मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

anxious to know. To satisfy the craving the only way was to have a newspaper sent to us from the outside world. And this was the hardest nut to crack. The time of which I am writing was one when no prisoner could have even the sight of a newspaper in this jail. It was much easier to let an elephant pass through its portals than to let even a scrap of a newspaper in. A prisoner may be pardoned for the former offence but never for the latter. We were content, in these circumstances, if we got at even small pieces of a newspaper properly smuggled in. Some political prisoners had a greed even to draw carriages, in which the Officers drove from place to place, as part of their prison work, with this objective in view. They even carried out carts full of garbage, took them to the Officers' bungalows, that they might load their garbage on these carts and discover in the process old newspaper or its cuttings. They discovered them and concealed them in the planks of the lumber on the carts on their way back to the jail. They used to hide them well in the drain pipes of our building for safe custody. And in their movements during the day they would read them all right. Funny was their experience of such reading. One scrap told them of Edinburgh; another of the cricket-world in England; a third delighted them with a column and half of a vulgar and serial fiction. Some came from wrappings round old shoes, and others from wrappings of clothes sent to a washerman. But these contained no news from India. Whenever we came upon a scrap of the "Times of India" or of a wire from London, we were on the qui vive, but to be disappointed soon after. "Foreign Mail" The newspaper scrappings thus imported into our jail sometimes brought us striking news and without our least expectation of it. One such was Sir Valentine Chirol's article on India and Indian revolutionaries in an issue of the London Times. Another gave us a full report of the Congress presidential address. A third, of which I have the clearest remembrance," was a full one-columned report of the Tuticorin trial. When they got the scrap they handed it over to me with eagerness and attention. That we could procure this piece of news and pass it on safely to all political prisoners made the prisoners realise to the full the utility of drawing these carts full of garbage to and from the prison and they never felt the hardship of months for the gain they had reaped from it. The dumping ground of this foreign mail was the lavatory of Officers' bungalows. It contained scraps from the daily Times stored away for daily use. Or they were thrown there on the floor carelessly after the Officers had read and done with them. The political prisoners bribed the scavenger in charge to collect them and put them in the garbage for carts to carry. And after they had been picked out and stowed away, we read them as we have pointed out above. Sometime 'The Local Mail' kept company with 'The Foreign Mail' for proper delivery to us. The factory attached to our jail wanted nails and other articles for use. They came in the factory, parcels of them, wrapped up in newspapers. The prisoners picked up these wrappings. Whenever they read the word India in them, their curiosity was sure to be roused by it and the scrap passed forthwith to the political prisoner. Often the piece of paper was so full of dirt that it had to be held with blades of straw and picked