During our most enjoyable visit, I could not help noticing a couple of books being passed around with titles concerning the raising of boys in a family.
On our way back home, I wondered what funds of experience and knowledge on the subject those books contained.
And I reflected on my own boyhood.
This piece is the consequence of that reflection.
The time I remember most vividly of my childhood was the arrival of home-delivered newspapers every morning to our house in Lahore.
That was during the days of the British Raj; Salman Rushdie and his Midnight's Children were not born then.
Early every morning, one English and several Urdu newspapers were delivered to our house.
As I went to school, they used to lie on a large table in the veranda of our large colonial-style house.
With their clean, crisp look and a pleasing smell of freshness, they began another day for our family.
The Civil and Military Gazette was always on top of the pile, as if by sovereign right.
I, the youngest of six children (all alive at the time of writing), took hardly any interest in the newspapers.
But I was growing up with home-delivered newspapers.
One of them was to fashion my future, for better or for worse.
Also, we had weekly and monthly magazines delivered.
Weekly magazines, in Urdu and English, were for my three sisters, and the monthly magazine that came from overseas was for the whole family.
I used to like the feel of the glossy pages of The Illustrated London News.
It was of some interest to me because it had lots of photographs of people and places of a faraway land.
One day in it I saw a picture of a girl, and I began to notice that her pictures would appear quite often in the magazine.
Years later, she was to shake my hand when, as a member of the Pakistan cricket team, I was presented to her at Lord's cricket ground during a test match against England.
At that very moment, the memory of her photographs in the magazine and my boyhood days in Lahore flashed through my mind.
My senses felt the stab of mysteries of life, the unforeseeable, and the unplanned: once a skinny little boy in Lahore who was always behind in his schoolwork, now there I was shaking hands with the Queen.
As a young boy I had no interest in reading newspapers, and no-one in our family ever asked me to read them.
But they were there every day; and every other family member read them, every day, notwithstanding their individual commitments to work, to school and college and university studies.
Looking back on my boyhood days in Lahore, I later realised that my parents were bringing me up in a household of newspapers knowing, I suspect, that in addition to their parental guidance, the newspapers would not only provide me with the current news and views and writings of others, but also with the means to further knowledge that was unlimited in its scope and unimaginable in its entirety.
I was growing up, and began to take interest in the western movies that came to our city, and the Civil and Military Gazette carried the advertisements of the cinema houses that showed them.
Now I started to read the newspaper.
No, that is not entirely correct; I began to read in the newspaper what I could understand and, indeed, what excited my imagination.
From back page of movies information, I began turning over the pages, from left to right, as when reading Urdu text.
The back pages carried sports news and results.
I began reading the scorecards of cricket matches.
The Civil and Military Gazette did not introduce me to cricket.
But it turned my boyish dabble in cricket into serious intent.
Cricket reports in the newspaper often included head and shoulders pictures of cricketers.
Two faces appeared regularly because they, like our own Glenn Turner, scored runs regularly.
One was an Australian, the other an Englishman.
Decades later, opportunities would come my way to meet them in their respective countries.
As the captain of Tasmania in 1972, I was introduced to Sir Donald Bradman during a match at the Adelaide Oval between the Apple State and South Australia.
He sat between the home team and Australia captain, Ian Chappell, and me during the teams' luncheon break; and in a wonderful gesture of courtesy, he spent most of the time talking with me.
In my boyhood days, I never thought of meeting him, let alone having lunch with him in Australia.
A couple of years later, I was commentating for the BBC on radio on a test series between Pakistan and England.
The first test was at Headingley cricket ground in Leeds, Yorkshire.
I had decided to stay at a mock-Tudor inn closer to Haworth, with a plan to visit the Haworth Parsonage, once the home of the Bronte sisters.
One evening there were only two guests having dinner in the large dining room of the inn, Sir Leonard Hutton and I.
Dinner over, I went over to his table and introduced myself; he invited me to have coffee with him.
He himself had been at the test that day, during which he, too, had seen the ball swing and seam all over the shop all day on what was once his home pitch.
I asked him how he himself would have batted on it, and waited to get an in-depth answer from the finest batting technician against the new ball I have ever seen.
There was a long pause; he squinted his eyes, as if his mind was journeying back to his playing days, and then in a soft, measured voice he said something about batting for five hours.
After savouring every instant of talking cricket with Len Hutton, I went out for a walk in the fresh air of his native Yorkshire, and thought of his pictures in the Civil and Military Gazette.
- Billy Ibadulla is a former international cricketer, coach and long-time enthusiast of the game.
