Four Miles to Freedom (10 page)

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.

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.

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 32
^nd
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 32
^nd
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?'