Four Miles to Freedom (6 page)

Pethia knew that he must tell Mr B—about his torture even if it meant subjecting all his comrades to the gruesome details. According to the Geneva Conventions all sick and wounded soldiers, including prisoners of war, must be treated humanely. Pakistan was a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, but in Pethia's case those rules had not been followed.

Pethia's Mystere had been shot down on 5 December. It was his fourth mission and the second day of the war. Like most of the others he had been robbed and beaten by villagers. That was par for the course. But unlike the others, his torment had not ended there. After suffering broken ribs from being beaten with rifle butts, he had been taken for interrogation to a room with high windows. The men who interrogated him were not dressed in uniform but he could tell from their questions and from the way they spoke to one another that they were military. When he refused to give anything beyond his name, rank and serial number, they burnt him with cigarettes. He was taken to the room more than once but he remained silent each time.

You have to give them something, thought Tejwant Singh. You have to make something up, change a few names, but you have to give them something. And then you have to remember what you've said, because they'll ask you the same questions again. Once on a training exercise he'd been dropped in ‘enemy territory', then captured and interrogated. He too had refused to say anything except his name rank and serial number, but he'd been told in the debriefing that was a mistake.

Dilip thought of the fake sketches he'd made of the Adampur airfield. Had his shenanigans saved him? Or was it the luck of the draw? Perhaps he had simply encountered interrogators who were more humane than Pethia's.

At the end of the meeting, Mr B—read out the names of four pilots who were still missing and asked the POWs if they had heard anything at all about their whereabouts. All had been seen ejecting, but none had been reported among the dead or captured by the Pakistani authorities. Where were these men?

‘Could you make some inquiries?' asked Mr B—. ‘There's the staff here, and you may have some visitors from the air base. Do what you can.'

It was the worst moment of the meeting, even worse than hearing the details of Pethia's ordeal. Yes, they would do all they could to find out what had happened to these pilots, but they knew in advance their efforts would be futile. What would have happened to me, thought Dilip, if that policeman had not arrived in time? If the villagers had beaten me to death, would the authorities have returned my battered body to India? As for Pethia, all he could think was ‘Why did they let me live?' It would have been very easy for his tormentors to kill him. Why did they let him live to tell his story? He had no trouble imagining what might have happened to the four men on the list.

Shortly after the visit of the Red Cross rep, the chief flight surgeon of the Pakistani Air Force visited the camp, probably at the urging of Dr Sarfraz, who had been attending the injured in their cells. As a result of the visit, all eleven ejection cases were sent to the Chaklala air base medical inspection (MI) room for x-rays and Mulla-Feroze was taken to a military hospital. After the medical assessments Kamat's broken legs were reset and Jafa was put in a body cast. Jafa and Singh had both suffered spinal injuries from their ejections and were prescribed bed rest. Along with Kamat, they spent the next two months in the MI Room. Chati, the youngest of the POWs, who had injured his jaw while ejecting, was sent to the MI Room for regular infrared treatments on his jaw and then to a dentist.

Bhargava's spinal injuries were deemed untreatable. He was inclined to blame his long walk in the desert followed by two days on a camel. ‘Just don't bend over,' a doctor told him. ‘Don't even tie your shoes.' He hoped that if he followed instructions, he might one day be able to fly again.

On their trips to the MI Room, the military hospital or the dentist, the POWs travelled in a van. They wore no blindfolds on these trips and it was a good opportunity to look around. They already knew that they were being held at No. 3 Provost and Security Flight in Rawalpindi. Now they could see that the flight's compound was located near Mall Road in the heart of the Rawalpindi cantonment.

There were actually a few signs in English, though most of them were in Urdu. But while all the POWs could understand spoken Urdu, which is very similar to Hindi, few of them could read it. After Partition, India's central government had ruled that the national language, Hindi (once called Hindi−Urdu), be written in Devanagari script rather than the Perso-Arabic script. Only Coelho and Jafa had learned to read Urdu at school, and that was over twenty years ago. Reading an Urdu street sign in passing was pretty well impossible.

But the POWs were familiar with the layout of cantonments. They had spent most of their careers living in similar enclaves. Cantonments had been built in British times to house the offices, barracks and bungalows of military personnel and their families. Rawalpindi, located near the turbulent northwest frontier, was the site of one of the largest cantonments in British India. Throughout India and Pakistan, the old cantonments continued to house military personnel. They were, for the most part, spacious, treed, residential suburbs and oases of calm and order compared to the older cities nearby.

In 1972 the new Pakistani capital, Islamabad, just north of the Chaklala air base, was still under construction. In the meantime, for all practical purposes, the Rawalpindi cantonment was the centre of power. It housed the president's residence as well as the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. Although the Indian POWs did not know it, they resided not far from Pakistan's president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a man who would have a prime role in deciding their fate.

In January, Bhutto was beset with a number of problems. At the top of his list was the return of 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, but first the Bangladeshis insisted on formal recognition, and India (who was actually holding the prisoners) backed them. And now Bangladesh wanted to put some of the Pakistani prisoners on trial as war criminals. Bhutto had already appointed a judicial commission to get to the bottom of such allegations, but there was no way he could allow Pakistani officers to be tried as war criminals in Bangladesh without facing a military coup at home. No wonder he was suffering from insomnia.

Meanwhile, down the road, the Indian POWs used their medical outings through the cantonment to scout the lay of the land. Soon they had the route to the Chaklala base memorized. And they knew that Mall Road was also the Grand Trunk Highway, an ancient road that ran all the way from Calcutta to Peshawar. If you turned left onto Mall Road and kept going, you would eventually reach the Indian border. If you turned right you were on the road to Peshawar and beyond that to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.

The eight POWs who remained in the camp missed the company of their four comrades in hospital. Still, their mood was usually optimistic as they strolled around the courtyard, lapping up the sun. India had won the war. They had survived. In a matter of months, they would go home. One day they bet a bottle of beer on the date of their repatriation. Grewal, who considered himself a realist, bet on 29 May. The other bets ranged from March through April.

In January, as Mr B—had promised, each POW received the ‘salary' due all POWs under Red Cross supervision. For the first month it amounted to Rs 57 for flight lieutenants, but none of the prisoners was paid the whole sum on the first payday. It turned out that all those cups of tea offered during interrogations had been totalled up and deducted from the pay cheque. And it wasn't just the prisoner's tea that had to be paid for, either. The cost of the interrogators' tea had been deducted as well! Even worse, Chati discovered that his whole salary had been wiped out by a few decent meals.

‘What would you like?' the good cop interrogator had asked him one day.

‘The rotis here are very tough,' Chati had replied. ‘I have trouble chewing them.'

‘How about some Chinese food?' the interrogator had suggested. So meals of noodles and rice were sent to his cell several days in a row, arousing the suspicions of Kuruvilla who was sharing a cell with Chati at the time.

‘I didn't know why they'd put me in with you in the first place,' Kuru confessed. ‘And when you got those special meals I became even more suspicious. Maybe this guy's a collaborator, I thought, so I watched my words.'

When the first payday arrived and Kuruvilla discovered that Chati had paid for the meals himself, the air was cleared. In fact, everyone had a big laugh at Chati's expense. It turned out he had racked up such a big bill that he had overdrawn his allowance for the next two months.

They decided, since funds were scarce, to pool some of their money. Brother Bhargava became the keeper of the common purse. Their first order was a jar of pickle and large chunk of jaggery. Their meals, trucked in from the enlisted men's mess at Chaklala, were adequate but never tasty. A little pickle with the meal and a lump of jaggery afterwards, for the sweet, was a definite improvement.

Early in January, Dilip wrote a letter to his good friend, Major Inder Khanna. He was worried about Inder. He had last seen him in Amritsar right before the war. Years before they had both gone to a palm reader who had predicted Inder would receive a major injury at about this time in his life. Since his friend tended to be accident-prone at the best of times, Dilip was inclined to take the prediction more seriously than he normally would.

IAF Officers' POW Camp

Rawalpindi, Pakistan

9 Jan ‘72

Dear Inder and Pamma,

A very happy New Year to you both and Anju and Anu as well. The address in the right top corner says a great deal. It means your friend is safe and in fact virtually without injury and is just whiling his time away, while all the National and International forces use their pressures and counter-pressures to get us home. For our part we hope these forces yield results as soon as possible.

There are 12 of us at this camp. At first we were all together but now 4 of the bad medical cases have been transferred to hospital. The capture, handling, transfer, and questioning of the guys here will be the subject of an interesting conversation for us later on. It is not without its humourous side as well.

Life has been gradually improving especially since the ceasefire. For Xmas we were all allowed to meet each other for the first time. The two Christian officers got a priest and we all shared two lovely cakes. New Year's was also brought in with plenty of singsong, some streamers for decorations and extra good food. Since Xmas we spend all the daylight hours together out in the sun. It is wonderful in this cold Pindi winter. At dusk we return to my room, get a lovely fire going and chat away until dinner. As expectations of a POW camp go, the life is much better than we thought it would be …

Tolerable as life is one is very anxious to go home. The twin curses of this place are boredom and lack of news. The first we combat with chess, carrom, and occasionally a rubber of bridge. The latter has no solution, and we really have no idea of the postwar situation in either country.

We even get paid for this confinement at the very handsome rate of Rs 57 per month. This money goes a long way towards tea and supplementing the meals … Our Pakistani captors are very reasonable. We seem to have established a very decent relationship based on humane qualities.

Once again I do wish very hard that you have emerged thru this entire skirmish unscathed …

Y. affly

Dilip

It was a carefully written letter that managed to avoid any blackouts from the Pakistani censors. And though there was a great deal left out, what Dilip chose to say, and worded so judiciously, was substantially true. In late December he had been moved from his single cell to a larger room next to the interrogation room. It had been Jafa's cell originally but after Jafa was moved to the hospital the POWs began to call it Dilip's cell or ‘the Indian tea club'. It was the fifth in a line of cells that began at the guardhouse by the gate, but its construction was much older than the first four cells and it was separated from them and the toilet by a narrow alley.

Every day at five o'clock, the eight POWs left the courtyard and assembled in Cell 5 for tea. The room had a fireplace that was lit occasionally for a few hours, and it was furnished with a table and chairs as well as the two charpoys. Soon it became the room where the prisoners ate all their meals. They even acquired a pet—a half-grown calico cat, very skinny. It was happy with any scrap of food they threw on the floor for it. They paid little attention to the cat but still it stuck around. ‘You could say she adopted us,' remembers Dilip, ‘and we were grateful.'

Cell 5 was by far the most desirable cell in the complex. It had not only a fireplace and a ceiling fan, but also a window, high up in one wall. At some point Dilip began to share the cell with Chati who was one of the walking wounded. He might have had to share it with Pethia too, but Pethia was suspected of having TB. For several weeks he was put on a course of antibiotics and quarantined in his cell.

Dilip was still determined to escape, but for the moment his plans were not settled. He had had second thoughts about the hostage-taking idea. He realized that a scheme that had worked in the western world, where there seemed to be greater respect for human life, might not work for him in the present situation. He could run into someone along the way who was willing to shoot the hostage, and make short work of him as well. It didn't seem to be a plan destined for success.

In the meantime he had noticed that the wooden frame of the window in his cell was rotting and the mortar that held the frame was deteriorating as well. From what he could tell, the bars were set into the frame alone and didn't extend into the bricks above or below. He figured with a little work he might be able to dislodge the whole frame.