Four Miles to Freedom Read online

  Another incident, one that no one who witnessed it will ever forget, happened in the courtyard one morning during a game of seven tiles. As usual Dilip threw himself into the game with great gusto. That morning, while trying to catch the ball, he crashed into a wall, then fell to the ground in a convulsion. ‘His teeth got locked,’ remembers Bhargava, ‘and we all ran helter-skelter trying to do something to help him. We were scared sh**** seeing his condition. Kamat asked for a spoon which was immediately brought and he forcibly put it in Dilip’s mouth. This carried on for some time and it had us all praying. Gradually he got back to normal and became his usual humourous self, asking why we had stopped playing. In fact he did not know what had happened.’

  For a while they stopped playing seven tiles. The other POWs urged Dilip to see a doctor, but he refused. He soon felt well again, and he did not want a suspected seizure on his medical record. At the end of March he distributed all the dried fruits he had collected to take with him on his escape. He knew he wouldn’t be leaving quite yet. In April he would receive the next ‘pay cheque’ and could always buy more.

  On the Road to Jamrud

  (13 August)

  On and on they walked down the road from Peshawar to Jamrud, but still there were shops and shacks lining the road, and a constant stream of people who turned to look at them.

  ‘What made things worse,’ remembers Sinjhi, ‘was that whatever they were doing, on spotting us they would stop their activity and stare intently at us. Several cyclists passed us, turned back, and passed us again …’

  Just from their appearance it was clear that the trio were strangers. Almost every adult male they met along the road was dressed identically in a dirty white salwar and kurta. Each had a pale complexion, a dark beard, and a white cotton cap on his head. And here they were, such a motley crew. Grewal was wearing the salwar he’d had made from some frothy, turban material and he had wound a cloth carelessly around his head like a Punjabi farmer. Dilip wondered why he’d done that. Though the sun was already hot, it was still a strange thing to do. But then Grewal was a Sikh. Maybe he felt uncomfortable in public without something on his head. Possibly it was Dilip himself, with his darker complexion, who was attracting the unwanted attention. Or maybe it was the slightly built Harry Sinhji, dressed in western clothes, with a moustache but no beard. Or could it be that men of their class would never be caught dead walking down the road from Peshawar to Jamrud? Men on excursions from other parts of Pakistan, unbearded men sporting moustaches, or even fedoras, might drive through the area, but would they ever think of walking?

  Yes, so few strangers travelled Jamrud Road on foot, they were bound to be noticed. When they look back on that morning, they realize that they were objects of a very natural curiosity, probably nothing more, but at the time, each question, each look, was a searchlight, a beacon, not of hope but of imminent capture. If a tongawala and a boy on a bicycle were suspicious enough to question them (‘What’s in your bag?’ a boy asked Harry Sinhji on Jamrud Road), what would happen if they encountered an official?

  Before long the pedestrian traffic thinned out, but there was still the odd cyclist as well as a gang of men working on the road. The three friends skirted heaps of gravel and walked straight on, past men loading basins, past other men with picks and shovels, past a truck spreading hot bitumen. They kept their eyes on the horizon, ignoring all the stares.

  When they passed the Peshawar airfield they could see a runway quite near the road. ‘Don’t look,’ warned Grewal. Against all their natural inclinations as airmen, they immediately averted their eyes.

  As far as they could see, there was nowhere to hide. The land was a flat gravelly plain, no fields of sugar cane, little vegetation of any sort. It was altogether a barren place. After a mile or so, Harry Sinhji grew tired and lagged behind the other two but it wasn’t such a bad thing after all because the group of three had attracted even more attention. And if the alarm had already gone up, as they believed, wouldn’t the police be looking for a threesome?

  False Start

  Early in April an ICRC rep arrived with a second batch of mail. This time he brought parcels and a volleyball net as well. Each POW received one parcel packed by the IAF which contained much-needed underwear, socks and night suits as well as toothpaste, razors, soap, needles and thread. Both Singh and Grewal received a length of cloth for a turban, but that was as far as customization went. The POWs were disappointed when they discovered that all the underwear was a small size. To much amusement, Kamat, with his few extra pounds, demonstrated the impossibility of donning the undersized shorts.

  Some of the POWs received parcels from family as well. Families had been told they were allowed to send cigarettes and food, but no clothing apart from underwear. Nevertheless, Dilip’s sister in Delhi, after reading his first letter about the cold, sent him a plush blue lounging suit. This was another cause for laughter. ‘Where does she think I’m putting up?’ he said. ‘At the Ritz?’ He put the suit back in the box and tucked it under his charpoy.

  April saw the prisoners’ acquisition of a radio, too. Somehow they had learned that Pakistani POWs in India were broadcasting greetings to their families in Pakistan. A chap would come on the air, say his name, greet his family, and basically tell them he was in good health. He might add a few details about life in his camp. The whole thing was actually a public relations exercise by India to show that it was treating its prisoners well. What interested our friends in Rawalpindi was the news that some Pakistani prisoners were listening to Hindi music all day long. It was piped into their camps through loudspeakers.

  How they learned this news, no one remembers for sure. It could have come from one of the friendly camp staff, possibly Corporal Mefooz Khan, a tall Pathan. He wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box but at least he was kind and he treated them with respect. Or maybe they deciphered the news themselves. Whenever the prisoners ordered chapli kababs from a dhaba nearby they would come wrapped in newspaper, always an Urdu newspaper unfortunately. But Jafa and Coelho, who had both studied Urdu, would sit down together and try to make sense of it.

  However the inmates of No. 3 Provost and Security Flight learned that the Pakistani POWs had access to music, they decided to put this information to good use—they demanded equal treatment, ‘simultaneous reciprocity’, as they had learned this was called from the Red Cross rep. For twelve people a loudspeaker was out of the question, but Wahid-ud-din agreed to give them a radio. It was a transistor radio that needed many batteries, but as long as they could keep it going they were allowed to listen to anything they wanted to, even the BBC and All India Radio. It was a great morale booster.

  Thus they learned that there were 93,000 Pakistani POWs in India, but only 600 Indian POWs in Pakistan, and that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had replaced Yahya Khan as president. They could tell that, in Pakistan at least, pressure for an exchange of prisoners was strong. Bhutto had recently proposed a prisoner exchange in return for recognizing Bangladesh. There were rumours that high-level talks would take place before the end of April. All this was good news. It seemed possible that Grewal would win his bet and they would all be home by the end of May.

  The radio newscasts provided other opportunities. When Tejwant Singh learned that thousands of Sikhs from around the world were coming to Gurudwara Punja Sahib, a Sikh shrine in Pakistan, to celebrate the spring festival Baisakhi, he had an idea. Why not ask Wahid-ud-din to allow him and Grewal to make the pilgrimage as well? The shrine was not far from Pindi, and since Muslims were inclined to take religious matters seriously, he thought he had a chance of success. Gurudwara Punja Sahib is 48 kilometres from Rawalpindi, in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is one of the holiest places of Sikhism because of the presence of a rock believed to have the handprint of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.

  After some negotiation, Wahid-ud-din agreed to arrange for the trip, but it had to be a week or so after Baisakhi (13 April) so they wouldn’t encounter crowds. He also agreed to let
Jafa go along, though he was suspicious of Jafa’s Sikh roots since he maintained a clean shave. (In fact, Jafa’s father was Sikh and his mother Hindu, so both religions were practised in his family.)

  The threesome left one morning right after breakfast, accompanied by four guards. The POWs were seated in one jeep with another jeep trailing. It was a short trip. The jeeps turned right out of the gate, then right again onto Mall Road and headed west towards Peshawar. The POWs noticed that Pindi was not a very big city on its western side.

  Soon they were out of the cantonment. To the north they could see the foothills of the Himalayas and beyond them higher mountain ranges were faintly visible. Ahead, the road cut between two hills. This was the Margalla Pass. Once over the pass the jeeps dipped into a scenic valley and before long they turned onto a narrow road that led to the gates of the gurudwara.

  The nineteenth-century gurudwara was an impressively ornate building that seemed to have been freshly painted for Baisakhi. At the gate they were greeted by three men who took them on a tour. The highlight of the tour was the rock with Guru Nanak’s handprint set in the midst of a flowing stream of water. According to the story, when the guru touched the rock, a stream sprang forth to quench the thirst of his followers.

  The jeeps returned to camp by lunchtime. Wahid-ud-din was pleased that he had done yet another good turn to raise the morale of his prisoners. Later, after the breakout, he was to change his mind about the expedition and accuse Jafa of using the outing to scout the lay of the land. He was wrong. At this point the escape project was still Dilip’s alone.

  Towards the end of April, the camp routine altered with the rising temperatures. The prisoners began to spend most of their time in Cell 5, which had a ceiling fan. After breakfast they still strolled in the courtyard or played a few games of French cricket or seven tiles, but by mid-morning, with temperatures already in the 30s, they retreated to Cell 5 for cards, board games or reading. After tea at five, they played volleyball in the main yard. Then it was dinner at 7.30 and sometimes more cards or chess until everyone returned to their cells for lights out.

  That was another change in routine. With the advent of warm weather the outer cell doors were left open at night to provide some ventilation. Since the lights from the yard allowed the guards to check on the prisoners, there was no longer any reason to keep cell lights on throughout the night. For over four months they had all struggled to sleep with the lights on. It was a great relief when they were turned off. But now there was the heat to contend with. Only Cell 5 was equipped with a fan.

  Grewal had discovered that one of the civilian staff at the camp had once been a tailor and continued to do sewing after hours. Since he had given up wearing a turban for the duration of his stay in Rawalpindi, he used the turban material he’d been given in his parcel to have a salwar stitched. It was cooler than the serge pants they’d been issued and he started to wear it every evening. Dilip went one step further. He sent the obliging Aurangzeb to the bazaar to fetch material for a full suit. He, too, began to wear his green salwar kurta in the evening. The guards and attendants seemed pleased to see the POWs adopt some of their customs. And it was understandable that a man would want a change of clothes—something more comfortable, especially in the hot weather. Of course Dilip’s real reason for acquiring the salwar kurta was to wear it the night of his escape.

  By this time he had acquired not only the Oxford School Atlas, but also a pair of scissors for trimming his beard and a screwdriver for fixing the transistor radio. With these tools his work on the window picked up. Then, one afternoon, a group of workmen appeared carrying trowels and buckets. They had come to repair the drain trough that led from the washing platform under the window in Cell 5. The prisoners watched nervously as they went to work. Luckily none of the workmen noticed the loose window frame even though it was staring them in the face. They had been sent to do one job and that was it.

  When the cement dried, Dilip could stand once again at the window that looked over the alley, but at first he could not dispose of debris by scuffing it around on the floor below. Then, after a week or so, the new cement, obviously poor quality stuff, began to crumble. When MWO Rizvi came to watch the chess players, Bhargava couldn’t resist pointing out the poor quality of the work and the materials. Rizvi immediately went to examine the spot, and he didn’t miss the loose window frame. He summoned a workman immediately and had him hammer nails into the frame to secure it. The next morning a crew of workmen were back with trowels and buckets of cement. They repaired the drain trough again and regrouted the window. This time they did a stellar job.

  Bhargava was mortified. Though he had begged Dilip to give up his escape plan, he’d had no intention of sabotaging it.

  ‘Bhargava was more upset than I was,’ remembers Dilip. ‘He couldn’t stop apologizing. I just thought, what the hell, I’ll have to find another way.’

  He thought of lines from his favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s If. At the National Defence Academy each cadet had a writing table and over that writing table hung a framed copy of If. For three years he had studied those stanzas and tried to apply them to his own life. He didn’t find their message much different from the Gita. Both works were about duty and detachment and being your own man.

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you …

  If you can wait and not be tired of waiting …

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two imposters just the same …

  Success and failure—he was determined to take each one in his stride. No, he would not give up. He was surrounded by men who thought he was a fool, but he would not give up. He would find another way.

  After Rizvi discovered that the window was about to give, he was on the alert for weeks. Bhargava had to work hard to make up for his faux pas. Whenever Rizvi mentioned the window, Bhargava tried to assure him that all was well: ‘We are all comfortable here,’ he would say. ‘Why would we want to try such a thing?’

  For the moment Dilip had to lie low. What he had in mind was a tunnel. If it ran under the back wall of his cell into the recruiting office compound, the tunnel would not have to be long or deep, just a dip under the wall. But now was not the time. He would have to wait. He was still on his own. No one else was interested.

  Through most of April the prisoners’ hopes were high that a prisoner exchange would take place very soon. On 20 April a newscast announced that high level talks would begin on 26 April at Murree, a hill station not far from Pindi. As scheduled, the talks went on for three days, behind closed doors. Pakistan was represented by its Secretary General of Foreign Affairs, and India, by Indira Gandhi’s special envoy, D.P. Dhar. But the outcome of the talks was not encouraging. All that had been accomplished was setting a tentative agenda for further talks to take place between Gandhi and Bhutto in India. With this news the POWs knew that they would have at least several more months to wait for repatriation. By then they would have been prisoners for over six months.

  ‘We realized,’ says Dilip, ‘that our fate was uppermost only in our own minds, certainly not in the minds of the politicians.’

  The politicians, indeed, had a great deal on their minds, and having three countries’ politicians involved complicated matters even further. One after another, countries in the Soviet Block and then in the British Commonwealth had recognized the independent nation of Bangladesh, prompting Pakistan to withdraw from the Commonwealth. Then in April Pakistan’s ally, the United States, reluctantly extended recognition. Still Pakistan held out.

  Sheikh Mujib Rahman had clearly refused to approve the return of the 93,000 prisoners of war until Bhutto agreed to recognition, but Pakistan had very little power in the negotiations ahead and seemed determined to hang on as long as possible to the carrot of recognizing Bangladeshi independence. Always lurking in the background (and occasionally in the foreground) was the Sheikh’s determination to try some of the Pakistani POWs as war criminals.

&
nbsp; For the POWs in Rawalpindi, the only good news was that summer came early in May. Finally Pethia was to be repatriated for medical reasons. As they had done to celebrate the departure of Mulla-Feroze, the POWs chipped in to buy sweets from a shop on Mall Road. Pethia was repatriated on 8 May, after five months and three days’ imprisonment.

  Now they were ten. Ten men who spent most of the day in a room with three charpoys, a table and chairs (most of them the chairs they carried to and from their cells each day), and a ceiling fan. They took turns playing bridge. They took turns lying down. The readers read whatever books that Rizvi fetched from the Chaklala base library. The books ranged from Dickens and Orwell to National Geographic but none was new. Jafa made notes from his reading in a school notebook. Singh began to keep a diary on onion-skin paper. After he’d made an entry he would store his wad of notes in the heel of his shoe. Both Singh and Coelho drew sketches of their fellow inmates and any members of the camp staff who they found interesting subjects. Still, no matter what anyone did, time weighed heavily.

  It was a discouraging time, not only for Dilip with his escape plans on hold, but for the other prisoners, too. All their ways of keeping up morale: the volleyball competitions, the games of chess and bridge, the system of bridge winners buying treats for tea once a month when their pay packets arrived, the once-a-month possibility of letters, their growing links to a few friendly guards and attendants and even the cat who wandered into the tea club for tidbits and the occasional saucer of milk—all this was becoming stale and burdensome. As time went on and nothing changed, it was an effort to maintain good temper and cheerfulness. They had done their best for almost six months, but by mid-May, with temperatures rising daily and still no date set for a summit meeting between Bhutto and Gandhi, everyone’s patience was wearing thin.