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

To add to this desolation and grief, only a few of us happened to be detained here when the rest of my political compatriots had been sent back to India, and could look forward to the remission of their sentences in their respective jails in India. We found our separation from them the gloomiest experience of our life. Our extreme solitude on this account would sometime become unendurable. A deep yearning came into the soul to call out someone by name, to ask someone to come and sit beside me. But in that heartless prison who was there to answer to my affectionate call? My mind thus began to prey upon itself. Nights were found too long and did not pass quickly into day-break. No new friends to make, no new work to organise, no new food for hope, the mind dwelt constantly on past memories, long-gone and forgotten activities, on friends in these years; and it played with these fantasies. But one does not feed on sugar and rice by merely drawing their picture on a piece of paper. These famished longings and thoughts sometime rebelled against me like unruly and riotous bands of robbers. Nothing that I could do would suppress them. The hunger was left unsatisfied; and it made the heart restless. This used to be my experience in prison for months together in succession. How much harassed by loneliness, how much eager for the society of friends, how much yearning and restless for friendship and love, and yet how much keen on duty to be done, my mind was during this period, none could know and describe except the few who had pined away with me in that prison. Do what we will to satisfy the authorities with our day's work, there was no hope in it for our discharge from that prison. There was only one way out of this dire position. That was a chance of escape from the settlement when and if we were sent out for our daily labour. And with that aim, we were punctilious in attending to our daily work in prison. But when I learnt that I was to stay and work for fourteen long years within the precincts of the Silver Jail alone, that chance again faded out of my view. In retrospect today I cannot say how I must have passed those days in that place. Months went by in these musings when, all of a sudden, as bolt from the blue, news came to us of a war having broken out between England and some foreign power. First, we could put no faith in this news from the market-place. For the prisoners had been long in the habit of catching at some such thread of news in their helpless condition. Every four or five months some one would start the canard of a jubilee or similar celebration in which the prisoners were sure to get their freedom, and the prisoners welcomed the news in the hope of the drowning man catching at a straw. And it was bound to prove a hoax. Another news came floating in on a similar rising tide. The news of war was the most hopeful news of them all. But we did not yet know between whom the war had broken. For the prison-world knew only of two powers under the sun, the British power in India and England, and the Amir of Afghanisthan. The Muslim section of it knew, besides, of Turkey and its Sultan. Therefore, when it was definitely known that war had broken out, it must be a war between the British and the Amir, or between Britain and Turkey. Britain had nothing to lose in her war either with Afghanisthan or Turkey. Hence, for two or three days subsequently, I paid no attention to that news. Later on, news had filtered that the English* monarch had gone to war with his son-in-law. But who was this precious son-in-law? Outsiders used to hint of Germany. But those who brought the news to me spoke often of an English Princess married to a foreigner on the continent of Europe. It was a war, they said to me, between these two sides. They could make some meaning of this relationship. But to me it came as