Nineteen seventy-one was a terrible year in former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, when the country was caught in the maelstrom of a savage war of independence. The marauding Pakistani soldiers were everywhere frantically looking for the freedom fighters and committing atrocities. The country was engulfed in desolation of the killing fields as the trail of death and devastation lengthened each day. That year of living dangerously spared not even a sleepy little village like Neelgonj in north-eastern East Pakistan. One morning the soldiers arrived having information that the freedom fighters were hiding in the adjacent woods.
