Four Miles to Freedom (15 page)

This time only Kamat and Kuruvilla, who shared a cell, were actually told of the impending attempt, though others may have suspected. It was, once again, Kuruvilla's task to call for a guard around midnight and say he needed the toilet.

As usual, the POWs in Cell 5 went through their routine of bridge, toilet, and lights out. For the third time, Sinhji, Dilip and Grewal changed into civvies, and filled the knapsacks. They would leave it to Chati to arrange the dummies in their beds. Then Grewal lay down under the charpoy to break the plaster. The plan was for each man to stand close to the outside wall until the next fellow, on a signal from Chati, reached through the hole and tapped his leg to say the coast was clear. Then he would scoot across the alley between the two buildings. Grewal, the first out, waited for a leg tap from Sinhji, who waited for a leg tap from Dilip..

This time the plan worked. The plaster broke. Each man crawled out, waited by the wall, then dashed across the narrow alleyway. It was around midnight. The storm hadn't broken, but a fierce wind fired dust and sand onto their faces. As for the watchman in the adjoining compound, there he was, sitting on his charpoy, perilously close. But when they took a closer look at him, they realized he had put a blanket over his head!

Landi Kotal

The bus wound up one mountain after the other, then came to a broad gorge with steep walls on either side. There were no more cave dwellings, just craggy walls of shale and limestone closing in on them. After a few more miles the walls of rock retreated and they could see ahead a broad valley or plateau ringed with mountains. Soon the bus pulled into Landi Kotal, the town at the summit of the Khyber Pass. It was a little before ten o'clock but Landi Kotal was already teeming with people. Sunday, it turned out, was market day.

After getting off the bus, the trio again sought the shelter of a dhaba for tea. All they had to do was find the road to Landi Khana and be off. Ten hours on the road and only a few miles to go!

Had they known what was happening back at the camp, they might have had even more confidence in their success. Chati had done a good job of cleaning up the rubble, replacing the bricks, and making sure the blankets folded on the beds resembled his roommates. The next morning he made excuses for them.

‘We played bridge too late last night,' he said. ‘They're still sleeping.'

When breakfast was ready, rather than rouse the three sleepers so that the POWs could have breakfast together in Cell 5 as usual, the attendants set out breakfast in the former interrogation room. If the camp commandant or even MWO Rizvi had been on duty, it would have been a different story.

Meanwhile, in Landi Kotal, the three men once again played the role of tourists. ‘While drinking tea,' says Sinjhi, ‘we casually asked the locals where this place called Landi Khana was. They did not seem to know so they asked their neighbours in a sort of “pass it on” game. About the fifth or sixth chap seemed to have some idea and he pointed to one road and said it was about four miles that way.'

‘Any buses to Landi Khana?' asked Grewal, who was still doing the talking. The fellow told him that there were no buses, but he could get a taxi for thirty rupees. Thinking that being too generous with their money had aroused the tongawala's suspicions in Peshawar, Grewal decided to reject the price.

‘Thirty rupees for four miles!' Grewal exclaimed. ‘That's too much! We'll walk.'

With this, they left the dhaba and headed to the bazaar where they'd been told cotton caps were for sale. Everyone else was wearing them, and Dilip figured their lack of caps was what had been attracting much of the attention.

‘No cap for me,' said Harry. ‘An Anglo-Pakistani would never wear a cap.'

Of course neither would any Christian, but at this point Dilip was not considering their assumed identities. No one had asked their names so far, and he was sure it was their appearance that was out of sync. So he left the two others standing by the road, and went down to the market, which was not far from the dhaba where they'd had tea. When he returned he had two caps, but neither fit Grewal's large head, so he donned his own and dove once more into the market to buy a larger cap.

And that was the mistake that he would forever regret. If only he had not returned to the market the second time. If only he had forgotten about the caps altogether. If only they had taken that first offer of a taxi for thirty rupees. They could have been on the road in minutes. They could have been halfway to Landi Khana by the time he returned with the second cap. But they hadn't taken the first taxi, and by the time he returned from his second trip to the cap-seller, the game was almost up.

The Tehsildar

When Dilip returned from his second trip to the market, he found Grewal and Sinhji besieged by taxi drivers. First a boy from the tea shop had shouted to them that a driver would take them to Landi Khana for twenty-five rupees. No, said Grewal. It would not do, he thought, for such a scruffy-looking group to spend freely. It would attract attention. Then he had second thoughts. Perhaps they
should
take a taxi. It would be so simple. They could be there in minutes. Sinjhi agreed. As soon as Dilip returned they would make their decision. But before that could happen they were surrounded by taxi drivers, all wanting to take them to Landi Khana.

Dilip returned in the midst of the hubbub. Yes, he said, a taxi is a good idea, and the sooner the better. Attracting a crowd like this was the last thing they needed.

‘You want to go to Landi Khana?' said a measured voice from the crowd.

They turned and saw a middle-aged man with a beard who wore glasses. Another taxi driver, they thought.

‘Yes, that's where we're going,' Grewal answered.

Then, instead of joining the other drivers in the bidding war, the new fellow began to question them. At first he was polite. ‘Who are you?' he asked them in Urdu. ‘Where do you come from?' Grewal told the prepared story about two airmen on vacation, with a civilian friend along.

‘How do you know about this place called Landi Khana?' the fellow asked next. ‘Do you know someone there?'

Grewal explained that they were exploring the area and had heard Landi Khana was a pretty place to visit. ‘It's on all the maps,' he said. It's the terminus of the bloody railway, he was thinking. Surely it has to be a good-sized town.

‘No,' said the chap. ‘You won't find Landi Khana on any map. Most people have never even heard of the place. It's been abandoned ever since the British left.'

The man then accused them of being Bengalis attempting to escape over the border to Afghanistan. Until this point, our trio did not realize that hundreds of Bengalis had escaped by the same route they were taking. When the war had broken out the 4,00,000 Bengalis living in West Pakistan were unable to leave. And even months after the war, the situation had not improved. Many had been put under house arrest or in camps. They had become another bargaining chip in the peace negotiations between India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. In fact, they were such a valuable commodity that Bhutto had offered a bounty of a thousand rupees for any Bengali caught trying to escape.

Despite the bounty, a number of Bengalis had been successful. Some of them had connections. Some had lived in West Pakistan for years and knew enough to hire smugglers to take them over the border at night. They had savings and jewellery to help finance the operation. But a few of them, it seems, were less knowledgeable or more desperate and, according to the man with the glasses, some had been caught right here in Landi Kotal.

‘Do we look like Bengalis?' said Grewal, laughing, as he appealed to the crowd, which was growing by the minute.

But no one else was in a mood to laugh. The man with the glasses seemed to have authority. Only the taxi drivers continued their clamour. As far as they were concerned the inquisitive man was interfering with business. They continued to push in, grabbing the trio's hands and arms in an effort to take them towards their taxis.

But the man with the glasses prevailed. He told our three tourists to show him the contents of their knapsacks and they obeyed. Nothing suspicious in there, they thought, nothing that couldn't be explained. But as soon as he saw a length of Chati's blood-stained parachute, the man looked worried. ‘Perhaps he thinks we have killed someone,' Sinhji remembers thinking.

Next the man asked for some identification papers and their PAF leave certificates. Too risky, they said, to carry such important documents with them, but the man was not convinced. He insisted on marching the three men under armed escort (and there was no shortage of armed escort in Landi Kotal) to the office of the tehsildar.

The term, tehsildar, an office that existed since Mughal times, is still in use in both India and Pakistan. The trio realized that they were about to be questioned by the area's top administrative officer. Only the district political agent had more authority. And they soon learned that the man with the glasses was the tehsildar's clerk. No wonder he had known the history of Landi Khana. Everything to do with land, and collecting taxes on land and crops, passed through the tehsildar's office.

The tehsildar, a large man dressed in a salwar kurta, did not budge when they were brought into his office. He sat behind a long table, leaned back in his chair, and began to question them along the same lines as the previous inquisition by his clerk. Who were they? Why were they not carrying any form of identification?

‘At the end of an hour in which we'd invented fathers' names and home addresses, (the tehsildar) said that although he could not put a finger on it, he knew there was something very fishy. So fishy, he declared, that he was putting us in jail,' remembers Sinhji. They would remain in jail, the tehsildar told them, until he could determine if the identities they had claimed were true. It might take as long as ten days.

The adventure was over and they all knew it. And being returned to the camp at Rawalpindi was the least of their worries. They all knew they would be lucky to survive ten days in a local prison. Once their true identities were discovered, they would be beaten, possibly shot. If the local population hated Bengalis, they could imagine their feelings towards Indian pilots who had bombed their country only eight months before. And they doubted very much that the tehsildar knew anything about the Geneva Conventions. Even if he did, the matter would soon be out of his hands. They would be at the mercy of the guards at the local prison. All three men had memories of being beaten by locals the previous December, and this time, surrounded by men armed to the teeth, they knew their fate was bound to be worse.

The Escape Route

Their blood will be on my hands, thought Dilip with horror. Sinhji had been right all along. Dilip was their leader. If not for his insistence, Grewal and Sinhji would not be in this mess. They had been the cautious ones. He had been so hell-bent on escape that he'd never had a second thought. Not until now. And now, here they were in a serious jam and if they all came to a sticky end, he knew it would all be his fault. It was up to him to do something, but what could he say that hadn't already been said?

At this point he noticed a phone on the tehsildar's table and had an idea. It came to him in a flash. Their captor was not the highest-ranking official. Dilip knew that the armed forces in Pakistan commanded even more authority than they did in India. If he could reach their first camp commandant, Usman Hamid, he could put the matter directly in his hands. Usman Hamid was a reasonable man. And as ADC to the PAF chief, he had some clout. If only Dilip could reach Usman Hamid, the tehsildar would have no jurisdiction. He would have to do as directed.

‘You can check our identities right now,' he told the tehsildar. ‘All you have to do is let me phone Air Force Headquarters.'

The tehsildar was reluctant at first, but Dilip did not give up. ‘We fought for this country,' he said with indignation, ‘and this is the way you treat us? You want to put us in jail and you won't even let me make a phone call?'

Eventually the tehsildar booked a call to Air Force Headquarters in Peshawar. A few minutes later, when the call went through, he handed the phone to Dilip who asked to speak to the ADC to the Chief of Air Staff.

With the greatest of luck, Squadron Leader Usman Hamid picked up the phone, wondering who could be calling him from Landi Kotal.

‘Salaam alaikum, Sir,' said Dilip. ‘This is Corporal Phillip Peters, Sir, Phillip, Sir, you know Dilip, from Pindi, Sir. Three of us took some leave to go hiking. These people have caught us.'

The astonished Usman said, ‘Dilip, is that you?'

‘Yes, Sir.'

‘What are you doing in Landi Kotal?

‘We were just trekking up to Torkham, Sir. We told the tehsildar that we are airmen from Lahore, but he is insisting on ID. Sir, please tell him that you know us so he will let us go.'