The man who walked out into the rain in Dhaka hadn’t seen the sun in more than five years.
Even on a cloudy day, his eyes struggled to adjust after half a decade locked in a dimly lit room, where his days had been spent listening to the whirr of industrial fans and the screams of the tortured.
Standing on the street, he struggled to remember his sister’s telephone number.
More than 200km away, that same sister was reading about the men emerging from a reported detention facility in Bangladesh’s infamous military intelligence headquarters, known as Aynaghor, or “House of Mirrors”.
They were men who had allegedly been “disappeared” under the increasingly autocratic rule of Sheikh Hasina – largely critics of the government who were there one day, and gone the next.
But Sheikh Hasina had now fled the country, unseated by student-led protests, and these men were being released.
In a remote corner of Bangladesh, the young woman staring at her computer wondered if her brother – whose funeral they had held just two years ago, after every avenue to uncover his whereabouts proved fruitless – might be among them?
The day Michael Chakma was forcefully bundled into a car and blindfolded by a group of burly men in April 2019 in Dhaka, he thought it was the end.
He had come to authorities’ attention after years of campaigning for the rights of the people of Bangladesh’s south-eastern Chittagong Hill region – a Buddhist group which makes up just 2% of Bangladesh’s 170m-strong, mostly Muslim population.
He had, according to rights group Amnesty International, been staunchly vocal against abuses committed by the military in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and has campaigned for an end to military rule in the region.
A day after he was abducted, he was thrown into a cell inside the House of Mirrors, a building hidden inside the compound the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) used in the capital Dhaka.
It was here they gathered local and foreign intelligence, but it would become known as somewhere far more sinister.
The small cell he was kept in, he said, had no windows and no sunlight, only two roaring exhaust fans.
After a while “you lose the sense of time and day”, he recalls.
“I used to hear the cries of other prisoners, though I could not see them, their howling was terrifying.”
The cries, as he would come to know himself, came from his fellow inmates – many of whom were also being interrogated.
“They would tie me to a chair and rotate it very fast. Often, they threatened to electrocute me. They asked why I was criticising Ms Hasina,” Mr Chakma says.
