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Authors: Faith Johnston

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They had had a few visits from PAF officers before this, including the commander of the Chaklala base. You could call them duty visits. Most of the PAF officers knew they could have been in the same boat themselves and might have appreciated having a few visitors to cheer them up.

‘We may be enemies in the air,' one chap said, ‘but we can be friends on the ground. If you ever need anything, let me know.' These turned out to be empty words, since the Indian POWs never saw the Pakistani officer again.

There was almost always a certain awkwardness in these visits, even from men of goodwill, for Pakistan had lost badly in the war and the superiority of the IAF had been an important factor. If the talk turned to history, that could be a minefield, too. The 1947 Partition of India had been a horror—they might all agree to that. If they went any further and tried to discuss the reasons for Partition or the responsibility for its results, they were soon mired in disagreements.

Jafa, Tejwant Singh and Bhargava enjoyed visits from Pakistani pilots they had trained with overseas. Singh and Bhargava had trained on the Sabre in the States, and Jafa had been to Staff College in the UK. No awkward conversations during these visits, just jokes and reminiscences about old times. The other POWs were there, too, in Cell 5, witnessing the fun. Jafa's friend came with his wife, who remarked that prisoner morale seemed high despite the difficult conditions. ‘And Jafa,' she said,' I can see you haven't lost your charm.'

The pilot who had trained with Singh and Bhargava in the States came alone, but at the end of the visit he surprised everyone by announcing that his wife was waiting in a car outside. ‘Since you are my brothers,' he told his two friends, ‘please do me the honour of coming to meet her.' The corporal on duty agreed to the request and accompanied the two prisoners outside the gate. Everyone was aware that the PAF pilot, a strict Muslim, had done something exceptional to express his friendship.

At some point in March or April the new Air Chief, Zafar Chaudhry, paid a visit accompanied by his ADC, Squadron Leader Usman Hamid. It was an informal early morning affair with the two men visiting senior officers in their cells, but hurried as the visit was, those who received Chaudhry remember him as being genuinely concerned about their welfare.

The visit of Wahid's family, which the prisoners had dreaded, turned out to be one of the most memorable visits of all. It may have been in May or June. The weather had already warmed up. At teatime Wahid drove into the courtyard with his whole family in the car. From Cell 5, where the prisoners had assembled as usual, they saw two women and several children step out of the car. The door to the cell was unlocked and the visitors filed in. Wahid introduced the ladies as ‘my wife and my sister-in-law'. The women were not veiled and were dressed in typical Punjabi salwar kameez. But no one was interested in the women's clothes, only in their lovely faces. The room was crowded and the visit did not last long but none of the prisoners has ever forgotten it. These were the first women and children they had seen in months and they found them all very beautiful. Two of the children were twin girls, maybe seven or eight years old.

After a few minutes one of the ladies began to weep. ‘My brother was in the army and is a prisoner in India,' she told them. ‘I wonder how they are looking after him?' The prisoners tried to assure her that the Pakistani POWs were being looked after very well, from what they had heard. ‘Don't cry,' they told her. ‘He will be fine.' After the family left the prisoners realized that maybe their appearance—rumpled clothes, some with beards, others unshaven (only a few of them took the trouble to shave on a regular basis), some wearing canvas shoes—had disturbed the woman. They didn't look like officers at all.

The next day Wahid arrived with a sumptuous lunch cooked by his wife and her sister. The attendants unloaded the containers from his car and set them on the table for everyone to share. For a few days after the feast they were inclined to think Wahid wasn't such a bad fellow.

Throughout March the POWs continued to spend all day in the courtyard. On occasion, when Wahid was absent, Rizvi would sit down and play a game of chess, and how he loved to win! Otherwise it was the same routine: a few energetic games of seven tiles followed by French cricket in the morning and cards or board games in the afternoon. Towards the end of March temperatures reached 30 degrees in the afternoons. A few POWs returned to their cells to nap or read but they all gathered for tea at five o'clock. After tea Dilip would stand at the window, his back to the door, as if looking out. He was making progress. He estimated the wall was at least 25 cm thick. He could already insert his knife up to the hilt in some spots. All he needed now was a little more work and a good sandstorm.

Some days, from the courtyard they could see children flying their kites from the roof of a building nearby. One day a kite floated into the courtyard. Its string had been cut in competition and both sides raced to retrieve it. Soon there was a pack of boys at the wall and one of the POWs reached up to hand the kite back. But that wasn't the end of the story. A few days later some boys brought a kite and spool to the wall so the POWs could fly one of their own kites. Jafa, who knew the Urdu script, wrote their address on it: No. 3 Provost & Security Flight, Mall Road. For a few days the POWs had fun flying the kite in competition. When its string got cut, they heard it had been delivered back at the gate, but they never saw it again.

Another incident, one that no one who witnessed it will ever forget, happened in the courtyard one morning during a game of seven tiles. As usual Dilip threw himself into the game with great gusto. That morning, while trying to catch the ball, he crashed into a wall, then fell to the ground in a convulsion. ‘His teeth got locked,' remembers Bhargava, ‘and we all ran helter-skelter trying to do something to help him. We were scared sh**** seeing his condition. Kamat asked for a spoon which was immediately brought and he forcibly put it in Dilip's mouth. This carried on for some time and it had us all praying. Gradually he got back to normal and became his usual humourous self, asking why we had stopped playing. In fact he did not know what had happened.'

For a while they stopped playing seven tiles. The other POWs urged Dilip to see a doctor, but he refused. He soon felt well again, and he did not want a suspected seizure on his medical record. At the end of March he distributed all the dried fruits he had collected to take with him on his escape. He knew he wouldn't be leaving quite yet. In April he would receive the next ‘pay cheque' and could always buy more.

On the Road to Jamrud

(13 August)

On and on they walked down the road from Peshawar to Jamrud, but still there were shops and shacks lining the road, and a constant stream of people who turned to look at them.

‘What made things worse,' remembers Sinjhi, ‘was that whatever they were doing, on spotting us they would stop their activity and stare intently at us. Several cyclists passed us, turned back, and passed us again …'

Just from their appearance it was clear that the trio were strangers. Almost every adult male they met along the road was dressed identically in a dirty white salwar and kurta. Each had a pale complexion, a dark beard, and a white cotton cap on his head. And here they were, such a motley crew. Grewal was wearing the salwar he'd had made from some frothy, turban material and he had wound a cloth carelessly around his head like a Punjabi farmer. Dilip wondered why he'd done that. Though the sun was already hot, it was still a strange thing to do. But then Grewal was a Sikh. Maybe he felt uncomfortable in public without something on his head. Possibly it was Dilip himself, with his darker complexion, who was attracting the unwanted attention. Or maybe it was the slightly built Harry Sinhji, dressed in western clothes, with a moustache but no beard. Or could it be that men of their class would never be caught dead walking down the road from Peshawar to Jamrud? Men on excursions from other parts of Pakistan, unbearded men sporting moustaches, or even fedoras, might drive through the area, but would they ever think of walking?

Yes, so few strangers travelled Jamrud Road on foot, they were bound to be noticed. When they look back on that morning, they realize that they were objects of a very natural curiosity, probably nothing more, but at the time, each question, each look, was a searchlight, a beacon, not of hope but of imminent capture. If a tongawala and a boy on a bicycle were suspicious enough to question them (‘What's in your bag?' a boy asked Harry Sinhji on Jamrud Road), what would happen if they encountered an official?

Before long the pedestrian traffic thinned out, but there was still the odd cyclist as well as a gang of men working on the road. The three friends skirted heaps of gravel and walked straight on, past men loading basins, past other men with picks and shovels, past a truck spreading hot bitumen. They kept their eyes on the horizon, ignoring all the stares.

When they passed the Peshawar airfield they could see a runway quite near the road. ‘Don't look,' warned Grewal. Against all their natural inclinations as airmen, they immediately averted their eyes.

As far as they could see, there was nowhere to hide. The land was a flat gravelly plain, no fields of sugar cane, little vegetation of any sort. It was altogether a barren place. After a mile or so, Harry Sinhji grew tired and lagged behind the other two but it wasn't such a bad thing after all because the group of three had attracted even more attention. And if the alarm had already gone up, as they believed, wouldn't the police be looking for a threesome?

False Start

Early in April an ICRC rep arrived with a second batch of mail. This time he brought parcels and a volleyball net as well. Each POW received one parcel packed by the IAF which contained much-needed underwear, socks and night suits as well as toothpaste, razors, soap, needles and thread. Both Singh and Grewal received a length of cloth for a turban, but that was as far as customization went. The POWs were disappointed when they discovered that all the underwear was a small size. To much amusement, Kamat, with his few extra pounds, demonstrated the impossibility of donning the undersized shorts.

Some of the POWs received parcels from family as well. Families had been told they were allowed to send cigarettes and food, but no clothing apart from underwear. Nevertheless, Dilip's sister in Delhi, after reading his first letter about the cold, sent him a plush blue lounging suit. This was another cause for laughter. ‘Where does she think I'm putting up?' he said. ‘At the Ritz?' He put the suit back in the box and tucked it under his charpoy.

April saw the prisoners' acquisition of a radio, too. Somehow they had learned that Pakistani POWs in India were broadcasting greetings to their families in Pakistan. A chap would come on the air, say his name, greet his family, and basically tell them he was in good health. He might add a few details about life in his camp. The whole thing was actually a public relations exercise by India to show that it was treating its prisoners well. What interested our friends in Rawalpindi was the news that some Pakistani prisoners were listening to Hindi music all day long. It was piped into their camps through loudspeakers.

How they learned this news, no one remembers for sure. It could have come from one of the friendly camp staff, possibly Corporal Mefooz Khan, a tall Pathan. He wasn't the sharpest tack in the box but at least he was kind and he treated them with respect. Or maybe they deciphered the news themselves. Whenever the prisoners ordered chapli kababs from a dhaba nearby they would come wrapped in newspaper, always an Urdu newspaper unfortunately. But Jafa and Coelho, who had both studied Urdu, would sit down together and try to make sense of it.

However the inmates of No. 3 Provost and Security Flight learned that the Pakistani POWs had access to music, they decided to put this information to good use—they demanded equal treatment, ‘simultaneous reciprocity', as they had learned this was called from the Red Cross rep. For twelve people a loudspeaker was out of the question, but Wahid-ud-din agreed to give them a radio. It was a transistor radio that needed many batteries, but as long as they could keep it going they were allowed to listen to anything they wanted to, even the BBC and All India Radio. It was a great morale booster.

Thus they learned that there were 93,000 Pakistani POWs in India, but only 600 Indian POWs in Pakistan, and that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had replaced Yahya Khan as president. They could tell that, in Pakistan at least, pressure for an exchange of prisoners was strong. Bhutto had recently proposed a prisoner exchange in return for recognizing Bangladesh. There were rumours that high-level talks would take place before the end of April. All this was good news. It seemed possible that Grewal would win his bet and they would all be home by the end of May.

The radio newscasts provided other opportunities. When Tejwant Singh learned that thousands of Sikhs from around the world were coming to Gurudwara Punja Sahib, a Sikh shrine in Pakistan, to celebrate the spring festival Baisakhi, he had an idea. Why not ask Wahid-ud-din to allow him and Grewal to make the pilgrimage as well? The shrine was not far from Pindi, and since Muslims were inclined to take religious matters seriously, he thought he had a chance of success. Gurudwara Punja Sahib is 48 kilometres from Rawalpindi, in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is one of the holiest places of Sikhism because of the presence of a rock believed to have the handprint of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.

After some negotiation, Wahid-ud-din agreed to arrange for the trip, but it had to be a week or so after Baisakhi (13 April) so they wouldn't encounter crowds. He also agreed to let Jafa go along, though he was suspicious of Jafa's Sikh roots since he maintained a clean shave. (In fact, Jafa's father was Sikh and his mother Hindu, so both religions were practised in his family.)

BOOK: Four Miles to Freedom
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