bhisham sahni whose dark masterpiece tamas ranks among the finest works on the partition was born on august 8 exactly 100 years ago in the capital to attend his ongoing centenary celebrations his nephew actor parikshit sahni tapasya samaj ko badal daalo and more recently pk spoke with toi on his earliest memories of his uncle i was only six months old when my father actor balraj sahni left for london with my mother to work for the bbc world war ii was on my grandparents and bhishamji advised them not to take me there so ever since i became conscious of my surroundings it was bhishamji and my grandparents all the way when they came back i was six years old i didnt even know they were my parents i always felt i had two dads my father and bhishamji i never called him chacha he was a friend to everybody when he was getting married and sat on a horse i started crying i thought he is going to his wifes house and would never come back i was told that it is the other way around to convince me they even made me sit on the horse in front of him on balraj my brother the biography he wrote balraj my brother is a very objective book he did not make it sentimental at all it is a painstaking and balanced biography bhishamji wrote what he saw realism was his credo he fathomed the depth of my fathers creativity very well from the book i learnt many things about my father which i wasnt aware of i came to know what formed his world view on his favourite works of bhishamji i studied english literature at stephens then i went to russia europe i studied european literature i was brought up on byron shelley maugham hemingway joyce and steinbeck then the russian classical writers tolstoy turgenev chekhov dostoevsky so i used to have a chip on my shoulder about hindi literature i hadnt read much it is only after i came back that i started reading i read premchand and when i read bhishamji i was pleasantly surprised some of his short stories were no less than those of chekhov chief ki daawat is an incredible story his novel mayyadas ki marhi reminded me of tolstoys war and peace because it similarly delineated an entire epoch he researched on it for so many years on tamas it is a classic i was too young to remember the partition very clearly but i have some vague recollections there was massacre in front our house in rawalpindi i have clear memories of bhishamji going around with a kirpan he was a member of congress at that time i was told later i also learnt that he was the guy who was trying to make peace he had firsthand knowledge of all that went on he had been all the way to the place where the sikh women had jumped