Four Miles to Freedom

by Faith Johnston

  ‘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.

  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 al
l 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 th
e 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.’