When I was growing up in Faisalabad, there was an empty patch of land at the end of our street that everyone called the ground. It wasn't an official sports field at all. It was a dusty plot waiting to be built on, but for about ten years it was the centre of my childhood.
I played there with the boys from our street and the next few streets, anywhere from six to twenty of us depending on the day. There was no adult in charge. The older boys organised everything, picked the teams and settled arguments, sometimes fairly and sometimes not.
Mostly we played cricket, of course, because that's the national obsession. We used a taped tennis ball instead of a proper cricket ball, so nobody got hurt, and the wicket was three sticks pushed into the ground or sometimes just a brick. There were complicated local rules, like if you hit the ball onto the roof of Mr Aslam's house, you were out, because we'd have to go and ask for it back. In the hottest months we switched to football in the evenings.
It was important to me for more than just the sport. I was quite a shy child, and at school I didn't have many friends. But on the ground, if you could bowl well, people respected you, and that gave me a lot of confidence. I also learned how to lose without crying and how to sort out disagreements without a teacher stepping in. A few years ago houses were finally built on it, and I felt surprisingly sad driving past, even though I'm now a grown man with my own children.