Four Miles to Freedom (5 page)

Dilip was in shock. He and Uday had been constant companions since childhood. They were closer than many brothers. Dilip's parents pressured him to quit. ‘My father rushed to Hyderabad and offered to pay the entire cost of my training to get me out of the air force, but I held fast and gradually they accepted it.'

The commissioning took place as scheduled, but Dilip did not celebrate as he might have with a few drinks. For a boy from a pious Hindu family, drinking was not acceptable. Of course, he had tried it anyway, and many a night Uday had helped him back to the barracks after a few too many. Every time that happened Uday had pleaded with Dilip to stop drinking.

Immediately after the commissioning ceremonies, Dilip skipped off. He was AWOL for over a week. He spent several days at home, resisting his father's pleas to give up the IAF. Then he decided, as a tribute to Uday, that he would never drink again. It was a vow that served him well in prison. Wanting a drink, needing a drink, would have added another aggravation.

After his commissioning, Dilip was posted to Jorhat in Assam. Weeks after Uday's death he confessed in a letter to Inder Khanna that there were still days when he suddenly missed his cousin, but most of the time he was back to being his ‘jolly old self'. He and his mates lived in bamboo huts that were comfortable enough, and because it was an ops area discipline was somewhat relaxed. When they'd finished flying for the day, they would take off on their motorcycles in a gang of seven or eight for neighbouring towns. There they had the use of two posh clubs built by tea planters. Each club had a big wooden dancing floor, a picture hall, tennis courts, and a swimming pool and one even had polo grounds and a golf course.

In the fall of 1963 Dilip, by another stroke of luck, was sent to the UK for training on the Hunter. But he found his first trip overseas not much fun after all. While he loved the flying, he found the weather bitterly cold, and since the IAF gave them only enough money for necessities, dating was out of the question. The only compensation after a long day's work was watching sports on television. Apart from the flying, it was a rather dreary life for a twenty-one-year-old.

Settling In

Soon after the Christmas party, living conditions at the camp began to improve. Each prisoner was issued a long-sleeved shirt and pants in cotton serge and an olive green sweater (the basic winter uniform for enlisted men in the Pakistani Air Force). They were still cold, but the new clothes were an improvement on the ragtag wardrobe they'd been wearing, even though most of them were a poor fit. Now that interrogations were over, it seemed that Master Warrant Officer (MWO) Rizvi, the second in command, was doing all that was within his power to make them comfortable. He gave all the men toothbrushes and towels, but no razors. And it was Rizvi, early on, who had supplied Tejwant Singh with his white turban.

One day Rizvi told Coelho that he had served in the Royal Indian Air Force before Partition. His family came from Kanpur. ‘I've heard the name Coelho before,' Rizvi said. ‘My father was in the British army and he often mentioned a Brigadier Coelho.'

‘Brigadier Coelho was my father,' Coelho told him.

And so a link was established between Coelho and Rizvi. ‘The first month was hell,' Coelho remembers, ‘but after that things settled down.'

Many muhajirs (1947 refugees) from India, like Rizvi, had settled in the Punjab of which Rawalpindi was the capital, and the prisoners encountered them more than once. When Kuruvilla was taken to the hospital for an X-ray, he met a Tamilian who was very happy to have the chance to speak his own language again. A lascar at the camp, who had migrated from Patiala, was eager to question Bhargava, who knew Patiala well because he had studied there. It was surprising that despite the trauma of their 1947 displacement, the muhajirs were always friendly. Twenty-five years is not a long time in the scheme of things. Memories of India were still strong and not all of them were bad memories.

Among the prisoners, both Grewal and Tejwant Singh had fled Pakistan with their families in 1947, but since they were only four and five years old at the time, they had few memories to draw on. What they did possess was fluency in Punjabi, which proved an advantage in dealing with most of the camp staff.

But even more vital to the POWs recovery than the improved relations with the staff was the end of solitary confinement, which had been as stressful as the interrogations. The prisoners had all found those first weeks after capture disorienting, lonely and frightening, and most of their fears were entirely reasonable. Who knew they had survived and were prisoners of war? Only their Pakistani captors, which meant they were completely at their mercy.

‘My worst time,' says Tejwant Singh, ‘was the initial days after capture when days went by and nights came and the interrogators came and went and I didn't know what was in store. Before we all met on 25 December, one person came to my cell and threatened me with dire consequences because I had given incorrect names of the pilots in my squadron. He said I was trying to be very smart and that they had not yet declared my name. So when we met on the 25
^th
I was very relieved that someone had seen me alive.'

Kuruvilla was held in solitary confinement for several days before being interrogated. He encountered no one but a silent guard who delivered food and put a hood over his head for his trips to the toilet. Finally he was at the end of his tether and could stand it no longer. He pounded on the door until the guard came.

‘I can't be treated like this,' he told him. ‘It's against the Geneva Convention.' He asked for a piece of paper so that he could record his complaint. The next thing he knew a heavyset man in his fifties or sixties appeared at his door with a paper and pencil. It was Rizvi to the rescue. It seemed like a miracle. Kuru had what he needed. He had suddenly gone from being no one to being a person who merited the attention of this affable little man.

One day, when Bhargava was still in solitary confinement, Rizvi suggested he might like to have a shave. A barber soon arrived with a very rough razor—not a pleasant experience. Then a strange thing happened, something that had nothing to do with the rough shave; Bhargava began to weep. The tears ran down his face and they wouldn't stop. The barber was alarmed and went off to report the matter.

Before long Usman Hamid paid a visit. ‘I think you are lonely,' he said. ‘I'm going to move you in with someone else for a few days.'

After Christmas, the painful experience of solitary confinement ended and all the prisoners were allowed to meet each day. After breakfast in their cells they were taken to a walled courtyard in the corner of the compound. The outer wall was so high they could see nothing but the tops of the trees and the roofs of a few houses outside. The inner walls were low enough for a guard to patrol on the other side, leaving them alone to stroll around in twos or threes, lapping up the warmth of the sun, gossiping. All the stories of ejection, capture, and interrogations came out.

Harish Sinhji had just missed landing on a tree, and his orange and white parachute had been caught there, like a sunburst, advertising his presence. He was considering hiding in a nearby cane field until dark when he looked up and saw thirty or forty people heading towards him. He ran for his life, heading into the cane, sweating like the devil until he realized he was still wearing his mask and helmet. Still on the run, he threw them off.

‘But the crowd soon caught up with me. One chap was carrying an axe. I really thought I was a goner.' Some men in the crowd stopped the fellow with the axe, but others lit into Harry with their hands and feet. Then, suddenly, the frenzy stopped. Sinhji was blindfolded and his hands were tied behind his back. The military had arrived.

Tejwant Singh figured the villagers who got to him were angry because he was not carrying the usual issue of 200 Pakistani rupees plus revolver. (He didn't bother to carry the standard packet since he knew he had no chance of avoiding capture, not with his long hair and beard.) The first fellow who reached Singh ran off with his watch. The next one found his gutka (prayerbook) in the pocket of his G-suit and ran off with that. ‘Those who were slower to reach me searched my pockets and found nothing so they took out their frustrations by beating me.'

When he saw two uniformed men holding .303 Lee-Enfield rifles from World War I, he begged them not to shoot. ‘Don't worry,' said one of the guys, ‘we're here to protect you.'

Soon a tonga arrived to take him to an army base, but before that a very strange thing happened. The fellow who'd stolen his gutka came back and returned it. ‘Take this,' the man said. ‘It'll come in handy.' And he was right, during his week in solitary confinement and even afterwards he found comfort in reading his gutka.

The only POW who hadn't ejected was Mulla-Feroze. He had been part of a Forward Air Control (FAC) team assigned to designate targets for the IAF. His team had been working along the border between Rajasthan and Sind. It was desert area where the front between the two armies shifted rapidly and somehow the Indian FAC team advanced behind enemy lines. When they came upon a column of vehicles kicking up the dust, Mulla-Feroze thought at first he was dealing with the Indian Army instead of an advance party of Pakistani troops. He walked over to the first jeep, thumped on its hood, and demanded to see an officer. The next thing he knew a jawan had shouldered his rifle, and when Feroze reached for his revolver, the man shot him through the arm.

Mulla-Feroze was a proud, impulsive fellow, and the incident seemed entirely in character. He was determined to keep the camp staff at arm's length—they were the enemy after all. But part of his edginess may have been caused by the pain of his wound. The flesh and most of the tricep had been blown away, baring the bone.

Bhargava's Marut had been shot down by ground fire on his first sortie. He, too, was captured in the desert of Sind, not far from the Rajasthan border. Shortly after 9.00 a.m. on 5 December, he landed on a sand dune and found himself alone, without a village in sight. He hid his G-suit in some shrubbery and changed his watch to Pakistan Standard Time. Then he took the compass from his survival pack and began to walk east. By noon he had finished the four small bottles of water from his survival pack. He was exhausted from climbing sand dunes and his back was killing him.

He was on the verge of giving up when he saw a large village ahead that he thought might be in Indian territory. He stopped at a farmer's hut just short of the village, introduced himself as a downed Pakistani pilot and asked for water. The farmer pointed to the cattle trough. Bhargava dipped one of his bottles and drank his fill.

‘Can you tell me the name of that village?' he asked the farmer.

‘It's Pirani Ki Par,' the man answered.

Bhargava realized then that he was still in Pakistan. But at least he now knew his exact location. Skirting the village, he set out in an optimistic mood, with his thirst quenched and his four water bottles full.

It was near dark when his luck ran out. He encountered three men who questioned him. Who are you, they wanted to know, what are you doing here? He stuck to the story that he was a downed Pakistani pilot, and said that his name was Flight Lieutenant Mansoor Ali. But the men were suspicious. They took him to a village and kept him there, sitting on a charpoy in someone's yard, until four rangers from the border patrol arrived to question him. Once again he repeated his story but they were not buying it either.

‘Say the Kalma,' ordered one of the rangers. Every Muslim knows the Kalma (roughly translated ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger').

‘I should have known the Kalma,' said Bhargava. ‘I grew up in Pataudi, a princely state west of Delhi. Most of the people there were Muslim. But I couldn't remember the words and that was my undoing.'

The next morning Bhargava was handcuffed and blindfolded and set on a camel for a two-day journey to an army post. It was a painful experience, lurching along with an injured back. The halts were actually the worst part—getting down and up again was a real killer. ‘I'd never been on a camel before,' he told his mates, ‘and I don't recommend it.'

The men soon recovered from their beatings, all except for Vikram Pethia. ‘Pethia had been so badly beaten up and manhandled by civilians as well as paramilitary forces that he could barely walk and couldn't eat properly,' remembers Grewal. ‘He had fractured ribs and cigarette burns on his body. We helped him all day long, even supplementing his diet with an egg or two whenever we got one each. Our requests for a special diet and some medical help in the camp fell on deaf ears.'

The prisoners had a chance to air grievances and concerns when Mr B—, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), visited the camp. Once again the prisoners assembled in the interrogation room. They were very happy to meet Mr B—for he was the person who could confirm that they were registered as prisoners of war. This meant they were protected by the rules of the Geneva Conventions. It also meant that their families would be informed that they were alive and well.

The prisoners were impressed with Mr B—. They remember him as being a short, fair-haired man in his forties, probably Swiss, and very courteous. First he gave them a rundown of the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross and how it had helped prisoners of war ever since the South African war in 1899. He told them that before too long they would receive letters and parcels from home, though that could take a month or two. In the meantime, they could write letters and give them to the camp office. And every month, beginning immediately, they would be paid a POW allowance. The money could be used for purchasing personal effects, cigarettes, or food to supplement their diet. The amount of the allowance was prescribed by the ICRC, and depended on their rank, but he thought they would all find it adequate.