Read Online Four Miles to Freedom by Faith Johnston - Free Book Online

shirt, pants and underwear at the same time, wringing them as dry as possible before he wore the same damp garments for the day. Every morning before breakfast Kuru did push ups in his cell and Coelho read his Bible. Coelho also folded his trousers and placed them under his bottom blanket at night to preserve the crease.
    Dilip and Grewal organized competitive games to help themselves and everyone else keep fit and in good spirits. The first game they proposed was seven tiles, a game they had all learned in childhood. It required little equipment, simply a stack of pottery shards or flat stones—whatever they could find—and a ball which they had a lascar buy from the market. They would form two teams of two or three men each and go at it hard. The first aim was to topple the stack by throwing the ball from a distance of about ten feet (they drew a line in the dirt), the second was to rebuild the stack while the opposing team fired the ball at you. It was a wild game, so wild and crazy that they couldn’t play it for long, but it gave them many laughs. Pethia and Bhargava usually formed the cheering section. Bhargava still had to be careful or his back would spasm, and Pethia was not well enough to play. Later they acquired a cricket bat and began to play French cricket, a hybrid game designed for small spaces, and since their courtyard was too small even for that, they made further modifications.
    There was lots of talk and joking while they sat around catching their breath or playing chess or bridge or carrom. At first it was all a novelty. They heard about Grewal’s trip to Europe a year before the war. He had taken a long leave, flown to Athens, and backpacked around for three months. ‘I tied my hair in a ponytail,’ he told Dilip, ‘and everyone thought I was a hippie.’ Everyone had a few good stories, well rehearsed, but as the weeks passed there was really nothing new to say.
    One afternoon while they were passing time in the courtyard, some young men peeped over the outer wall and initiated a conversation. ‘How is life?’ they asked. ‘How do you pass your time?’ The young men said they were members of the Rawalpindi Club, whose grounds were nearby. They returned the next day and tossed several packs of high-quality playing cards over the wall. They explained that at the club a pack of cards was discarded after every ten hands. The POWs never saw the young men again and wondered if the camp staff had put a stop to their visits.
    Most days either Rizvi or Usman Hamid popped in to see how they were doing. Rizvi tended to linger if a game of chess was in progress. He obviously loved the game. He would stand there watching and they could tell he was itching to play. Usman Hamid was more inclined to tell a funny story to cheer them up. One day he told them how he had gone to England for training at Staff College. He remembered being given little notice of his trip and regretting that he would miss the very popular Indian movie, Mughal-e-Azam . It had just opened in Pakistan at the time. Don’t worry, his father had told him. It will still be playing when you come back. And sure enough, when he returned almost a year later, the film was still playing at the same movie hall.
    â€˜I’ve always wanted to travel overland to Europe,’ said Usman another day.
    â€˜So have I!’ Dilip said quickly, sensing a chink of opportunity. ‘Grewal and I were thinking of a trip to the Olympics in Munich this coming summer. I have an aunt in Lebanon and he has an uncle in Egypt. We want to stop in both places along the way.’
    And that was Dilip’s excuse for asking Usman Hamid for a map, a school atlas, to be precise. If he and Grewal had a school atlas, they could plan their trip to the Munich Olympics. Surely they would be repatriated before the summer. And planning their trip would give them something to do in the meantime. That was the story he told Usman