‘I almost lost the will to live’: Imran Khan’s unveils his agonizing marriage ending

Ex- Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan has spoken of ‘losing the will to live’ after the disintegration of his marriage to heiress Jemima Goldsmith. He said the six months leading to the divorce and the six months after was the ‘hardest year of my life.’

Speaking for the first time about his nine-year marriage, Mr. Khan admitted not seeing their two sons – Sulaiman and Kasim, then aged eight and five – caused him deep anguish. He said: ‘I loved fatherhood more than anything I had ever experienced in life…now
not having them around was the hardest thing to come to terms with.’

‘For the first time I began to understand how people could lose the will to live. The children’s obvious distress exacerbated the misery. Seeing Sulaiman’s pain doubled my pain. I missed them terribly. Nothing filled the void.’

In a new book on his rise to political power, Mr. Khan writes how politics and family life failed to mix after he married Miss Goldsmith in 1995 when he was 43 and she was 21.

My greatest sacrifice for being in politics was not always being able to spend as much time as I wanted to with my family,’ he is quoted in the Daily Telegraph. He describes how he was vilified and ridiculed in Pakistan when he launched his own political
party and his wife faced allegations she was part of a Zionist plot to take over the country.

Jemima, who had converted to Islam, ’wished I had never gone into politics,’ he writes. He had become the butt of jokes and his private life was ‘raked over’ in the media. He recalled how critics would attack her to get at him. ‘Hard for anyone, this kind
of treatment was particularly distressing for somebody like Jemima, who was naturally shy and sensitive.’

She returned to Britain with the boys to study a course on modern Islam at university and the couple finally divorced in 2004. Mr. Khan’s sons visit him in Pakistan during their school holidays while he stays with his former mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Goldsmith,
when he comes to London to see them.

The legendary ex- cricket captain reveals his relief that the ‘burden of Jemima’s unhappiness’ was lifted from him after they parted. He writes: ‘If there’s one thing worse than seeing a loved one leave, it’s seeing a loved one discontented.’

Mr. Khan confesses that he now realizes his wife may have been too young and inexperienced to cope with the challenges of his political career. He writes: ‘It pained me that she had to endure all the suffering that divorce entails. She gained two beautiful
sons, though, and a second home in Pakistan, where she was much loved.’

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Posted by Khayyam Bokhari on Nov 27 2011. Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry