Sahir Ludhianvi was born into the wealthy family of a Muslim zamindaar as Abdul Hayee on March 8, 1921 in Ludhiana, Punjab. Sahir's parents had a very loose and estranged relationship. In 1934, when he was thirteen years old, his father married for the second time. At that time, his mother decided to take the bold step of leaving her husband, forfeiting all claims to the financial assets. Sahir's father then sued his mother for child custody but lost. He threatened to make sure Sahir did not live with his mother very long, even if that meant taking the child's life.Sahir's mother then found friends who kept a close watch on him and didn't let him out of sight. Fear and financial deprivation surrounded the formative years of this young man. His parents' divorce brought him and his mother face to face with poverty and struggle in life. The house in which Sahir was born, a red sand-stone haveli, stands in Karimpura, a muslim neighborhood of Ludhiana, with a small plaque announcing its importance upon the arched mughal darwaaza - the only effort by this teeming industrial city to remember him.
In 1943, Sahir settled in Lahore. Here, he completed the writing of his first Urdu work, Talkhiyaan ("Bitterness"). He then began searching for a publisher who would publish his work and after two years of search he found a publisher in 1945. After his work was published, he began editing four Urdu magazines, Adab-e-Lateef, Shahkaar, Prithlari, and Savera; these magazines became very successful[He then became a member of the Progressive Writer's Association. However, inflammatory writings (communist views and ideology) in Savera resulted in the issuing of a warrant for his arrest by the Government of Pakistan. So, somewhere in 1949, Sahir fled from Lahore to Delhi. After a couple of months in Delhi, he moved to and settled in Bombay. A friend of his recalls Sahir telling him "
