My mother's recollections of Calcutta of the 1940s populate my notebooks. Her stories, told with care over the years to me and to others, offer a complex picture of the worst chapters of religious upheaval and violence. Now that so much is being said about Direct Action Day, the subject of a recent film, it seems pertinent to remember how my mother spoke of the day and its long aftermath.

Smoke billowed between rooftops, black clouds hung low and incandescent rain fell. Calcutta was under siege as the Muslim League called for Direct Action Day. The consequences – killings, rioting, arson and rape – engulfed the city. Shutters were pulled down, traffic was sparse. It rained the whole night and by morning it was still drizzling across much of central Calcutta.

The year was 1946. Little was known then that, within a year, India would be free from British colonial rule, though fractured by the creation of Pakistan to the east and west. Partition’s bloody saga would kill millions and leave even more homeless, the largest forced migration of people in modern history.

My mother was nine. The eldest of four siblings, she would recall the day with pauses and glassy eyes. She could hardly sleep that night. At the crossroads of cosmopolitan Calcutta, in the Park Circus area of Dilkusha Street, lived the Sen family. It was a large family of 20 people in a two-storey house with a long verandah and a basement storeroom.

The house, probably built during the early years of the second world war, had the basement as a necessary refuge in case of Japanese air raids. Later it was used to store sacks of rice grain for the large household. My grandfather, the head of the family, was a British government servant and an expert in Morse code.

The city was preparing for Durga Puja. There was a Muslim tailor nearby, fondly called Rahim Chacha (uncle). He was busy stitching my mother Mira and her cousin’s clothes while the children waited eagerly for their silk dresses to be delivered. She remembered giving him five sets. But she never got them back. The riots consumed her neighbourhood.

My grandfather worked at the port in Khidirpur, itself surrounded by the Muslim-majority area of Metiabruz. On August 16, 1946, the Muslim League called Direct Action Day to reject what it called the “Hindu-dominated Congress”.

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the chief minister of Bengal, lived nearby and was once considered a neighbour. Suhrawardy Avenue – named in 1933 after his uncle Hassan Suhrawardy, a medical surgeon, professor of history and vice-chancellor of Calcutta University – still runs from Park Circus towards the EM Bypass, opposite the Park Circus Maidan and beside Lady Brabourne College. A brick-coloured building there still stands. As a child, whenever we visited an uncle’s home nearby, my mother would point to that two-storey building and memories would come flooding back to her.

Numerous calls from my mother’s family to Lalbazar, the police headquarters, went unanswered. The local police station near Mullick Bazar was deserted. The family feared for the young women and children. My mother remembered how she and the elders buried jewellery underground to prevent looting. The nights were sleepless, filled with the shouts of arsonists, looters and murderers. The cries of nearby slum dwellers were unbearable. The family wept and prayed, not knowing when the attack would come.

By the evening of August 17, the skies were filled with smoke. No police arrived to evacuate Hindus from the area. Yet, strikingly, the Muslim neighbours the family knew were not part of the rioting mob. That night, as heavy rain fell, a neighbour, Aslam Chacha, and his daughter Fathima came to their home around 11pm. My mother remembered, even as a child, how the family sat around Aslam, who scratched his greying beard and assured them that, as long as he lived, he would defend Hindu residents against the League’s goons.

“They are not Bengali,” he said of the rioters. “We will stand beside you as long as possible. We have blocked the entry to this alley.”

Soon other Muslim neighbours joined them, giving the same assurances. They carried green dye and henna to colour the men’s vests and hair, to give them a “Mohammedan look” – a temporary disguise, perhaps, but a means of survival.

When curfew was imposed on 17 August, the city fell silent. The silence was more frightening than the shouts of rioters. In the distance, gunfire and the occasional explosion could still be heard.

My mother recalled how her younger sister, barely five years old, clung to their mother in terror. Food supplies dwindled, and the large family had to survive on whatever was left in the storeroom. The smell of smoke was everywhere.

On the morning of 18 August, they saw corpses lying on Central Avenue. Some were half-burnt, some headless, some hacked into pieces. Crows circled above. “I can never forget that sight,” my mother said.

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Soon afterwards, the Indian army finally appeared in armoured vehicles. Soldiers went from house to house, asking people to evacuate. “Take only the essentials,” one soldier told my grandfather. The family quickly packed a few clothes, some food and water, and the children.

As they prepared to leave, Aslam Chacha and Fathima stood at the door, tears in their eyes. “Go quickly,” he urged. “Do not look back.” He pressed my grandfather’s hand, as though to say everything else could be rebuilt later, but life had to be saved first.

The family was escorted in batches to the nearby army camp. My mother remembered the endless lines of evacuees – Hindus and Muslims alike – carrying bundles, children, and little else. Relief and fear were etched on every face.

Inside the camp, they were given bread and tea. The children were exhausted and soon fell asleep on mats laid on the floor. For days, the family remained there until it was safe enough to return home.

When they did, Dilkusha Street was unrecognisable. Many houses had been looted or burnt to the ground. The air was thick with the stench of death and smoke. But their home, miraculously, was still standing – protected, as they always remembered, by the courage of Muslim neighbours who had chosen humanity over hate.

The Great Calcutta Killings, as they came to be known, left thousands dead. Official figures put the toll at around 4,000, though many estimates suggest the real number was far higher. Tens of thousands were injured or displaced.

The violence spread from central Calcutta to the suburbs, engulfing Howrah, Dum Dum, and Metiabruz. Trains arriving at Sealdah and Howrah stations carried not passengers but corpses. Whole neighbourhoods were razed.

In those days, news travelled by word of mouth or by hurriedly printed reports in English and Bengali newspapers. The Congress party accused Suhrawardy’s ministry of deliberately allowing the violence. The Muslim League claimed it was retaliation for Hindu attacks. But to ordinary families like mine, these were meaningless arguments. They had only one concern: survival.

My mother often spoke of the eerie normalcy that followed. Once the army restored order, shops reopened, trams clattered again along College Street, and children returned to school. But beneath the surface, nothing was normal. Fear lingered in every household. Hindus eyed Muslims with suspicion, and Muslims feared Hindu reprisals. Calcutta’s cosmopolitan fabric had been torn.

The riots of August 1946 were a prelude to the Partition the following year. The communal fault lines exposed in those three days would only deepen. For Bengal, it meant not only the bloodshed of Calcutta but also the tearing apart of the province itself. East Bengal became East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. West Bengal remained in India, scarred by memories of slaughter and displacement.

For my mother, the memory of that August never faded. She would often recall the unfinished dresses left with Rahim Chacha the tailor – a small, personal reminder of a childhood interrupted by violence.

The months that followed brought more turbulence. Bengal, like Punjab, was at the centre of the Partition debate. The Cabinet Mission Plan had failed. Congress and the Muslim League were irreconcilable. Gandhi travelled to Calcutta in August 1947, a year after the Great Killings, to try to hold the city together as independence approached.

By then, my mother was ten. She remembered people whispering that Gandhi was walking barefoot through the alleys of riot-torn neighbourhoods, urging Hindus and Muslims to embrace one another. “If Calcutta can be saved, India can be saved,” he said. For a time, his presence calmed the city.

But the relief was fleeting. Partition brought its own horrors. Millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs fled across new borders. Refugee camps mushroomed in Calcutta and elsewhere, overflowing with families who had lost everything. My mother recalled trains arriving from East Bengal crammed with people, their eyes hollow, their belongings tied in bundles.

Our family took in relatives who had fled Dhaka and Jessore. Rooms were partitioned with makeshift curtains; children slept head to toe on mats. The basement, once a grain store and later a shelter from bombs, became a dormitory for cousins. Food was stretched thin, but no one complained. They were alive, and they were together.

For years afterwards, stories of Partition and the Direct Action Day riots were told and retold in hushed voices after dinner. Children listened wide-eyed, struggling to imagine the city of smoke, blood and silence their parents described. For my mother, those memories were not history lessons but lived experience – a reminder of how quickly neighbours could turn on one another, and how equally quickly acts of courage and kindness could emerge.

My mother lived well into old age, but the memories of August 1946 never left her. Even in her last years, when we sat with her in the verandah, she would look into the distance and say quietly: “I can still smell the smoke.”

She spoke often of the fear that gripped her family, but also of the neighbours who chose to protect rather than betray them. She remembered the trembling hands that buried jewellery in the garden, the restless nights when every shout in the street felt like a death knell, and the sight of corpses lying unclaimed on Central Avenue. Yet she also remembered Aslam Chacha and his daughter Fathima, who risked their lives to shield Hindu families from the mobs.

“These are the things you cannot forget,” she would tell us. “Hate comes easily. But so does courage.”

The unfinished dresses at Rahim Chacha’s tailor shop remained for her a lasting symbol. She never wore them, never saw them again. They belonged to another time – a childhood cut short, a city scarred, and a country on the brink of freedom and division.

Her stories were not about politics or blame. They were about survival, memory, and the choices people make when fear takes hold of a city. For her, Direct Action Day was not an event in the history books. It was the day the sky turned black, the streets filled with fire, and neighbours became guardians of one another’s lives.

Shome Basu is The Wire's contributing photography editor.

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