On the evening of 25 March, Pakistani troops moved through the streets of Dhaka toward Sadar Ghat along Nawabpur Road. At the intersection with Shankharibazar Road, they shelled a house. A portion of the building collapsed. Three people died in the shelling and five or six were injured. This was a prelude. The full assault would come the next day, when the army returned with deliberate intent. The night of 25 March 1971 is remembered across Bangladesh as the beginning of Operation Searchlight -- the military crackdown that targeted Bengali nationalists, intellectuals, students, and religious minorities. Shankharibazar, a densely populated Hindu neighborhood with narrow lanes and closely packed buildings, was among the first targets in Old Dhaka.

The Pakistani army entered Shankharibazar on the afternoon of 26 March. They went to premises number 47 first, killing the father and younger brother of a family. The elder brother, Amar Sur, escaped through a narrow lane at the rear of the house. Then the soldiers ordered residents out of their homes. When people emerged, they were shot. According to the account of Kalidas Baidya, 126 Hindus from the neighborhood were rounded up into a single house and shot to death. The army continued through the locality, killing approximately fifty more people in the surrounding premises. More than two hundred were injured. Houses were set on fire. By the time the soldiers withdrew, over 212 Bengali Hindus were dead. Shankharibazar fell silent. Dead bodies remained on the streets for days. The survivors who could flee crossed the Buriganga River to the villages of what is now Keraniganj. The Pakistani authorities renamed Shankharibazar Road to Tikka Khan Road, after the military governor of East Pakistan -- an act of renaming that attempted to overwrite the neighborhood's identity along with its people.

Bangladesh achieved independence in December 1971, and in 1972, a memorial was erected at the eastern end of Shankharibazar Road. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the nation's founding leader, promised the victims' families a compensation of 2,000 taka each. According to reports, that compensation was never paid. In 1997, on the silver jubilee of Bangladesh's liberation, the Shankharibazar community published a souvenir listing the names of those killed -- an act of documentation that ensured the victims would be remembered as individuals rather than as a number. The conch-shell craftsmen eventually returned. Their trade has continued, though in diminished form, the old skills competing against cheaper mass-produced alternatives.

Shankharibazar today is narrow, busy, and ordinary in the way that Old Dhaka's lanes tend to be -- crowded with shops, tangled with wires, alive with the sounds of commerce and conversation. The memorial at the street's eastern end is modest. It does not dominate the landscape or draw large tourist crowds. But the street's survival is itself a form of testimony. The Pakistani army's renaming of the road did not last. The craftsmen's quarter was not erased. Every year, the anniversary of the massacre is observed, and the names published in 1997 are read aloud. In a city where demolition is constant and memory is fragile, the persistence of Shankharibazar -- the name, the community, the craft -- stands as quiet defiance.