Death Wasn't Painful by Jafa Dhirendra S.;

Author:Jafa, Dhirendra S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications India Pvt, Ltd.
Published: 2015-06-06T08:28:47+00:00

Preparations and Doubts

‘Tom is getting ready,’ whispered Dilip to Jafa during the evening stroll in the courtyard. He had, of course, named it after the first of the three tunnels, called Tom, Dick and Harry, that were dug by Allied servicemen to escape from a German prison camp during the Second World War, as described in the book and film The Great Escape.

‘Are you still determined?’ asked Jafa.

‘Absolutely,’ said Dilip.

‘The others?’

‘Some softening of the will, whenever there is news of a possible agreement on repatriation. Otherwise, they would go with me.’

‘Approximate D-Day?’ asked Jafa.

‘The 27th or the 28th.’ Dilip was fairly certain of the time it would still take to complete the digging of the hole.

It was Dilip and Garry who worked alternately from about 10:30 p.m. in the evening until about 1:30 a.m. in the morning, every day, at scraping out the cement plaster and loosening the bricks. The modus operandi was to begin playing cards immediately after supper and put the transistor radio on high volume for any kind of music from any corner of the world to cover up the noise during the scraping of the wall. At about 10 pm they would ask to be taken to the toilet, and, on return, ask the guard to switch off the cell light from the outside. The radio would keep blaring. Chati and Harry would then lie down on the floor close to the door and the window while Dilip and Garry pulled the bed slightly away from the rear wall and moved the cardboard boxes around to create working space. One of them would then get down and begin scraping, while the other collected the loose bits of plaster, sand and brick and hid them inside the empty cardboard boxes.

It was for Chati and Harry to watch over every movement of the guards. If any of them came too close to the cell a ‘bogey’ call was whispered, and the scraping stopped instantly. For anyone peering from outside there would appear to be four bodies in deep slumber inside the cell, three real and one dummy representing whoever was down at work behind the cot. But for Dilip the preparation for the escape was not merely a serious and desirable endeavour, it was also a great deal of fun. Little things amused him and he merrily laughed away at all the peccadilloes. Now he was bent upon testing out Kamy’s bazooka in spite of all the assurances by the inventor and others that it was an unfailing device and needed no experimentation. So one night he positioned the bazooka over the electric plug, waited until the young guard, a new face, had gone furthest from the cell, called ‘ready’ and pressed it inside. WHOOSH! There was noise like a whisper heard through a 200-watt amplifier at maximum volume, and the room was bathed in a neon-like illumination for a brief second. Dilip leapt on to his bed a moment before the guard pressed his head against the iron bars of the cell door.

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