All the IAF prisoners knew, of course, came from a few news broadcasts, and Bhutto’s statements had raised their expectations. They had no access to the longer commentaries and speculations in newspapers. They were hopeful for the obvious trade-off: peace in Kashmir (where India’s position had been disputed by Pakistan since 1947) in return for the prisoner exchange Bhutto said was his top priority. It seemed entirely logical. If it happened, the POWs would benefit in two ways. First they would go home. Second, they might never have to fight another war. And for Grewal, there would be another bonus. He wouldn’t have to risk his life in an escape attempt. The whole escapade would have become unnecessary.
Talks between the two leaders began at Simla on 28 June. Every evening the prisoners filed into Wahid-ud-din’s office to watch the evening news. Nothing was as simple or straightforward as they had hoped. Pakistan was insisting on getting back its prisoners and occupied territories before even beginning to discuss Kashmir. On 1 July, a day before the end of the conference, Gandhi and Bhutto met briefly but couldn’t get past their stalemate. It seemed the conference was doomed to failure.
By 2 July the prisoners had pretty well given up hope for the Simla conference. And they had another problem on their hands. That morning Wahid-ud-din stormed into Cell 5 while they were still sitting around having breakfast. He slammed a copy of The Dawn on the table. ‘Another Pakistani prisoner shot dead,’ he declared. ‘You people don’t know how to govern! I could say I shot you since you were all trying to escape.’
His outburst was met by a stunned silence. They’d heard all this before, but not for a while. Was it possible, they wondered, that Wahid-ud-din had somehow gotten wind of the escape preparations? Or was he all steamed up, as usual, because he had a brother-in-law and a number of friends among the POWs in India? After his speech he strode out of the room with the newspaper under his arm, leaving the prisoners to wait for a lockdown, or even worse—much worse—a search of their cells. If Cell 5 were searched they would be doomed for sure: the knapsacks, the rope, the civvies, the maps—there was no way they could explain them.
But there was no lockdown that day and after a few hours of the normal routine, they realized their fears had been groundless. On the evening of 2 July they watched the TV news, as usual. The Simla conference was still going on. That evening Bhutto and Gandhi were meeting privately in the hope of salvaging five days of negotiations, not to mention weeks of preparation.
On 3 July 1972 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto flew back to Lahore. At the airport he was greeted by thousands of supporters. A tall, handsome man and a charismatic speaker, Bhutto was Pakistan’s first civilian leader after fourteen years of military rule. In the controversial 1970 elections, the Pakistan People’s Party, which he had founded, won 72 per cent of the votes in West Pakistan. After losing the war and half the country, and all his credibility, President Yahya Khan had been forced to cede power to Bhutto.
That evening the POWs sat in Wahid-ud-din’s office watching Bhutto’s triumphant return on the evening newscast. It was clear that six months into his presidency, the man was still very popular. He knew just what to say. He talked about losing the war but winning the peace. Give peace a chance, he said. And the people cheered every sentence. At the end of his speech, when he flung his jacket into the crowd, men scrambled for it, tearing it to pieces.
The Simla Agreement, signed very late on the night of 2 July 1972, after intense one-on-one negotiations between the two leaders, did, in fact, become the basis of peace between the two countries for the next forty years. In exchange for the return of 5000 square miles of occupied territory in West Pakistan, Bhutto had agreed to respect the line of control in Kashmir and ‘to refrain from threat or use of force in violation of this line’. Indira Gandhi had achieved her goal. India would continue to govern the majority of Kashmir. Gradually, over the years she expected that the line of control would be recognized as an international border. And as far as India was concerned Gandhi had ceded very little. Retaining the territories in Pakistan that had been occupied as result of the 1971 war had never been her intention.
That evening the prisoners waited to hear something about a prisoner exchange or a reference to negotiations beginning on such an exchange but there was nothing. The next morning Wahid-ud-din came in, his paper tucked under his arm as usual, but this time he was happy, happier than the prisoners had ever seen him. He read them the headline: ‘India Returns Territory’. The prisoners asked him to leave the newspaper for them that day and he did. Then, growing bolder, someone said they really should have access to The Dawn every day and in his buoyant mood Wahid-ud-din agreed.
Thus the prisoners were able to follow the news closely as the details of the Simla Agreement emerged, but they found nothing encouraging at all. On 12 July Indira Gandhi held her first press conference after signing the pact. When questioned about Indian POWs, she made it clear that there would be no general exchange of prisoners until a firm peace was assured. Since there had been no firm peace between India and Pakistan for twenty-five years, the POWs did not find this news reassuring. It was time to start digging.
The Wall
By the time the digging began, the escape team numbered three. Harish Sinhji’s enthusiasm finally overcame Dilip’s hesitation to take him along. For weeks Sinhji used all the ammunition he could muster to persuade his comrades that he was a good candidate. Later he confessed, ‘I bluffed and said I had come first in the jungle and snow survival course.’ But Harry’s size and strength wasn’t the only issue. The son of a princely family from Mysore, he had always attended English-language schools. Consequently his Hindi was very poor and he spoke no Punjabi at all.
On the other hand, by July the escape had become a group enterprise. The group had decided that only bachelors could go—it was too risky for men with families—and Sinhji qualified on that score. But in the end, it was Harry’s persistence that won him a place on the team. He obviously wanted to be part of the escape team so badly that Dilip felt it would be undemocratic not to give him his wish. Yes, he was neither tall nor strong and might slow them down, but he was a fearless fellow and very good-natured. At one point during their sojourn in Pindi Harry received a letter from a woman he had met at a wedding and fallen in love with (as he tended to do). Because the letter was written in Hindi he needed someone to translate it, and that, of course, led to a great deal of teasing, but he had taken it in his usual good form.
Because Harry’s Hindi was so atrocious, it was agreed that he would have to keep his mouth shut during the escape. If they were stopped and questioned he would say he was an Anglo-Pakistani from Hyderabad (Pakistan), and a civilian friend of the two PAF airmen. For the escape he would have to wear his beige prison pants and the blue-green shirt from the parcel sent by Dilip’s sister. Grewal would wear the other shirt, the beige one, over his salwar. Dilip, of course, would wear the green salwar kurta he’d been wearing every evening.
The next task was to have Sinhji move into the escape room. For three or four nights, Grewal, Chati, Dilip and Harry played bridge after dinner, begging the guards to let Harry linger just a little longer to finish a rubber. Then they suggested that Harry simply move in, and they could play as long as they liked without troubling the guards. Once again the trick worked. It was simple enough for Harish to move his charpoy and few belongings into Cell 5. However, keeping up the pretence of playing bridge night after night wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Grewal had no interest or skill in the game at all, and they all had more important matters to think about.
This was the routine. The prisoners in Cell 5 played a sham game of bridge until about ten o’clock. Then they asked a guard to unlock the cell for their nightly trip to the toilet. When all four were once again back in the cell and the guard had turned out the light, Dilip and Grewal, in turn, would begin chipping away at the wall, using the light of a torch. The spot the POWs had chosen was on the back wall a few feet from the corner of the room. They had traced a rectangle in t
he plaster at ground level, just large enough for a broad-shouldered man to slip through.
In mid-July, as they began chipping the plaster, their chief concern was light. Bhargava had managed to get them a torch by telling a lascar he needed one so that he could read after lights out. As the person doing the chipping lay under the charpoy with the torch in one hand and a chipping instrument in the other, it was essential that no shaft of light escape from the work space. To prevent this Dilip had gathered half a dozen blankets (no one was using blankets in the heat) and draped them over his charpoy so that it was covered on all four sides right to the floor.
Each night, before the work started, they moved Dilip’s charpoy out from the wall. Then either Dilip or Grewal lay down on the floor under the charpoy with chipping tools and the torch before the charpoy was shoved back, flush with the wall so that no light could escape. Every half hour or so, the two men changed places.
Their second concern was noise. Although the guards were not curious, or even particularly attentive, they knew if a guard heard something suspicious he could be there in seconds, and the first thing he would do was flip the light switch and catch them red-handed. Thus they could dig only when the guards on duty were at least twenty feet away, or when it was raining. The role of Chati and Sinjhi was to stand near the door and keep an eye on the guards. As an extra precaution, one of them always unscrewed the cell’s single light bulb before the work began and replaced it when they had finished.
Of course they realized that if the guard flipped the switch and the light didn’t come on, he might investigate (or he might not since power outages were common enough). Their back-up plan was a U-shaped gizmo made of raw wire they called the bazooka. By inserting the ends of the bazooka in the electrical outlet in their room, they could blow the fuse. Perfecting the bazooka had taken some time. When they tested Kamat’s first bazooka, there was a small explosion, a spark that made a popping noise, and the bazooka was a charred mess. Now they had a stronger, thicker bazooka to do the job.
The chipping tools they used were better than Dilip’s original knife and fork. As well as the screwdriver and scissors they now had a sharp-pointed old engine valve Grewal had bought from a little boy selling cold drinks in the camp. Still it was very hard working from such an awkward position. And it was slow, too. Every time a guard started in their direction, Sinhji or Chati whispered a warning and work stopped immediately. ‘Our initial plan was to cut this hole in a week to ten days,’ Grewal remembers. ‘It ended up taking about fifteen.’
The wall was about 25 centimetres thick. After removing the inner plaster, they had a clear view of the bricks. They were typical bricks of the era, 22.5 x 10 x 10 centimetres. Some were laid lengthwise along the wall. In those sections there was another brick behind them, also laid lengthwise. Next would be a section with two bricks laid side by side pointing outwards. In the end they had to remove only eighteen bricks, but each one was firmly ensconced in mortar that had to be chipped away a bit at a time with as little noise as possible. (Unlike the two prisoners who had blasted their way through a similar wall in one night while Grewal’s father was magistrate in Punjab, our prisoners were neither desperate nor reckless, and the presence of four armed guards patrolling through the night was reason enough for caution.) They were amazed at how thick the mortar was and how firmly it held so many decades after construction. By the time they finished the job they had accumulated seven or eight boxes of mortar.
Every night, at about 1.30 a.m., they replaced the loose bricks and stored the debris in an empty Red Cross box (there were always several boxes under beds or in the corner of the room). The next day they would be up by seven, as usual, for breakfast with their mates. The others might occasionally be laggards but since Cell 5 was used for all meals its inmates could never linger in bed. Later in the morning, when the sweeper came through, all ten POWs would avert their eyes from the charpoy in the corner, the one with all the blankets and the spare shoes and plastic slippers lined up along the length of it. They were counting on the sweeper’s aversion to touching the footwear of the Indian POWs in the course of his cleaning. And sure enough, they were right. The shoes were always left undisturbed.
Every few days, Bhargava shifted a Red Cross box full of the chipped mortar back to the storage room. So far, everything was going according to plan, but Bhargava was growing more and more worried about his friends. Since they were not inclined to listen to him, he decided to speak to Jafa. He had an argument that might convince him, as a senior officer, to put a stop to the whole thing.
The idea that married men couldn’t be part of the project did make some sense, he had to admit. Jafa, Bhargava, Coelho, Kamat and Singh had wives and children who depended on them and this crazy scheme could definitely be a widow-maker. Even young Kuruvilla was married, though the marriage was so recent that he and his wife had now been apart far longer than together.
But there were people who cared about the single men, too. That was the point Bhargava used with Jafa. ‘Think about their parents,’ he argued. ‘You have children. What would you say if one of your sons were in a prison camp and wanted to break out? Would you allow it?’
‘These men are adults,’ said Jafa, ‘and they are very brave. I’m not going to stand in their way.’
Tension mounted as the night of the breakout neared. Dilip and Grewal knew they could not remove the outer plaster until the night of the breakout itself. Otherwise, the hole would be visible from the recruiting compound and petrol pump behind their cell. Every morning employees at the recruiting office parked their bicycles near the barbed wire fence which was only a foot from the wall, so someone was bound to notice.
On the evening of Thursday, 27 July, they dislodged the final brick. ‘Tomorrow night, we go,’ said Dilip. But Grewal wanted to wait. The Simla Pact had just been ratified by both countries and troop withdrawals were beginning. Again there were rumours of a prisoner exchange. Why not wait a few more days to see if they were true?
‘I don’t want to go back through repatriation,’ said Dilip. ‘If repatriation is tomorrow I will attempt to escape today. We have wasted enough time already.’
Sinhji took Dilip aside. ‘If you force Grewal to go and the whole thing goes wrong, his blood will be on your hands,’ he said.
‘I’m not forcing anyone,’ said Dilip. ‘I will go on my own. No one has to come with me.’ He meant what he said, but, at the same time, he knew very well that Grewal would never let him go by himself and neither would Sinhji. It was a matter of honour, of keeping one’s word. It was a matter of loyalty to a fellow officer.
Then Sinhji suggested they should at least wait another day. The next day (28 July) was a Friday. If they waited until Saturday night, their absence would be discovered on Sunday, which was the camp commandant’s day off. Discipline was always slack on Sundays. They might have a few more hours of freedom before the alarm was raised.
‘But Dilip was determined,’Sinhji remembers, ‘and so we all got ready to go.’
The only uncertainty was the weather. Even during the monsoon there was the occasional clear night with no threat of rain. When that happened, the off-duty staff usually dragged their charpoys outside to catch the breeze. Clear weather meant far too many ears close by to hear the sound of breaking plaster.
But that particular Friday the weather was cooperative and the rain clouds rolled in late in the day as expected. In the evening they ate dinner with their comrades as usual, and wished each other a goodnight. Everyone knew that goodnight really meant goodbye. The others went back to their cells, wondering if they would ever see their three friends again. And what would happen to Chati? He was in danger, too. It is always the initial reaction that is unpredictable and possibly violent. When the guards discovered Chati alone in the cell they were bound to be furious. After all, their jobs would be on the line. They might shoot him in anger or in a calculated move to save their reputations. They could always say they shot him while he was trying to es
cape.
The plan was to break through the plaster at midnight. Kuruvilla would provide a distraction by calling a guard for a visit to the toilet. The cell he shared with Kamat was on the other side of the yard from Cell 5. He knew the guard would come over and unlock his cell, then wait there to lock him up again after he had made his trip. Thus no guard would be standing close enough to Cell 5 to hear the plaster breaking.
After the required rubber of bridge and lights out, the POWs removed the light bulb and got ready to go. They donned their civvies and concealed their pink prisoner identity cards in the waist bands of their underwear. Should they be caught, they hoped that their identity as prisoners of war would give them some protection. They filled the G-suit tube with water, then packed the two knapsacks with some glucose powder (for energy), dried fruits, first aid kit, rope, and the sections of Chati’s old parachute. They each pocketed part of the 180 rupees saved from the common funds.
‘We made dummies in our beds,’ remembers Sinjhi, ‘and covered them with blankets and said goodbye to Chati. We made some sketch maps showing we were heading south to Sind, crumpled them up and threw them in the corner of the room to mislead the inevitable search party.’
By this time the rain had started. Their timing, it seemed, was perfect. The guards on duty sought shelter, and those off duty were sound asleep inside the barracks. Kuruvilla had called a guard for the toilet and that guard was probably cursing his luck as he stood over there in the rain waiting for him to return.
Four Miles to Freedom Page 10