“My mother, Sybil, was shopping for Christmas when the Japanese bombed Rangoon that fateful day. With the help of a Burmese, family she could flee Burma, but had no way to find out what happened to her family. Until an almost magical event reunited them in Kolkata almost 65 years later,” says Scottish resident Derek Flory, who recounts the amazing tale of his mother and aunt in the book Torn Apart.

Flory, who is in the city to promote the book at the Kolkata Book Fair, had no knowledge about his mother’s past life until he took the initiative to discover his family roots in 2007. Sybil had married a Scottish soldier who was serving in India during the war and settled in Scotland, without knowing if her family had survived the Japanese attacks or not.

“My wife was taking a course in ancestry. I mentioned this to my mother and she asked me if I could look up her side of the family,” says Flory. However, the search was not without its share of chances and coincidences. “When I think of it, I must say it was almost magical. I typed out my mother’s maiden name and searched it in Google. Without knowing, I had misspelt it. Strangely enough, the people who put up a notice seeking information about my mother had also misspelt it,” he laughs.

A series of emails later, Flory discovered that his aunt Blanche was alive and settled thousands of miles away, in Kolkata.

“She was married to an Indian man and after spending more than three years in Japanese-occupied Burma, she started a new life in Kolkata. I broke the news to my mother very gently. As soon as she got to know about it, she wanted to speak to her sister. The call was made and the two sisters spoke for the first time in 65 years,” he says.

Eventually, a reunion of the Le Fleur sisters was arranged in Kolkata in October 2008, which was attended by the children and grandchildren of both the sisters. “It was as if they had never parted. They were singing songs and cracking jokes like two giggly teenagers,” he remembers.

Torn Apart, claims the author, is also an attempt to understand the events that led to the separation of the two sisters. “I try and talk about the atrocities of the war. The oppression which scarred two innocent lives forever,” he says.