Four Miles to Freedom (17 page)

‘We have shot them all,' said a sergeant. Surely he was joking! But it was hard to be sure of that.

In fact, while the three escapees were being held in Peshawar, their comrades spent three very uncomfortable days and nights in solitary confinement. Instead of the usual friendly conversation, they were cursed by their guards and kept in gun sights whenever they crossed the courtyard to go to the toilet. At night they were wakened almost hourly for body searches. Chati was questioned twice in the interrogation room. He stuck to his story: he had known nothing of the escape plans. His roommates had fooled him as well as everyone else.

On the third night, the seven prisoners were awakened before dawn and breakfast was delivered to their cells shortly afterwards. They were told to prepare for a trip. There was little to prepare, though they did receive some of their possessions back. Night clothes and toiletries, Jafa's notebook, Coelho's dictionary, these things were returned helter-skelter and quickly bundled up for the trip. One by one they made their trips to the toilet. When it was Singh's turn, he reached into the crevice where he had hidden his notes and found them gone. Possibly someone had given the chain a great yank and the notes had tumbled into the latrine and gone down the drain, unobserved. However it had happened, months of work had disappeared and he now had no notes to jog his memory.

Early that morning, the seven prisoners were assembled in the courtyard where several jeeps stood waiting. There was the camp commandant, Wahid-ud-din, hands on hips, directing the operations. His anger was obvious. They were bloody scoundrels, he told them. He had given them all sorts of privileges. He had trusted them and they had let him down. ‘Now,' he said, ‘you will be taken to a place where you will never see the daylight.'

After Wahid-ud-din's harangue, the POWs were blindfolded and handcuffed and seated in the jeeps where the chains on their cuffs were fastened to the belt of a guard seated beside them. The jeeps drove out the gate and turned right. Seven blindfolded pilots took note of the turns, the traffic noises, the angle of the sun on their faces. They were going south. In the small gap between blindfold and cheek, some could see the floor of the jeep and if their heads jerked back (it was a bumpy road) they could make out the occasional road sign, always in Urdu. Singh was one of these. Putting together all the clues, before long he guessed they were heading towards Lahore.

After about two hours the jeeps turned off the main road onto a rougher road, and a few minutes later they pulled off that road and started into a field. This was an alarming development. ‘Looking at the scene through the gap, I began to wonder if we were going to be taken to some remote area to be disposed of,' remembers Singh. He knew the story of
The Great Escape
—over seventy prisoners escaped initially, probably the largest POW escape in history, but only three made it to safety. Fifty of those who had been recaptured were taken into a forest and shot.

Soon the jeeps stopped. Their blindfolds and handcuffs were removed. Wahid-ud-din shouted to some locals, who were peering around a building, to bring charpoys. Once the prisoners were seated, tiffin tins were unloaded and they ate lunch. Wahid-ud-din's bark was definitely worse than his bite.

After lunch, their journey started again, complete with blindfolds and handcuffs, and after a few more hours, those who could glimpse the outside world spied the massive walls and gate of a prison. The jeeps stopped outside the gate. Wahid-ud-din left his charges and entered the compound. After a few minutes, the POWs were escorted inside and their blindfolds and handcuffs removed. They found themselves standing in the open air but everywhere they looked were walls. The outer walls of the prison were at least fifteen feet high and topped with several layers of barbed wire. And inside the high outer walls were a series of other compounds with walls at least eight feet high. It was a far cry from No. 3 Provost and Security Flight in Rawalpindi. The whole place looked newly built and built to last.

‘Welcome to Lyallpur,' said the man standing before them. He was a clean-shaven man of average height and girth, in his forties or early fifties, they guessed. ‘I'm in charge here. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Latif.'

‘Now I know you are duty-bound to try and escape,' he went on, ‘but it is my duty to stop you. And I must warn you, that wire you see up there is electrically charged. As you know, your friends have been caught, and they will join you here soon.'

They heard this news with great relief. Until then they had heard rumours, but this was the first official word of their comrades' safety. They liked Latif immediately. They liked his humour, his frankness and his courtesy, all in such contrast to the way Wahid-ud-din had been treating them. He invited them to take tea in the office compound nearby. Over tea—served in china cups, not the usual enamelled mugs they'd become used to—he told them that he had a particular sympathy for POWs because his own brother was a POW in India. He also told them that the office compound, where they were having tea, was earlier the lock-up for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (now president of Bangladesh). When they finished their tea, he took them to see a garden the Sheikh had planted to while away his time.

Wahid-ud-din did not linger to see the garden. He left immediately after tea without saying a word to the prisoners. He had a long road ahead of him. Back to Rawalpindi he would go and face the real culprits. Once the inquiry was finished he could wash his hands of the whole lot of them.

After their arrival at No. 3 Provost and Security Flight, the notorious three were taken to cells 1, 2 and 3, nearest the guardhouse, to await their trial. As he crossed the courtyard from the jeep to his cell, Grewal muttered to his escort, ‘I tried to be an honourable man, and here I am in handcuffs.'

‘Not handcuffs,' said the man. ‘Those are your jewels.'

It was a remark he would never forget and it helped him get through the difficult days ahead. They were in solitary confinement once again, eating meals in their cells. Their only contacts were guards who were not as sympathetic as Grewal's initial escort. In fact, most of them were actively hostile.

‘You'd better not try anything funny,' one fellow warned Dilip. ‘We are all sharpshooters and judo black belts. If you try anything funny, I'll break every bone in your body and shoot you dead.'

‘Well, no one saw me go the first time,' he replied coolly, ‘and no one will see me go this time either.' Somehow he was still riding high, and the threats only fuelled his adrenaline.

For two days the Chaklala base commander conducted a court of inquiry into the escape. Each man was interviewed separately on two occasions and then brought in again for sentencing. The court took place in Wahid-ud-din's office, where they had watched TV in the evenings. The procedure was familiar to all three men. It was the same as a court of inquiry into some mishap or misdemeanour in the Indian Air Force. The president of the court, in this case the base commander from Chaklala, asked the questions, and another officer took notes. At the end of the process, Wahid-ud-din, as camp commander, sentenced each man to thirty days solitary confinement, the maximum penalty allowed under the Geneva Conventions. When the prisoners asked for the days they had already spent in solitary confinement in Peshawar and Pindi to be counted towards those days, Wahid agreed.

‘He had to be nice to us,' reflects Grewal. ‘His fate was in our hands.' Later, after they emerged from solitary confinement and were finally able to compare notes, the trio discovered that they had all come, independently, to the same decision not to cast aspersions against the staff at the camp or complain about the conditions.

‘We had tricked people,' says Dilip. ‘They had cooperated involuntarily and we didn't want to get them into trouble.' Therefore he was careful not to mention the compass (still in his shirt pocket) or the batteries used to magnetize it, or the map from
Murray's Handbook
, which had come on loan from the Chaklala base library. As to their motives for the escape, he said poor treatment or good treatment had nothing to do with it. They were prisoners of war and it was simply their duty to escape if at all possible.

After sentencing, they were once again blindfolded, handcuffed and shackled, and taken to the railway station where they boarded a night train. The security was even more impressive than before. Each prisoner occupied his own air-conditioned compartment, his handcuffs chained to either a bar of the window or a bunk support. In the same compartment, an armed guard kept constant watch. A sergeant who escorted Dilip to the toilet consented to unlocking the handcuffs, but he was clearly nervous. After a short interval he banged on the toilet door and said, ‘Sahib, what are you scheming now?'

Early in the morning, the trio were blindfolded and taken off the train into vehicles. When the blindfolds were removed, they, too, were welcomed to Lyallpur by Lt Col Latif who once again gave his spiel on their duty to escape and his duty to stop them, and pointed out the electrical wire that topped the outer walls. Then he led them into his office where he examined their documents. Sensing Latif's good nature, Grewal decided it was worth asking him to excuse them from the rest of their term in solitary.

‘The army is a much larger and more generous organization than the air force,' Grewal said, hoping the man would respond to flattery, but Latif only laughed.

They were put in high-security cells. Each cell had access to a walled courtyard about two metres square that had a wire roof. The sun managed to penetrate this enclosure for just a few hours each day. The rest of the cell was cramped. There was a cement plinth for sleeping, a squat toilet and a tap. On the cement plinth was a thin mattress. The chain for the toilet was located outside each cell, which meant calling the guard for a flush, but that was a minor inconvenience.

The bars of the cell door did not reach the ground so that meals could be shoved through without having to unlock the door. Each meal was delivered by an Indian POW accompanied by an armed Pakistani guard. There was no chance of conversation, just the scrape of the thali under the door.

On the second or third day, an Indian jawan came to Dilip's cell as usual and slid the thali through. As soon as the two men had left, Dilip sat down to his meal. When he picked up his roti, he found a piece of paper in the fold. ‘Dilip, we are all here. All seven are safe. Welcome to Lyallpur.'

How had his friends discovered he was here, he wondered. Had the Indian jawans who were serving the food passed the word?

From the courtyard Dilip studied the prison's high outer walls topped with electrified barbed wire, and towers manned by armed guards. Lyallpur prison was certainly an impressive place. But no prison is escape-proof, not a hundred per cent. Already he had an idea. He would need rope for a ladder and a hook. He figured he could scale the wall and throw his thin mattress over the wire. But that was weeks away. First he would have to get out of this cage.

Lyallpur

The last week in August the prison was abuzz with activity. On 31 August the Indian POWs would celebrate Janamashthami, the birth of Lord Krishna. Knowing that Janamashthami was an important Hindu festival, Latif had agreed to a request that the Indian jawans prepare a programme, and all POWs (except the three in solitary confinement) be allowed to attend. But then the requests had kept coming. They needed costumes and a sound system. They needed time to rehearse. All this was good for morale, he supposed, so he said yes to all the requests. In fact, the programme was becoming so impressive that he decided to invite local dignitaries to attend as well. So the set-up became even more elaborate—chairs for the fourteen POW officers, chairs for the dignitaries, and some thought given as to who would sit where. The six hundred jawans, of course, would sit on the ground.

By this time the seven IAF officers had become well acquainted with their seven army counterparts. All the army officers were friendly and helped the newcomers in every possible way. The senior officer, Major Hamir Singh, who had been badly wounded, bore his pain with great stoicism. He was finally repatriated as a medical case a month or so after the IAF officers' arrival. The other six army officers were young men in their twenties.

General layout of the Lyallpur Central Jail used as POW camp for Indian Army personnel and Air Force pilots

One of them, Captain Dastur, had been on the same Forward Air Control team as Mulla-Feroze, and blamed the overconfident IAF pilot for his capture. ‘I kept telling him we were too far forward, but he said he knew the place like the back of his hand!' It did not sit well with Dastur that Mulla-Feroze had already gone home while he was still cooling his heels in Pakistan.

But the teasing was usually good-natured and they were glad to have one another's company. Every clear evening the officers met to play volleyball. Even Jafa, Singh and Kamat stood their ground and hit the ball when it came within range, though they left the leaps and net shots to Chati and Kuruvilla, who were in better shape. Their most enthusiastic, energetic players were still in the clink, so they had to make do.