Personal Life
Sahir Ludhianvi remained a bachelor all his life, he had two failed love affairs with writer Amrita Pritam and singer/actress Sudha Malhotra. These relationships had left him an embittered man. He took to drinking heavily and drank himself deep into alcoholism. The tragedies and pathos of his personal life most truly reflected in his poignant poetry.
His relationship with Amrita Pritam was so passionate that at one time, while attending a press conference, Amrita wrote his name hundreds of times on a sheet of paper. The two of them would meet without saying a word and Sahir would puff away with his cigarettes, and after he left, Amrita would smoke the cigarette butts left by him. After his death, she hoped the smoke from her cigarettes would meet him in the other world.
It is said that when Sahir was courting Amrita Pritam, he built a taller house in front of Amrita Pritam's residence in Ludhiana to show her father that he could afford a house. This statement is a fallacy derived from the Hindi film Tere Ghar Ke Samne. Sahir's economic position at the time was pitiful, so 'building a house' would be out of the question; and secondly, Amrita Pritam did not belong to Ludhiana but to Gujranwala; and the "love of her life" was another Urdu shayar, Imroz, as detailed extensively in her autobiography, written in Punjabi for which she got a Sahitya Academy Award.
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