"I am at once full of fond remembrances of my parents, grandparents and numerous uncles, aunts and cousins who filled the house with the sounds of their chatter and hearty laughter," Dilip Kumar wrote in his blog.
"I have lovely memories of Qissa Khwani Bazar, where I received my first lessons in story-telling, which later provided the impetus to choose meaty stories and scripts for my work," the 89-year-old actor wrote in a piece titled "On my ancestral house and childhood."
Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the Information Minister of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, announced last week that the ancestral homes of Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor in Peshawar would be acquired by the provincial government and preserved as national heritage sites.
"The news that the house where I was born (1922) and where I spent a good part of my childhood in Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazar, then in undivided India, will be given the honour of being a part of the national heritage of Pakistan has sent my mind racing back to memories of happy days spent in the spacious home and its surroundings," Dilip Kumar wrote.
The actor was born as Muhammad Yusuf Khan at Mohalla Khudadad in Qissa Khwani Bazar on December 11, 1922. His father, Lala Ghulam Sarwar, was a fruit merchant who owned orchards in Peshawar and what is now Maharashtra. The family shifted to Mumbai in the late 1920s
Dilip Kumar recalled his mother, "who was frail and delicate, was always in the spacious kitchen of the house and as a little boy I would wait for her to finish her chores so that I could just sit by her side and gaze at her beautiful face".
He added: "I have memories of the sitting room where the family gathered for high tea in the evenings, the large room where the ladies prayed, the terrace, the bedrooms, everything. I can vividly recall the piggy rides on my grandfather's back and the scary stories my grandmother cooked up to forbid me from wandering out of the house alone."
Some of the acting legend's most vivid memories appeared to be of Kissa Khwani Bazar, or the Storytellers' Market, which in the past was a historic gathering place for traders from all over Central Asia. It got its name because travellers and traders often sat there and listened to tales narrated by storytellers.
Dilip Kumar promised to tell more of his memories of Qissa Khwani Bazar in an upcoming autobiography.
"Every day as the trading closed in the market of Qissa Khwani Bazar, a storyteller would sit in the centre of the square narrating stories of valour and victory, deceit and retribution which I would listen to with wide-eyed attention, seated next to my father and uncles. It is all there in my autobiography which, Inshallah, will be released shortly," he wrote.