Dilip Kumar and a house in Peshawar

Declared a national heritage, Dilip Kumar's crumbling house in Pakistan is a repository of stories

On cold winter nights, a two-storey house in a congested lane in Peshawar would come alive with sounds of singing and storytelling. A little boy, born as Yousuf Khan who would later become famous as Dilip Kumar, would sit with his family by a bonfire on the terrace of this house, a quilt wrapped around his legs, listening to songs and stories. This was a family ritual. Today, Dilip Kumar's house in Peshawar is falling apart. But the stories linger on.

For years, there have been requests in Pakistan for salvaging this legacy of the Indian actor who is so adored in the neighbouring country that in 1998 it conferred on him its highest civilian award, Nishan-e-Imtiaz (Order of Excellence). Now, finally, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has declared Dilip Kumar's house a national heritage to be restored and turned into a museum. "It's a four-marla (900 square feet) house and no longer livable," says Mashood Mirza, the acting director of Pakistan National Council of Arts that will see the process through.

It was at this house during his childhood in Peshawar that his "sense of storytelling was ignited," writes the actor in his autobiography, Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow . The house is, after all, located in the famous Kissa Khwani Bazaar, or the 'Market of Storytellers', which got its name because it was here that locals and travelling traders from Central Asia would gather in the evenings and narrate stories to one another. To this day, Kissa Khwani Bazaar remains a bustling marketplace known for its chapli kebabs.

That Dilip Kumar would go on to be known as 'Tragedy King', an actor who could internalise and convincingly portray agony, is also perhaps a result of an incident that took place here. He was playing in the front room of the house one day, when a fakir (ascetic) arrived at the doorstep, took one look at the boy and prophesied, "This child is made for great fame… protect him from the world's evil eye." From that day on his grandmother would not let him step out without soot smeared on his forehead. The pain of alienation he experienced in school because of this showed up in his films later.

The house in Peshawar is also the foundation of a lifelong friendship between two legends - Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. A short walk from here, in Dakhi Nalbandi, lived Dewan Basheshwarnath Kapoor, a friend of Dilip Kumar's Pathan father. "His elder son came to our house with him a few times and he stunned the ladies with his handsome appearance. That was Raj Kapoor's father, Prithviraj Kapoor," writes Dilip Kumar. Once among the highest buildings in the vicinity, the Kapoor house, where Raj Kapoor was born in 1924 (two years after Dilip Kumar), is also in a state of decay now. Some of the top storeys have collapsed.

Also located in these narrow alleyways within a 200-metre radius is the ancestral house of Shah Rukh Khan where some of his cousins still live.

These were houses built with interconnected terraces. As Dilip Kumar recounts in his book, "the buildings were so designed as to give the ladies who observed purdah those days [like his mother] the mobility they needed without having to come out of their houses."

Not much has changed since Dilip Kumar moved to Mumbai in the 1930s. He and his wife, Saira Banu, visited the house in 1988 and wanted to do so again when they were in Pakistan a decade later, but the crowd that turned up to see them made it impossible.

The Pakistan government now wants to turn the clock back. "The process of restoring the house," says Mirza, "has only started. We have to first acquire the house. The rest will follow."