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

all struggle for happiness and none could weep for all time and continue suffering to the end of the chapter. I wanted to know how many days I suffered and how many days I was without suffering. So I made a month's chart and marked on it days when wearing a body was a joy and when it was intense pain. I marked this on the wall, the day of suffering from one ailment or another, and the day free from any ailment. This went on for two months and then I made a reckoning. I found out that of sixty days, fifteen days were relatively better, and the rest were all worse. So I concluded that things were not after all so dark, and I must put off the thought of suicide. But who would thus continue to live on 'the far-off interest of tears'? The castles in the air are, after all, shadowy, unsubstantial things. And the mind recoils on reality after building them long enough. So I was pulled back on 'the earth, earthy' and was kept hanging on the borderland of suicide. In the hospital my weight had fallen down to 95 pounds, I could take no solid food, I felt distant symptoms of Thisis; fever did not abate; and there was none whom I could call mine near me. During the three following months I became worse, what with the atmosphere of hostility common to all political prisoners around me; what with disrespect and stark despair, with none to talk to me words of kindness and of love, and with no freedom of movement from one place to another. So much so that I knew not when Death would pounce upon me and snap the chord of my life. I realised that the time had come when, with all my will to live, I must pass away. Am I, then, to die in the hospital? This thought began to haunt me all along. I reviewed in my mind the philosophy of the world and its conclusion on the subject. From Buddha's doctrine of Nirvana and nescience to the Yoga doctrine of Knowledge; from the materialism of Science to the Monism of Haeckel and Spencer, and to the evolution theory of 'Substance' propounded by them, I searched them all for light on death and immortality. From the Mimansa doctrine of the Vedanta to Mill's Utilitarianism, I ransacked in my mind their conclusions about religion, and about the triple faith of God, Immortality and Duty. And as the fruit of them all came forth my poem "On my bed facing death." I wrote it while on bed in the hospital, and I had no hope that I should survive to read it. When I was first arrested, and, when, in England I had expected the sentence of death, I had composed the two poems entitled "My Will", and "First offering". And this I wrote on the threshold of death. In the last I have woven an imaginary conversation between Death and myself. All the three poems find a place in the book, "Echo from the Andamans", published subsequently. First meeting with my family This year my brother and myself got the permission to see our own people in the Andamans. Others were allowed to meet their own people once in five years, and they