Four Miles to Freedom Read online

  It was under these circumstances that Grewal finally capitulated. ‘I’m in,’ he told Dilip one day. ‘But we don’t need a tunnel. We can go through a wall. I know how these old havelis are built. When my father was a magistrate in Punjab, two prisoners broke out of a place like this. They did all the work in one night.’

  Dilip was elated. He had the very best partner he could imagine, the one he had been seeking for months. And he knew that once Grewal had given his word, he would never go back on it. He was a man with a great deal of pride.

  Grewal

  Flight Lieutenant M.S. Grewal had been shot down on 4 December, the first day of the war. He may have been the first Indian pilot shot down or, at least, the first who was able to face the news media. Jafa and Chati came down the same day, but neither was available for interviews. Jafa had damaged his spine on landing. Chati had injured both his arm and face during ejection and was of no use for propaganda purposes.

  It was Grewal’s second sortie of the day, flying from Amritsar with the 32nd Squadron. In the first mission, he and his mates had successfully bombed an airfield, destroying a few grounded planes and airfield installations. That morning all of the 32nd Squadron’s missions were successful and all pilots had returned safely. In the afternoon, they were assigned new targets. Grewal and his mates were to hit Rafiqi Airbase, which is southwest of Lahore near a town called Shorkot Road.

  ‘Once again we took off, heading towards Pakistan, flying very low towards our target,’ remembers Grewal. ‘During our run-in, from the initial position to the pull-out point, we faced heavy flak. Being the number four in the formation, I saw the other three pull up safely. As I was rolling in to carry out my attack, I got hit by anti-aircraft artillery, lost control of my plane and ejected safely.’

  Like Dilip, Grewal was immediately surrounded by villagers who took his watch and other valuables and beat him. But since he had landed about a mile from the airbase, the military police were soon on the scene. He, too, was blindfolded and taken on a long overnight trip in an open jeep to Rawalpindi. After a short stay in a cell, he was taken, sleepless, to a press conference where he was questioned by reporters for various news channels, as well as senior PAF officers.

  ‘Having noticed prominent news channels such as the BBC,’ says Grewal, ‘I was confident that my whereabouts and condition would be known back home and everywhere else. In fact, I found out later that my friends and family in the US and Canada saw me on TV.’ Most of India had no TV network at this point, but since Lahore’s transmission could be well received in border areas, his father in Amritsar soon heard that someone had seen his son on TV.

  And so began Grewal’s incarceration, a time that eventually became so boring that he was willing to risk a breakout. For about ten days he was alone and very cold. His flying overall had been taken away and he wore only pants and a shirt. During the night he could hear bombs exploding and ack-ack fire, indicating that the war was still on.

  During the day he would be taken for interrogation and two or three times he’d stood all night in a corner of the interrogation room because he had refused to answer certain questions. His guard, unlike the one assigned to Dilip, did not give him a break, and in the morning, when he was asked if he wanted tea, he said yes but the tea never arrived.

  He remembers well being questioned by Chuck Yeager. ‘This is not an interrogation,’ Yeager began. ‘I just want to ask you a few questions.’

  When Yaeger told Grewal his name, he was surprised that he didn’t recognize it. ‘I’m the man who broke the sound barrier,’ he said. ‘You’re a fighter pilot. You should know that.’Grewal thought the sound barrier had been broken by a British pilot called John Derry, but he knew enough to keep his mouth shut about that.

  Yeager was interested mainly in the Sukhoi’s fuel capacity and range. ‘How did you get so far?’ he asked, and ‘How well do the ejection seats work?’

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ Grewal remembers answering, ‘so they obviously work pretty well.’

  Unlike Dilip, Grewal had had no childhood interest in flying. He had a most unusual family history, with many bumps along the way. He was born in Sheffield in 1942. His father had gone to England to study metallurgy before World War II. ‘He went to study metallurgy but got involved in matrimony,’ jokes Grewal. By the time the Grewals returned to India with their three young sons, it was 1947, just months before the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. They soon had to flee their home in Lahore and find a place for themselves in India. Grewal’s father found work in Indian Punjab, first in Ferozpur, and then in Patiala, but by the time they were settled, his English mother had had enough. She left India in 1950 never to return.

  Grewal owed his flying career to an uncle whose blue IAF uniform impressed him, and to the discovery of his somewhat latent talents. Although he had never done very well in school, in 1961 he sat for the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exams, without much hope, and he passed. When he passed the interview as well, he began training at the Air Force Academy in Jodhpur. ‘At the time I couldn’t ride a bicycle without having an accident,’ he remembers. ‘My father said, “How are you ever going to fly a plane?” But I did!’ By 1971 he had been flying almost ten years and had gained a lot of confidence as well as competence.

  On 16 December 1971, after ten days of solitary confinement, Grewal was taken outside without a blindfold and allowed to sit in the sun with Flight Lieutenant Harish Sinhji and Flying Officer Kuruvilla. He was meeting both men for the first time. In the next few days he met the others and realized that he was, indeed, one of the lucky ones. In fact other POWs remember Grewal as the strongest and the fittest, a natural partner for Dilip Parulkar in his plan to escape.

  Why had Grewal resisted the idea of escape for so long and then changed his mind? This is the way he remembers it: ‘By now it was May−June in the Indian subcontinent. The days were long and hot with very little news from home about our repatriation. Life started to get very intense and boring.’

  Over the next few days Grewal and Dilip confided their plan to their senior officers, Jafa and Coelho. Coelho believed that having highly trained pilots risk their lives in an attempt to escape was very foolish, but since he could not really argue against a POW’s well-known duty to escape, he hesitated to issue the order that would have stopped them. Jafa, on the other hand, realized that Dilip, and now Grewal, were hell-bent on the breakout and saw his role as facilitator. Careful preparation would be essential and he was willing to help.

  The discussions began. Not everyone approved, but all were in on the planning, and each had his say. Should they head for India or Afghanistan? What supplies would they need for their trek? How, day after day, could they conceal their preparations from the thirty-five to forty guards who lived on the compound and patrolled around the clock? And who, in the end, should go? Harish Sinjhi was soon itching to be part of the team, but was he strong enough for the journey? These were all vital issues. The camp was abuzz. No one could say it was boring now.

  Finally, on 27 May, Radio Pakistan announced that Bhutto would fly to Delhi on 28 June for summit talks with Gandhi. Once again hopes for repatriation rose, but this time Dilip and Grewal did not wait idly. They were determined to have their backup plan ready. If the summit failed to promise repatriation that summer, they would be off.

  Meanwhile, northern India and Pakistan experienced the hottest June in years. As the prisoners sweated through the long hot days before the monsoon rains began, one of the first questions to settle was the escape route. If two prisoners could dismantle a section of wall overnight, there was no point in starting that part of the operation yet. The first thing to decide was their ultimate destination. Should they head east to India or west to Afghanistan?

  India was certainly much closer. The Indian city of Poonch was only 100 kilometres northeast of Rawalpindi. If they headed for Poonch, which was Dilip’s original plan, they would now have to cross the Jhelum River during the monsoon. Bu
t if they headed west to Afghanistan, the border was more than twice as far, and they would have to cross the Indus. Whichever direction they took, they would have to skirt bridges and other possible checkpoints. The plan was to walk at night and hide during the day. They could reach the border near Poonch in three nights but reaching the Khyber Pass would take much longer. Even if they managed to avoid highways and bridges, the longer they were on the road, the more likely they were to be caught.

  Of course, the authorities would expect them to head for India, but that wasn’t the only problem with destination Poonch. Jammu and Kashmir, where Poonch is located, had been disputed territory since India and Pakistan gained their independence in 1947. After three wars, the line of control there was heavily fortified. They could step on a landmine. They could be shot by their own troops.

  The Afghan border was peaceful by comparison. Once they reached Peshawar they would have to cross through Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province to reach the border, and that was a notoriously lawless place. But they were sure they could count on a warm reception in Afghanistan. The Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan was on good terms with India. Seven years later, civil war would break out between the Afghan government and the US-backed mujahideen (which would go on to form the Taliban). But in 1972 Afghanistan was at peace. In 1970 Grewal had flown to Kabul and then on to Tehran and Athens.

  All these factors were weighed by the members of the Indian tea club, as they sat on charpoys indoors or played volleyball at sunset. At first Dilip and Grewal favoured Poonch but eventually they were persuaded to go west to Peshawar and the Khyber Pass. As for Harish Sinhji, he was a slight fellow and he didn’t know how to swim, so they were reluctant to take him.

  Scrounging

  When Grewal made his decision to team up with Dilip, he used some excuse (now forgotten) to ask for a shift to Cell 5. By this time some of the POWs liked to linger there longer than others each evening, playing cards or chess. Why not accommodate the players by letting them bunk together? It seems likely that MWO Rizvi’s suspicions about the window had evaporated. It is even possible that he had not informed Wahid-ud-din about them in the first place. Or perhaps both men thought that with the Simla talks a month away, and a prisoner exchange likely to follow, they could relax.

  So by June there were three men in Cell 5, and though Chati was there somewhat by chance, his presence proved to be useful. Because of his injuries, he could request visits to the dental clinic or the hospital and, along the way, scout the lay of the land. Dilip and Grewal, who were known for their fitness, did not have an excuse to leave the camp, and they needed all the information they could get.

  They figured there was no need to start on the wall until a week or ten days before the escape, but in the meantime they needed to scout the premises and plan the route out. They quickly agreed that the back wall of Cell 5 was the best place for the breakout. Since that wall faced the same direction as the back wall of the bathroom, and since the bathroom had a ventilator, they were able to observe the PAF recruiting station and petrol pump behind their compound. The two compounds were separated by a barbed wire fence, about a foot from the back wall of the prison compound. Although the fence was high, it was not much of a barrier. They had observed airmen step through it to reach the recruiting compound.

  By watching through the ventilator in the bathroom, they discovered that after five in the evening only a single watchman stood guard in the recruiting station compound. He sometimes sat on a charpoy, not far from the barbed wire fence, but when he did, he usually faced the other way, towards the gate on Mall Road. If they were quiet and quick, they could escape his notice. If he turned around they would be finished. It would be up to each man to check the watchman’s position before making a dash across the alleyway and along the back wall of the other prison cells. As they neared the outer wall, the one they would have to climb over, the guard’s view would be blocked by a hut on the recruiting compound. It was really the first twenty feet that were risky.

  Once over the wall they would be on a side road, close to its intersection with Mall Road, which they knew was also the Grand Trunk Highway. If they turned right at Mall Road, they would be on the way to Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, but they couldn’t risk travelling such an obvious route, even at night. They would have to go overland, avoiding the main roads, the big towns. They would need a compass, some food to keep them going, and at least a small supply of water. A ground sheet of some sort for sleeping on would come in handy, something to protect them from ants, and in the mountains, from the cold (though cold was hard to imagine at the moment). And a length of rope was always a good thing to have.

  All of them had taken survival training in the air force. They had been dropped in the desert or the jungle or the mountains (usually all three) with just a compass, first aid kit, some matches, and a few flares, the same paraphernalia contained in the small cloth bag that accompanied them on all their flights, in case of ejection. But not one of them had managed to keep his survival kit. They had been stripped of everything remotely valuable either by the crowds that greeted them or by the military police. Only Chati’s parachute and Coelho’s anti-gravity suit were still on the premises. Coelho kept his G-suit in his cell. The parachute was stored in the cell by the guardhouse that had once belonged to Pethia. Since his departure that cell was used to store the surplus Red Cross boxes, most of them empty but a few of them still containing remnants of the latest delivery. Brother Bhargava had taken charge of the cell and kept the key. Though he needed permission to come and go, the guards were always obliging. Sometimes they were rewarded with leftover sweets or canned goods that had been sent to the prisoners.

  Once Dilip and Grewal had taken stock, preparations began in earnest. There was a long list of things to do. They had to create their own survival kits, gather their own intelligence, and make plans step by step.

  Devising a compass fell to Kamat who knew the most about physics. He used scrounged wire and cells from the transistor radio to magnetize a sewing needle. For a pivot he used the hollow half of a press button (the type of snap button used on all the shirts they had been issued), and mounted the pivot on yet another sewing needle so that the pivot could swing freely. Using as a model the compass rose from the Oxford School Atlas, Coelho drew a new compass rose on letter paper. When that was ready, Kamy pushed the base sewing needle through the rose’s centre for another test and the whole apparatus proved true. Then he took the whole thing apart, wrapped the pieces in cotton batting, and stuffed them into a hollowed out biro pen that Dilip could carry in his pocket when the time came.

  Other things fell into place in strange, serendipitous ways. For weeks the volleyball net had been useless because of a broken rope. After repeated requests for rope, all falling on deaf ears, the prisoners had given up. Now someone suggested replacing the broken volleyball rope with the rope from Chati’s parachute. They could use part of the rope to fix the volleyball net, and keep another length for the survival kits. With permission, Bhargava fetched the blood-stained parachute from the dump cell. When he returned it, the parachute was missing not only its lines, but a good chunk of its many yards of fabric. They had cut lengths of its yellow and white nylon for groundsheets. The fabric was light and folded to a pack that would fit the palm of your hand. It was strong, too, and if it hadn’t been such a bright colour, they could have used it to make knapsacks.

  That was a problem, or one of the many problems. How were they to carry everything? Grewal and Dilip had already decided to pose as PAF airmen on leave, off for a hike in the mountains. Knapsacks would be ideal but, even if they had enough cash, they couldn’t send Aurangzeb to the market to buy knapsacks.

  It was around this time that the POWs’ good luck blossomed and several important pieces of the puzzle fell into place, one after the other. On 11 May the Pakistani rupee was devalued from five rupees to the American dollar to eleven rupees. When the prisoners received their pay packets in June, the flight
lieutenants found that their salaries had increased from 57 rupees per month to 147. ‘Surely the fastest pay rise in history,’ jokes Dilip.

  Bhargava remembers celebrating by ordering Chinese food from Hotel Flashman, which was near the camp. ‘In fact we became regular customers and we particularly enjoyed pastries from there which we normally had after the game of volleyball.’ Despite these extravagances, the rise in POW allowances still allowed more cash for the escape. They would have enough money to take a bus, hire a tonga or even a taxi. They could stop at a tea stall to eat. They could behave, in other words, like any other travellers on holiday, though they would still have to be prepared for long hikes over rough, wild territory.

  The idea of taking a bus was farfetched until Dilip discovered, by accident, that in Rawalpindi there were buses arriving and leaving right through the night. One day he was talking to a Pathan guard, trying to learn something about the northwest frontier. ‘Where is your village?’ he asked. ‘How often do you get leave? How do you get home?’ The guard told him that he could finish his shift and catch a bus that very night to Peshawar. Dilip knew that Peshawar was only about fifty kilometres from the Afghan border. It was a major centre and therefore a place to be avoided, but if they arrived in the early morning, perhaps they could be out again before arousing suspicions. Hopping on to a night bus to Peshawar could save many nights of walking. Hadn’t Chati mentioned seeing the central bus station in Rawalpindi on one of his visits to the dentist? ‘You must visit the dentist again,’ Dilip told him. ‘Find some excuse.’

  The idea for a water-carrier came once again from Kamat. They would use the rubber tubing from Coelho’s G-suit. An anti-gravity suit is designed to prevent blood from pooling in the lower part of the pilot’s body during rapid acceleration. During flight the pilot’s G-suit is attached to a valve in the cockpit that automatically fills the tubes with air when necessary. Now Kamat used scissors to carefully remove the tubing from the leg section of Coelho’s G-suit. The tube would be filled with water and tied tight before the breakout, then refilled at every opportunity along the way. It would be carried in one of the knapsacks, which had yet to be devised.