Four Miles to Freedom (18 page)

Every time the POWs encountered Camp Commandant Latif they would ask him to consider letting their friends out of solitary a few days early. Here we are enjoying good company they would say, but we are thinking of them. And they had the support of the army POWs when they made their requests. But Latif was not about to give in. He would just smile and shake his head, as if to say you are doing your duty and I must do mine, too.

The night of Janamashthami everyone was in a jolly mood from laughing at jokes and the crazy antics of the jawans playing the roles of women. Still, when Latif came by they didn't forget to ask him again. Here we are all together, having fun, they said, if only our friends could be here to enjoy the programme with us. This time Latif's reaction was more promising, ‘I'll see what I can do,' he said.

The next day he released all three men from solitary confinement. His told each of them, ‘Because your behaviour has been exemplary, I have decided to release you early.' But their friends told them the story from another angle. We asked him again and again, they said. And the night of Janamashthami, Latif had something at stake as well. He had invited VIPs from Lyallpur to attend. He had six hundred POWs as well as camp staff enjoying the show. He didn't want to refuse us that night. We could have stopped the show if we'd chosen to.

One way or another, depending on who is telling the story, the three escapees were released on 1 September 1972, and joined their comrades in the IAF compound. When the three arrived there were hugs and handshakes all around. Then it was catch-up time, with stories to tell about getting caught by the tehsildar, and political agent Burki and Usman Hamid coming to the rescue; about Dilip's attempt to escape the first night in Peshawar; about the phone call to the camp and the hulchul that followed; about Wahid's anger and Rizvi's hurt feelings. How different Latif was from Wahid-ud-din, they all agreed. No one could ruffle Latif. He was an experienced manager of men. If there was dirty work to be done, he would leave that to others.

But for prisoners at Lyallpur life was, for the most part, a frictionless affair. The high-security prison, which is still in use, was built in the 1960s during the military rule of President Ayub Khan. It was used, at this point, to house criminals and political dissidents, as well as the six hundred prisoners of war. Designed to hold two thousand prisoners, it was far from full. The ten IAF POWs had their own compound, with a cook and two assistants from the Indian Army. They were housed in two rows of cells. Since there were twenty cells and only ten prisoners, the cook and his assistants also slept in the compound, and one cell was allotted for cooking. In each row of cells one of the end cells became the toilet and the other, the bathroom. Though there were toilets in each room, the prisoners preferred this arrangement.

During the day the individual cells were unlocked and the prisoners circulated within the compound freely. The only guard in sight stood on a platform at one corner of the eight-foot wall that bordered their compound. To summon a guard or the havaldar who attended them, they used to take a stick from the cook's stack and whack the metal gate several times.

At first the army POWs had been lodged in civilian prisons or in hospitals along the border. By February they had all been brought to Lyallpur. Conditions at Lyallpur were miserable at first but gradually improved. The army POWs believed that the improvements had happened largely because of simultaneous reciprocity—once the authorities in Pakistan knew their own prisoners were being well taken care of, they were willing to reciprocate. But they had had to push for changes, too. During their early days at Lyallpur the food was poor and there was no opportunity for the officers to meet the jawans and nothing to do all day.

By August when the airmen arrived, all the POWs assembled each Sunday for a religious service. One Sunday the service was Sikh, the next, Hindu and the following, Christian, but everyone attended, except the Muslims (though they did take in programmmes on certain occasions, such as Janamashthami). The privilege of meeting all together, whether on Sunday for prayers or at other times to play football or attend an evening programme, had taken a while to establish. The Pakistani authorities had assumed that the jawans in each religious group would be content to live, eat and socialize separately, and were surprised to find they were not. The men wanted occasions to come together and their officers, who had never been segregated into religious groups, supported them. Still, the jawans did continue to live in separate compounds based on their religion, and sleep side by side on the floor in large barracks.

In some ways Lyallpur was a stricter place than the Pindi camp. There was no TV, no listening to the BBC or All India Radio, no books. They could not send a lascar out for sweets or chapli kababs or a bottle of booze. There were no lascars at Lyallpur. All the staff were military. In any case, they had no cash in hand to bribe an attendant. At the Lyallpur prison canteen all purchases were deducted from each officer's monthly allowance.

The strange thing is, despite the loss of TV in the evenings, and books, and newscasts, the IAF prisoners remember being happier at Lyallpur than they were in Pindi. For one thing, they weren't locked in their cells, except at night. In Pindi, every time they wanted to move from one space to another, from their own cell to Cell 5, or to the toilet, they had to wait for a guard to unlock and lock a door, but at Lyallpur they could move freely around their own compound. And their meals, cooked on site by their countrymen, were much more appetizing. Also, it was good to see some fresh faces. Almost every day they met the seven Indian army officers for tea, or a meal, or a game of chess or bridge or volleyball, usually in the army officers' compound, which was about a hundred metres from their own. Occasionally they played football with the jawans, and on Sundays there was always the gathering of all six hundred POWs for a religious service of one kind or another.

The havaldar who attended their needs was an obliging fellow. They could ask him to fetch soap or shaving cream from the canteen or they could ask him to take them to the canteen themselves. It was always a welcome break. The canteen was well stocked, and if you didn't see what you needed, you could ask and the item would be ordered. Tejwant Singh was able to buy oil paints and cloth that he transformed into canvas for his paintings.

But despite all these distractions, Dilip continued to plan an escape. After all, something that had been tried once, and had almost succeeded, was surely worth another go. And Tejwant Singh developed a plan of his own. When they look back now, both men are amazed and somewhat embarrassed by the naivety of their plans, but at the time those were the ideas that nourished hope for freedom and fed their ingenuity.

This time neither man thought of tunnelling out. There was no ignoring the impressive walls of Lyallpur prison, or the guards posted in the towers. It was a matter of finding a way over those high walls and the tangle of electrified wire on top. Dilip elaborated on his original idea of scaling the high wall (after scaling the wall of the inner compound) and throwing a mattress over the wire. He might need two mattresses, he concluded, and he would definitely need a diversion of some sort. He finally settled on a sandstorm. When the rains ended in September and the winds began to blow and blow, sandstorms were not uncommon. If it were a roaring storm, visibility would be vastly reduced and he believed he could scale the walls without being caught. It would, of course, be a solo effort this time.

Singh's scheme also depended on the winds. He hoped to float over the walls with the aid of a hot air balloon. He would buy sheeting from the canteen and treat it with chemicals as he had the canvases for his paintings. He would use one of the kerosene burners from the kitchen for the flame. He started by devising a miniature model using sticks and cloth and tried it in the space between the two blocks of cells, away from the eyes of the guard on the corner platform. But no matter how he constructed the thing, it was never light enough to travel far, and he eventually gave up trying.

A more successful scheme was brewing a batch of rum. Since there was no Aurangzeb to send out to the market (and no cash in hand to pay him, in any case), the drinking men put their heads together and decided to make their own. It involved buying jaggery from the canteen and mixing it with water in a water pot—the same kind of clay pot found in the corner of every kitchen in India and Pakistan. They would have liked to add some orange peels and a bit of barley, but that was impossible, so they settle for straight jaggery and water.

The function of a water pot is to stay cool and uncontaminated (thus its narrow neck) but in this case they needed warmth. In fact both Singh and Grewal knew that a Punjabi farmer would bury his pot in a layer of manure, but they had none of that either, so they settled on burying the pot of brew in the garden between the two cell blocks, where they already had some carrots and radishes growing. There it would get the sun for at least part of the day. After a week or so, they put an ear to the ground and listened for the burble of fermentation. All this happened out of view of the guard who sat on his platform at one corner of the compound.

Still assembled out of nothing in POW Camp Lyallpur, November 1972

It was a happy day when the burble was detected. In turn each man put an ear to the ground, the drinking men and teetotallers alike, all in on the game. Then it was the turn of Kamat and Singh to set up a still, using sections of garden hose, several tin cans reshaped, and a burner from the kitchen. The distilling took place on a Sunday morning when the others were attending the weekly service. The result was two bottles of brew, but it wasn't the best brew, they discovered that evening. They had been too eager. They should have waited a little longer. Still, everyone had a sample, and nothing was left over.

And so the time passed. By the end of September the rains had stopped and the nights had cooled enough for a decent sleep. By the end of October they needed blankets at night. In November, with temperatures dipping to ten degrees they were already wearing their POW sweaters to bed. They dreaded the winter to come. It would be their second winter in captivity. Three months of being chilled to the bone. Singh bought some material from the canteen and sewed himself a housecoat.

On 8 November, after forty days of fasting during daylight hours, the Muslim POWs celebrated Eid with a special gathering. Coelho, who was senior officer among all the prisoners, remembers persuading everyone to attend.

‘It was an opportunity to show the solidarity of being Indian,' he says. He was particularly concerned that some of the forty-two Muslim POWs might defect and choose not to be repatriated. All the POWs, both officers and jawans, did attend the Eid celebration. During the prayers they had to watch their Muslim colleagues carefully so that they could follow along.

‘At Eid everyone hugs each other three times,' Coelho remembers. ‘By the time we had finished everyone was weeping.'

In November each airman also received a large box sent by the IAF through the International Red Cross. Each box was full of packages of biscuits and tins of food. They realized that their complaints about the poor food in Rawalpindi had been heard—rather late—but heard nevertheless, and now they had not only the better meals in Lyallpur but this bounty to share with their comrades from the army.

A week or so after receiving their parcels, when they crossed over to the army officers' compound for volleyball, the airmen noticed a great clean-up in progress. The larger compound had been scrupulously swept and the paths marked out with limestone powder. An inspection coming up, they guessed, or an important visitor, which was about the same thing. Then, the next day they were told to look sharp for an assembly. The day was Friday, 24 November.

That morning all the IAF prisoners except Bhargava, whose back was troubling him, were taken to a compound near the main gate. All six hundred jawans were already sitting on durries in front of a stage set with a podium and microphone. Flags were flying. Journalists and photographers were gathering near the stage. ‘Bhutto is on his way,' their army colleagues predicted. Were they guessing or had they been informed by their havaldar of what was afoot? Soon they heard the sound of helicopters, then the approach of jeeps. A few minutes later President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stepped out of a jeep and mounted the stage. He needed no introduction.

By this time the POWs expected a momentous announcement. Had the three countries finally agreed to an exchange of prisoners? Was it possible they wouldn't spend another winter in Pakistan after all? But that was not what Bhutto said. They had all been guests in his country far too long, he said, and he had decided, unilaterally, to release them. What India did was up to that country. He had made his decision and it would stand.

He said all this with great flourishes. He would stop and look directly at them with his broad face, or toss his head back. It was an impressive performance. With his thick fringe of grey hair, he was like a lion surveying his territory. At the end of it the POWs applauded politely. Bhutto walked off the stage and left immediately without mingling. He was a popular man still, but not as popular at Lyallpur prison as he was on the outside.