For Amar Jaleel, the world isn’t a stage; it’s more like a cricket field with everyone of us out to play the innings of our life. The abiding passion of this veteran short story writer and columnist is cricket and his conversation is peppered with anecdotes and analogies from the ‘gentleman’s game’.

“Even at the age of 78, it’s my first love,” he says with a wide smile. “I don’t sleep at night; I stay awake watching five-day test matches being played elsewhere in the world at that time, such as Australia or the West Indies.” For someone who started writing at the age of 10 and who would grow up to have a prolific love affair with the written word, Jaleel Sahib’s burning ambition as a young man was to play test cricket for Pakistan — more specifically, as a wicketkeeper-cum-batsman like his idol, Imtiaz Ahmed.

A twinkle comes into his eyes as he describes how he would try and imitate his hero’s style of playing, even his mannerisms, down to his walk and hairstyle.

When it became clear that test cricket was a bridge too far for his sporting prowess — although he did play for the NJV High School and Karachi University teams while studying there — he decided he’d follow Imtiaz Ahmed’s second career path and join the air force. However, his doting mother didn’t allow her youngest child to become a fighter pilot.

Jaleel Sahib was born in Rohri near Sukkur, when his older brother was in college, and his sister was eight. Although both his parents were originally from Bombay, his father settled in Karachi in 1920.

One of his earliest memories is from the time of the Second World War, when he was only three. Drills were held in Karachi every third day in readiness for an air attack (which ultimately never took place). Sirens would be sounded and blackouts imposed, and everyone took shelter under the nearest staircase. “My mother would cradle me in her lap. She was very heavy, like a big Maratha woman,” he remembers with a chuckle. “I’d be nestled against her chest listening to her breathing. I still remember the darkness and the sound of the sirens. In fact, till today, I have a lingering fear of the dark.”

Karachi back in the ’40s, with a population of 300,000, was a very different place. The only substantial traffic was on Bunder Road (now M.A. Jinnah Road), and trams transported travellers to and from the centre of the city. Jaleel Sahib lived with his family in the building that later became the Anklesaria Hospital, a stone’s throw away from what was then called Gandhi Garden — the zoo. The sound of the lions roaring in the early morning and at sunset every day remains imprinted on his mind.

In 1942, at the age of six, he was enrolled at the Ratan Talao Primary School on Bunder Road. Hindus and Muslims studied together, and the children would sing two anthems before classes in the morning. One was Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana mana gana and the other was Saare jahan se accha Hindustan hamara. Here was laid the foundation of a fiercely independent mind that has always refused to compromise closely held convictions, even if they upended conventional wisdom and put several holy cows to slaughter.

“It was inculcated in our heads that this earth, India, is our mother,” says Jaleel Sahib. “You can’t partition your mother.” His anti-partition stance is a recurrent theme in many of his columns and stories.

His opinion of Mohammed Ali Jinnah is also somewhat unconventional. “He was not a politician, he was a lawyer — albeit a brilliant one,” he says.

“He was hired as an advocate by the Muslim League to fight their case for Pakistan. And he fought it and gave them this homeland.”

He believes Jinnah did not foresee the paroxysm of communal violence that would engulf India at independence. “He thought like an advocate, not a politician.”

In fact, in his view, the Two-Nation Theory itself was fundamentally flawed, containing within it seeds of future communal conflict. “In Jinnah Sahib’s first speech after partition he spoke of equal rights for Hindus and other minorities. How could he say that after claiming a separate homeland for the Muslims of subcontinent and after saying Muslims weren’t prepared to live with them?” he asks.

Known as the king of the Sindhi short story, Jaleel Sahib has authored hundreds of such works of fiction based on socio-political issues, as well as numerous columns for Sindhi, Urdu and English newspapers. He is also the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Pride of Performance.

For this avowed Sufi, religious conventions have little meaning. “There is no creator but One Creator. The pagan and the pious are His creations. We all belong to Him,” he has written in an essay. His love of music leads him most often to bhajans — Hindu devotional music — via the internet. And for inspiration he turns to Buddha who, in his eyes, was a “real” Sufi because he rebelled against the religion he was born into.

Religion, says Jaleel Sahib, is an accident of birth. “I was born a free man for five minutes and then I was chained. It was not my decision to be born in a Muslim family, no more than it is for someone to be born in Christian or Hindu families.”

Views such as these can land one in trouble — or to use his preferred lexicon, on a sticky wicket. So it happened to him, that too in the comparatively more laidback ’70s when a Sindhi short story of his, about the violation of a Hindu family at the hands of a group of Muslim thugs, came to the parliament’s notice. A non-bailable warrant was issued, charging him with blasphemy. He only managed to evade arrest on the personal intervention of the director general of Radio Pakistan, where he was working at the time.

A committee was formed to look into the matter, which included intelligence personnel and members of the armed forces, but the enquiry snowballed from allegations of blasphemy to sedition as more of his stories were scrutinised. Nearly 30 stories were banned, as were the magazines in which the works had appeared.

Reprieve for this dyed-in-the-wool progressive came, ironically enough, at the hands of Gen Ziaul Haq who, upon coming to power, with one stroke pardoned all those who had been facing ‘political persecution’ under the PPP government.

Jaleel sahib’s career as a writer continued against the backdrop of his equally long career as an educationist. Beginning with Radio Pakistan in Karachi, he moved to Islamabad to continue as director, Institute of Education Technology for 24 years and finally retired as vice chancellor of Allama Iqbal Open University.

Today, he lives in Karachi and spends his time reading and writing a weekly column for a local Urdu newspaper. “My wife and I have no children, but when I write I feel like I have given birth to my child,” he says. “People can read it in 10 minutes; I take three days to write it.”

He often writes about current affairs, or whatever else catches his fancy. After 55 years of writing, that’s a privilege he can afford. The situation in the country confounds him, particularly what he sees as the government’s pandering to the militants and seeking a dialogue with them.

But at the end of the day, there’s little that gets him agitated. “Life is like a game of cricket played on a wet wicket,” he says. “You can’t judge the ball. It might rise and hit you in the chest, but you’re a cricketer. So you go out, keep your head down, and play your game the best you can.”