellow journalists were trying to track down Younis Khan for an interview. They found him at the end or start of a game, and he asked them to "come over to my hotel room later tonight". As he sped past them, they realised he hadn't mentioned the room number, or indeed the hotel. They asked a few others for Younis' phone number and pretty soon ended up with about 16 different numbers for him. All of them were switched off.

The next day, they ran into Younis, who asked them where they had been. They told him about the room number problem and then the 16 phone numbers, which made him laugh and repeat a famous Bollywood dialogue, "Woh kehte hain na - Don ko pakarna mushkil hi nahi, namumkin hai." (You know what they say: capturing the don isn't just difficult - it's impossible.)

The charming anecdote captures some important things about the player - his sense of humour, his frankness, his tendency to go incognito. What I like most is that the film reference made me think of filmi characters - those larger-than-life creations of masala movies that are such a big part of South Asian culture.

I have often felt that the collapse of the popular film industry has been a major cause for the superstardom of Pakistani cricketers. They have filled a void of sorts in the popular imagination.

The Pakistan cricket team has had its fair share of absolutely mad characters, but Younis is the maddest, or most filmi to have emerged with a great reputation as well as superb statistics. Indeed, he is now the greatest run scorer in Pakistani history, and yet I still can't help but feel that he can be better "imagined" in both Pakistan's and cricket's popular narrative.

The word filmi has negative connotations (describing someone who is melodramatic), but to paint him as such is not at all my intention. My use of it here is to celebrate the barely believable, twisting and turning career of a marvellous player. After all, Younis has spent all this time playing the long con.

The character I pictured when thinking about him in a filmi reference was Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects - the guy no one expected to be there at the end; the guy everyone underestimated.

Younis began his career amid the dying embers of the #Mighty90sSide, which was fighting its demons and court cases as much as it was its opponents. He came of age in the Bob Woolmer era, where with Mohammad Yousuf and Inzamam-ul-Haq he formed the mighty triumvirate that was Pakistan's middle order. Even there, his feats were often overshadowed, largely because the other two had been archetypal in a way he never had been - Inzamam was the unknown youngster who had arrived from nowhere to grab the world by surprise, a typical Pakistani cricket myth. Yousuf had his moments in his golden run in 2006, where he played into the English myth about the classy subcontinental batsman who was an aesthetically pleasing run glut.

Younis' story was always more bizarre. Around about the time of his golden run as a Test batsman, Pakistan did not play Tests for a year, and he was then kicked out of the side months after leading the country to a world title, in 2009. The annus horribilis that was 2010 laid waste to many careers in Pakistan's batting stocks, and an entire generation of players that were meant to finally come of age were instead out of the team. The fixing scandal meant that an old-timer was brought back to lead a team of fresh-faced youngsters. The only other old face was that of Younis, whose spat with the board meant that he had been absent from the horror tours of Australia and England that had caused all these changes.

Yet once again, Younis was in the shadows, as the era came to be defined largely by Afridi v Misbah debates. That debate didn't apply in Tests, but even when Misbah's team showed how formidable it could be, the plaudits went largely to the captain and the bowlers. Younis wasn't seen as a leading act, let alone a superstar.

But now that he is at the top, now that he has the numbers irrefutably in his favour, we realise that playing out someone else's story was never an option for Younis Khan - he was always going to be the basis for his own myth.

So what will his myth be?

For me, the parts of Younis' career that are most intriguing are the ones that subvert certain narratives about Pakistani cricket and reinforce others. He wasn't blessed with abundant talent; he lacks a penchant for spectacular match-winning feats; he hasn't been prone to being lazy and unprofessional when things aren't going his way. And yet, what has made him extremely Pakistani is his desire, his obsession, to prove a point. Like Imran Khan seeing red after being hit for a boundary, or Javed Miandad aping the keeper, Younis has always had that desire to compete to the end.

For most of his career, Younis has been sidelined because there haven't been any clichés or narratives that fit him. But whenever he leaves, he will do so as an example, an ideal that others will aspire to. It's a legacy that few others can manage.