Mari

Revised edition

"I open the diary slowly. The childish scrawl of a young girl fills its pages, and as I read on, I am almost that girl again. Carefree, innocent, and oblivious to the way in which the war would change my life forever. I am drawn once again, irresistibly, into that mad whirl of living, dying and loving. That was the war I knew. I had thought then that life began at seventeen. And that life began in spring. And the world was green with the young green of new plants, the hills bathed with thin mist every evenings and the nights velvet with the songs of Bing Crosby. How little of life I knew then. 

Kohima. 1944. The Japanese invade India, life changes overnight and seventeen- year- old Mari and her young sisters are evacuated from their home and and separated from the rest of their family.

Even as she pines for her fiancé and common law husband Vic, a soldier in the British army, Mari and her sisters are forced to run from village to village, camping in fields, gathering herbs for food, seeking shelter from bombs and bullets until the madness has passed.

A sensitive recounting of a true story. Mari is also the story of Kohima and its place in the historic Japanese invasion of India in 1944. Easterine Kire brings alive a simpler time in a forgotten place that was ravaged by the war before it was noticed by the rest of the world."