Morning of October 1942, Chittagong, British Colonial India  Chittagong was a sleepy, largely agrarian town, still languishing in the backwaters of the British East Indian Colony. As the early winter fog was still hesitantly floating in the air, sudden howling of aerial attack sirens rang out from the nearby British and Allied military barracks. Soon, waves of Japanese Bombers started dropping the payloads over the town. The Japanese air-attack was instantly followed by thuds of anti-aircraft batteries fired from the British bases as they engaged the attackers from this Air-Naval base.  On this same day of October 27, 1942, shrill cries of children and relatives rang out in the unison in the household of Antoo Miyan Chowdhury and Pori Roksar Begum. The gathered elders and men of the family started chanting “La ilaha il-lal-la-No God but Allah”, their collective voice took on the gravitas of gnostic melody, as Pori’s body laid motionlessly on her bed. Someone pulled the white shroud over her body soon covering her pale bloodless face. As the cacophony of mourning voices of men, women and children merged together like an operatic performance, one was the most distinct with mournful timbre in that bamboo thicket house with a corrugated tin roof.“Pori? Why did you leave before me? How could you go before me?” The mourning and melancholy of the voice gave her identity away: only a mother could be so sad, she was none other than of Sabeda Khatun, Pori’s mother. Chittagong, being in a far-flung corner of the British Indian Colony bordering Burma (Myanmar in the present days), was still almost unknown to the world and was still hidden away from the limelight of the constant World War II news reports which were only busy with the reports of European frontlines. Almost nothing was reported from this area in what was the mainstream media of that time, although the ferocity and atrocities of the war were no less than the European frontlines. But lying in the hinterland of Indian subcontinent provided no respite to my ancestral hometown of Chittagong from the devastation of World War II. It quickly became a hub of frantic military staging operations for the British Army. By this time the Japanese Imperial Army had occupied large part of Burma with the cooperation of local Burmese and had posed a direct threat to what was the territory of Indian Colony itself.  At this time, British Major General Wilfrid Lewis Lloyd was commanding the battle to recover from what was until then a humiliating defeat of the Allied armies at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army in the Burma Front. Chittagong Nestled by the shores of the Bay of Bengal, with continuous and contiguous Burmese shorelines, Chittagong still defines the transition of India-South East Asia with Indochina or with Far East Asia. It was the perfect geographic and strategic fit for the advance military supply base that could be reinforced from the sea and the air routes in Burma Campaign. The Americans also provided significant logistical support via Chittagong as British Allied fighters assembled for the fight in Arakan, the westernmost Burmese province adjacent to Chittagong. The assembled troops were diverse and included conscripts, soldiers, and other personnel from all parts of India, and as far as West Africa. The first reported Japanese bombing of Chittagong was on August 9, 1942, which, intensified during the subsequent months and by October it was so intense that my grandmother Pori’s burial had to be delayed on October 27, 1942. Pori & Antoo Miyan Chowdhury Pori Roksar Begum was my maternal grandmother whom we call “Nani” in local Chittagong dialect. She was the oldest of four children of Sabeda, and Ahmed Kabir (Sabeda’s husband). Pori had died when my mother was barely ten, we never had a chance to meet her in person.  Her parents had named her Pori, meaning Angel, for the angelic beauty and mild manner she showed from her childhood onward, according to family’s history. But little did they know then while naming her that she would turn out to be physically fragile all her life as well. As was customary in the society of the then, Pori, in her mid-teenage years, married my maternal grandfather, Antoo Miyan Chowdhury, my “Nana“. He was one of the first Muslim graduates in Chittagong with a BA degree at a time when the Muslims from the Indian subcontinent had just begun their struggle to regain their rights to get an education and enter the job markets after a long period of marginalization and discrimination, both at the hands of the British colonialists who wrestled the power away from the Muslim dynasties and later at the hands of the Hindu majority who more closely allied themselves with the British before the Muslims could accept and reconcile with the new reality of being the losers and the underdogs in the wake of a new power structure. Nana was a government servant of the British Raj, a position commanding considerable social respect and financial security. His homelife flourished as well, as during their married life of ten years, Nana and Nani Pori had seven children. Each pregnancy happened before she could fully recuperate form the previous childbirth and left her weaker and sicker than ever. Her seventh child, a boy, was born in 1942 through a difficult delivery at home. And so, it seemed that by this time, Pori’s young body had produced enough children and could not give birth anymore. Although the newborn was healthy after the long birthing process, Pori never regained her place in her world. All her seven deliveries were at home under the care of her mother and local elderly women (midwives) who lacked any formal medical training. Hospitalization for childbirth was not ever heard of in those days in this society. The midwives and elder women who supervised the childbirths of Pori at her home were at a loss to explain her deteriorating condition. They told she had chutabai, a basket term in the local Chittagong