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

see her no more. I consoled myself thus and dropped the topic. I turned on other subjects of national, religious and domestic importance. I indulged in humour and laughter within the time at our disposal. I do not know whence I gathered so much strength, in my exhausted condition, to say what I said. We three brothers had met together after twelve years! We were standing together on the pier near the boat that was to take me to England. That was in 1906 and we had met now in Port Blair and in prison in the year 1919, and that only for an hour and a half! Permission was given me to meet my wife alone for half an hour. After the meeting was over, my younger brother and the other members of my family were instantly put on the boat at Port Blair. As if their stay here for a week more to see the Andamans would have been dangerous, and involved some plot to spirit me away from this place by a boat or in an aeroplane! My brother's arrival had made many people anxious to meet him, but no one else was allowed to see him. But my fellow-prisoners saw him in spite of the ban, and did not shrink from presenting him with fruit and flowers. Well, my people had left. It was like a happy dream in deep sleep on a night when the body is burning with fever; and like waking up from that short-lived experience and relief, to toss restlessly on my bed again. I found myself all alone once more, locked up on the third floor of chawl number five of my prison-house in the Andamans. At this time, I was removed from the hospital and put in. this place. It was a solitary place but I saw from it the broad ocean and the open sky, and the island of Ras on the bosom of the ocean. I had never before been put in a room so airy and so open to view. And I was permitted, besides, to move freely in the verandas and the square of that circle of chawl. I used to sit and watch the island stretching out in front of me, and I often passed into a reverie. It put a strain on my mind to be lost in thought thus. Sometimes emotions bubbled over and overthrew thought, and I had to surrender myself to them till the storm had passed over me and I was again cooled down. A conflict and anarchy was the result of these surging waves, and then I had to take the helm, ride the storm and let thought resume its seat as before. That my heart should not be so entirely swayed by them, I directed my attention deliberately to the most ordinary things about me like the cows grazing in the compounder's ground like crows picking up and making away with coconut pieces, in concert and phalanx; or like little boats sailing towards the island of Ras. In the prison the mind becomes so introspective, that it is hard for one to push it out and direct it to objects without. We lose the habit of observing the world around us, and contract the vicious habit of brooding, again and again, over the same old thoughts. Reading was impossible for the brain was too fagged for it. Serious thinking and concentration on Yogic practices was out of question. While contemplating the sea and watching the rise and fall of the rolling waves, suddenly the mind itself like the waves was lost in the depths of reverie, and a mood of concentration would follow. Sometime deep silence came over me as I kept on looking at the island of Ras, shining like an emerald in that sea, and adorned by the Church and its spire pointing heavenward. It