Power of a will can be assesed by how much resistance, pain, and torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Room 101 is a torture chamber in George Orwell's novel 1984 that forces prisoners to confront their worst fears – a tool of the Party to break down dissent and control citizens.
Yet the horror of literature found itself a reflection that is more real – “Aynaghar” – the collective nickname given to the secret detention centres built by the ousted regime of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh.
Translating to “House of Mirrors”— this was not merely an architectural anomaly hidden within clandestine compounds, a place where reality was twisted, identity fragmented, and hope pulverised.
The name Aynaghar is thus grotesquely poetic.
What is a mirror if not an object that reflects reality? But in Aynaghar, mirrors did not reflect; they refracted.
Victims saw distorted versions of themselves, shaped by the regime’s propaganda, and its narratives of treason, sedition, and subversion.
Ironically, the regime itself gazed into the mirror and saw only its delusions—unquestioned authority, infallibility and control.
But like all tyrannies, Hasina’s reign forgot that mirrors, however distorted, do not lie forever.
Eventually, cracks appear, reflections shatter, and the truth—sharp and unyielding—bleeds through.
As much as it was a place of torture, it was also an existential metaphor, a dark looking-glass where the reflections were distorted, inverted, and, oftentimes, erased altogether.
The infamous and hitherto secretive detention centres were first brought to public attention by Netra News in 2022.
Since the ouster of the Awami League government on 5 August 2024 in the face of a mass public uprising, many of the secret detention centres, located inside law enforcement compounds, were attacked and partially demolished.
The prisoners were let go just as the cronies of the regime fled.
On 12 February 2025, Chief Adviser Professor Dr Muhammad Yunus visited three spots in Dhaka that were previously used as Aynaghar.
Members of the advisory council, members of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, victims, and local and international media accompanied the chief adviser during the visit to the spots located in Dhaka's Agargaon, Kachukhet and Uttara areas.
And the photos of the infamous establishment have since been circulating on social media.
Unlike the ominous grey bastilles of yore, Aynaghar had been designed to be invisible.
No signboards, no official records, no trace of existence save for the whispered terror it etched onto the hearts of those who dared dissent.
It was, in every conceivable sense, a ghost prison—a spectre haunting the very fabric of civil liberties under the Hasina regime.
Survivors recount being blindfolded for days, their perception of time disassembled, much like their identities.
The absence of natural light was not just an architectural design but a diabolical one—a deliberate attempt to unmoor captives from the passage of days, to make them drift in an eternal “now”, where fear was the only constant.
There, men were not beaten into confession but into oblivion.
Physical torture was but the beginning; the main focus was psychological disintegration.
Imagine being forced to listen to the recorded screams of fellow detainees, layered over their own pleas.
Stripped of agency, and isolated from the world, they faced their own abyss.
Some emerged broken beyond repair, others with their will steeled into something unrecognisable.
Hasina’s kleptocratic edifice has crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions.
But perhaps the real terror of Aynaghar is not that it existed, but that it could again.
Aynaghar was never just a place but rather a perverse reflection of a regime’s evil.
As Bangladesh steps into a new chapter, perhaps the nation needs to heed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s warning once more: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
Nietzsche believed that suffering could be transformative, but Aynaghar was not the crucible of noble resilience. It was the grinder of identities, the eraser of narratives.
The survivors have found their meaning. The rest of us must ensure it was not in vain.
