Four Miles to Freedom Page 4

  One day, when Bhargava was still in solitary confinement, Rizvi suggested he might like to have a shave. A barber soon arrived with a very rough razor—not a pleasant experience. Then a strange thing happened, something that had nothing to do with the rough shave; Bhargava began to weep. The tears ran down his face and they wouldn’t stop. The barber was alarmed and went off to report the matter.

  Before long Usman Hamid paid a visit. ‘I think you are lonely,’ he said. ‘I’m going to move you in with someone else for a few days.’

  After Christmas, the painful experience of solitary confinement ended and all the prisoners were allowed to meet each day. After breakfast in their cells they were taken to a walled courtyard in the corner of the compound. The outer wall was so high they could see nothing but the tops of the trees and the roofs of a few houses outside. The inner walls were low enough for a guard to patrol on the other side, leaving them alone to stroll around in twos or threes, lapping up the warmth of the sun, gossiping. All the stories of ejection, capture, and interrogations came out.

  Harish Sinhji had just missed landing on a tree, and his orange and white parachute had been caught there, like a sunburst, advertising his presence. He was considering hiding in a nearby cane field until dark when he looked up and saw thirty or forty people heading towards him. He ran for his life, heading into the cane, sweating like the devil until he realized he was still wearing his mask and helmet. Still on the run, he threw them off.

  ‘But the crowd soon caught up with me. One chap was carrying an axe. I really thought I was a goner.’ Some men in the crowd stopped the fellow with the axe, but others lit into Harry with their hands and feet. Then, suddenly, the frenzy stopped. Sinhji was blindfolded and his hands were tied behind his back. The military had arrived.

  Tejwant Singh figured the villagers who got to him were angry because he was not carrying the usual issue of 200 Pakistani rupees plus revolver. (He didn’t bother to carry the standard packet since he knew he had no chance of avoiding capture, not with his long hair and beard.) The first fellow who reached Singh ran off with his watch. The next one found his gutka (prayerbook) in the pocket of his G-suit and ran off with that. ‘Those who were slower to reach me searched my pockets and found nothing so they took out their frustrations by beating me.’

  When he saw two uniformed men holding .303 Lee-Enfield rifles from World War I, he begged them not to shoot. ‘Don’t worry,’ said one of the guys, ‘we’re here to protect you.’

  Soon a tonga arrived to take him to an army base, but before that a very strange thing happened. The fellow who’d stolen his gutka came back and returned it. ‘Take this,’ the man said. ‘It’ll come in handy.’ And he was right, during his week in solitary confinement and even afterwards he found comfort in reading his gutka.

  The only POW who hadn’t ejected was Mulla-Feroze. He had been part of a Forward Air Control (FAC) team assigned to designate targets for the IAF. His team had been working along the border between Rajasthan and Sind. It was desert area where the front between the two armies shifted rapidly and somehow the Indian FAC team advanced behind enemy lines. When they came upon a column of vehicles kicking up the dust, Mulla-Feroze thought at first he was dealing with the Indian Army instead of an advance party of Pakistani troops. He walked over to the first jeep, thumped on its hood, and demanded to see an officer. The next thing he knew a jawan had shouldered his rifle, and when Feroze reached for his revolver, the man shot him through the arm.

  Mulla-Feroze was a proud, impulsive fellow, and the incident seemed entirely in character. He was determined to keep the camp staff at arm’s length—they were the enemy after all. But part of his edginess may have been caused by the pain of his wound. The flesh and most of the tricep had been blown away, baring the bone.

  Bhargava’s Marut had been shot down by ground fire on his first sortie. He, too, was captured in the desert of Sind, not far from the Rajasthan border. Shortly after 9.00 a.m. on 5 December, he landed on a sand dune and found himself alone, without a village in sight. He hid his G-suit in some shrubbery and changed his watch to Pakistan Standard Time. Then he took the compass from his survival pack and began to walk east. By noon he had finished the four small bottles of water from his survival pack. He was exhausted from climbing sand dunes and his back was killing him.

  He was on the verge of giving up when he saw a large village ahead that he thought might be in Indian territory. He stopped at a farmer’s hut just short of the village, introduced himself as a downed Pakistani pilot and asked for water. The farmer pointed to the cattle trough. Bhargava dipped one of his bottles and drank his fill.

  ‘Can you tell me the name of that village?’ he asked the farmer.

  ‘It’s Pirani Ki Par,’ the man answered.

  Bhargava realized then that he was still in Pakistan. But at least he now knew his exact location. Skirting the village, he set out in an optimistic mood, with his thirst quenched and his four water bottles full.

  It was near dark when his luck ran out. He encountered three men who questioned him. Who are you, they wanted to know, what are you doing here? He stuck to the story that he was a downed Pakistani pilot, and said that his name was Flight Lieutenant Mansoor Ali. But the men were suspicious. They took him to a village and kept him there, sitting on a charpoy in someone’s yard, until four rangers from the border patrol arrived to question him. Once again he repeated his story but they were not buying it either.

  ‘Say the Kalma,’ ordered one of the rangers. Every Muslim knows the Kalma (roughly translated ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger’).

  ‘I should have known the Kalma,’ said Bhargava. ‘I grew up in Pataudi, a princely state west of Delhi. Most of the people there were Muslim. But I couldn’t remember the words and that was my undoing.’

  The next morning Bhargava was handcuffed and blindfolded and set on a camel for a two-day journey to an army post. It was a painful experience, lurching along with an injured back. The halts were actually the worst part—getting down and up again was a real killer. ‘I’d never been on a camel before,’ he told his mates, ‘and I don’t recommend it.’

  The men soon recovered from their beatings, all except for Vikram Pethia. ‘Pethia had been so badly beaten up and manhandled by civilians as well as paramilitary forces that he could barely walk and couldn’t eat properly,’ remembers Grewal. ‘He had fractured ribs and cigarette burns on his body. We helped him all day long, even supplementing his diet with an egg or two whenever we got one each. Our requests for a special diet and some medical help in the camp fell on deaf ears.’

  The prisoners had a chance to air grievances and concerns when Mr B—, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), visited the camp. Once again the prisoners assembled in the interrogation room. They were very happy to meet Mr B—for he was the person who could confirm that they were registered as prisoners of war. This meant they were protected by the rules of the Geneva Conventions. It also meant that their families would be informed that they were alive and well.

  The prisoners were impressed with Mr B—. They remember him as being a short, fair-haired man in his forties, probably Swiss, and very courteous. First he gave them a rundown of the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross and how it had helped prisoners of war ever since the South African war in 1899. He told them that before too long they would receive letters and parcels from home, though that could take a month or two. In the meantime, they could write letters and give them to the camp office. And every month, beginning immediately, they would be paid a POW allowance. The money could be used for purchasing personal effects, cigarettes, or food to supplement their diet. The amount of the allowance was prescribed by the ICRC, and depended on their rank, but he thought they would all find it adequate.

  Pethia knew that he must tell Mr B—about his torture even if it meant subjecting all his comrades to the gruesome details. According to the Geneva Conventions all sick
and wounded soldiers, including prisoners of war, must be treated humanely. Pakistan was a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, but in Pethia’s case those rules had not been followed.

  Pethia’s Mystere had been shot down on 5 December. It was his fourth mission and the second day of the war. Like most of the others he had been robbed and beaten by villagers. That was par for the course. But unlike the others, his torment had not ended there. After suffering broken ribs from being beaten with rifle butts, he had been taken for interrogation to a room with high windows. The men who interrogated him were not dressed in uniform but he could tell from their questions and from the way they spoke to one another that they were military. When he refused to give anything beyond his name, rank and serial number, they burnt him with cigarettes. He was taken to the room more than once but he remained silent each time.

  You have to give them something, thought Tejwant Singh. You have to make something up, change a few names, but you have to give them something. And then you have to remember what you’ve said, because they’ll ask you the same questions again. Once on a training exercise he’d been dropped in ‘enemy territory’, then captured and interrogated. He too had refused to say anything except his name rank and serial number, but he’d been told in the debriefing that was a mistake.

  Dilip thought of the fake sketches he’d made of the Adampur airfield. Had his shenanigans saved him? Or was it the luck of the draw? Perhaps he had simply encountered interrogators who were more humane than Pethia’s.

  At the end of the meeting, Mr B—read out the names of four pilots who were still missing and asked the POWs if they had heard anything at all about their whereabouts. All had been seen ejecting, but none had been reported among the dead or captured by the Pakistani authorities. Where were these men?

  ‘Could you make some inquiries?’ asked Mr B—. ‘There’s the staff here, and you may have some visitors from the air base. Do what you can.’

  It was the worst moment of the meeting, even worse than hearing the details of Pethia’s ordeal. Yes, they would do all they could to find out what had happened to these pilots, but they knew in advance their efforts would be futile. What would have happened to me, thought Dilip, if that policeman had not arrived in time? If the villagers had beaten me to death, would the authorities have returned my battered body to India? As for Pethia, all he could think was ‘Why did they let me live?’ It would have been very easy for his tormentors to kill him. Why did they let him live to tell his story? He had no trouble imagining what might have happened to the four men on the list.

  Shortly after the visit of the Red Cross rep, the chief flight surgeon of the Pakistani Air Force visited the camp, probably at the urging of Dr Sarfraz, who had been attending the injured in their cells. As a result of the visit, all eleven ejection cases were sent to the Chaklala air base medical inspection (MI) room for x-rays and Mulla-Feroze was taken to a military hospital. After the medical assessments Kamat’s broken legs were reset and Jafa was put in a body cast. Jafa and Singh had both suffered spinal injuries from their ejections and were prescribed bed rest. Along with Kamat, they spent the next two months in the MI Room. Chati, the youngest of the POWs, who had injured his jaw while ejecting, was sent to the MI Room for regular infrared treatments on his jaw and then to a dentist.

  Bhargava’s spinal injuries were deemed untreatable. He was inclined to blame his long walk in the desert followed by two days on a camel. ‘Just don’t bend over,’ a doctor told him. ‘Don’t even tie your shoes.’ He hoped that if he followed instructions, he might one day be able to fly again.

  On their trips to the MI Room, the military hospital or the dentist, the POWs travelled in a van. They wore no blindfolds on these trips and it was a good opportunity to look around. They already knew that they were being held at No. 3 Provost and Security Flight in Rawalpindi. Now they could see that the flight’s compound was located near Mall Road in the heart of the Rawalpindi cantonment.

  There were actually a few signs in English, though most of them were in Urdu. But while all the POWs could understand spoken Urdu, which is very similar to Hindi, few of them could read it. After Partition, India’s central government had ruled that the national language, Hindi (once called Hindi−Urdu), be written in Devanagari script rather than the Perso-Arabic script. Only Coelho and Jafa had learned to read Urdu at school, and that was over twenty years ago. Reading an Urdu street sign in passing was pretty well impossible.

  But the POWs were familiar with the layout of cantonments. They had spent most of their careers living in similar enclaves. Cantonments had been built in British times to house the offices, barracks and bungalows of military personnel and their families. Rawalpindi, located near the turbulent northwest frontier, was the site of one of the largest cantonments in British India. Throughout India and Pakistan, the old cantonments continued to house military personnel. They were, for the most part, spacious, treed, residential suburbs and oases of calm and order compared to the older cities nearby.

  In 1972 the new Pakistani capital, Islamabad, just north of the Chaklala air base, was still under construction. In the meantime, for all practical purposes, the Rawalpindi cantonment was the centre of power. It housed the president’s residence as well as the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. Although the Indian POWs did not know it, they resided not far from Pakistan’s president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a man who would have a prime role in deciding their fate.

  In January, Bhutto was beset with a number of problems. At the top of his list was the return of 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, but first the Bangladeshis insisted on formal recognition, and India (who was actually holding the prisoners) backed them. And now Bangladesh wanted to put some of the Pakistani prisoners on trial as war criminals. Bhutto had already appointed a judicial commission to get to the bottom of such allegations, but there was no way he could allow Pakistani officers to be tried as war criminals in Bangladesh without facing a military coup at home. No wonder he was suffering from insomnia.

  Meanwhile, down the road, the Indian POWs used their medical outings through the cantonment to scout the lay of the land. Soon they had the route to the Chaklala base memorized. And they knew that Mall Road was also the Grand Trunk Highway, an ancient road that ran all the way from Calcutta to Peshawar. If you turned left onto Mall Road and kept going, you would eventually reach the Indian border. If you turned right you were on the road to Peshawar and beyond that to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.

  The eight POWs who remained in the camp missed the company of their four comrades in hospital. Still, their mood was usually optimistic as they strolled around the courtyard, lapping up the sun. India had won the war. They had survived. In a matter of months, they would go home. One day they bet a bottle of beer on the date of their repatriation. Grewal, who considered himself a realist, bet on 29 May. The other bets ranged from March through April.

  In January, as Mr B—had promised, each POW received the ‘salary’ due all POWs under Red Cross supervision. For the first month it amounted to Rs 57 for flight lieutenants, but none of the prisoners was paid the whole sum on the first payday. It turned out that all those cups of tea offered during interrogations had been totalled up and deducted from the pay cheque. And it wasn’t just the prisoner’s tea that had to be paid for, either. The cost of the interrogators’ tea had been deducted as well! Even worse, Chati discovered that his whole salary had been wiped out by a few decent meals.

  ‘What would you like?’ the good cop interrogator had asked him one day.

  ‘The rotis here are very tough,’ Chati had replied. ‘I have trouble chewing them.’

  ‘How about some Chinese food?’ the interrogator had suggested. So meals of noodles and rice were sent to his cell several days in a row, arousing the suspicions of Kuruvilla who was sharing a cell with Chati at the time.

  ‘I didn’t know why they’d put me in with you in the first place,’ Kuru confessed. ‘And when you got those special meals I became even more suspic
ious. Maybe this guy’s a collaborator, I thought, so I watched my words.’

  When the first payday arrived and Kuruvilla discovered that Chati had paid for the meals himself, the air was cleared. In fact, everyone had a big laugh at Chati’s expense. It turned out he had racked up such a big bill that he had overdrawn his allowance for the next two months.

  They decided, since funds were scarce, to pool some of their money. Brother Bhargava became the keeper of the common purse. Their first order was a jar of pickle and large chunk of jaggery. Their meals, trucked in from the enlisted men’s mess at Chaklala, were adequate but never tasty. A little pickle with the meal and a lump of jaggery afterwards, for the sweet, was a definite improvement.

  Early in January, Dilip wrote a letter to his good friend, Major Inder Khanna. He was worried about Inder. He had last seen him in Amritsar right before the war. Years before they had both gone to a palm reader who had predicted Inder would receive a major injury at about this time in his life. Since his friend tended to be accident-prone at the best of times, Dilip was inclined to take the prediction more seriously than he normally would.

  IAF Officers’ POW Camp

  Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  9 Jan ‘72

  Dear Inder and Pamma,

  A very happy New Year to you both and Anju and Anu as well. The address in the right top corner says a great deal. It means your friend is safe and in fact virtually without injury and is just whiling his time away, while all the National and International forces use their pressures and counter-pressures to get us home. For our part we hope these forces yield results as soon as possible.

  There are 12 of us at this camp. At first we were all together but now 4 of the bad medical cases have been transferred to hospital. The capture, handling, transfer, and questioning of the guys here will be the subject of an interesting conversation for us later on. It is not without its humourous side as well.