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

helped to keep his memory alive. And it will live so long as this book lives; otherwise it would have soon passed into oblivion. And verily it should have been so. For Mr. Barrie was but a tool in the hands of Government to inflict horrible cruelty on us. And his role, as the jailor of the Andamans, brought him too much notoriety. In recording all the horrors and kindness as of an institution, the man who is unwittingly or wittingly its instrument must needs find mention, and hence-Mr. Barrie must come in along with the story of our life in the Andamans. Otherwise, in themselves, neither his merits nor his demerits were of a character that would bring him notoriety or fame. This reference to Mr. Barrie must not end without an expression of my sincere gratitude to him, his wife and child for the kind words he spoke at times to me and for the deep sympathy that his wife and daughter ever felt for me during the ten years of the hard life I had to pass in that prison. If I had met him in different circumstances, perhaps, he would have been one of my sincere admirers. And this thought is enforced in my mind by reading his jottings about me in his own diary. After Mr. Barrie, Mirza Khan We have done with Mr. Barrie. Let us now turn to his lieutenant, Mirza Khan. Where the volcano had itself become extinct, what of him who depended for his heat upon the fire in that volcano? The rising strength of the political prisoners, the fact of his isolation, one by one, from his Pathan, Sindhi, and Baluchi confreres, and the substitution in their place of men of discipline and order, of gentle and good behaviour, in all the keyposts of the prison and the Andamans, had shorn Mirza Khan of all his former power. His beard inspired no terror in the heart of the prisoners, and, if he was at all to survive as a jamadar, he must now earn the goodwill of the very prisoners whom he had ruthlessly trampled under foot. His very fanaticism had now become his bugbear. He feared that, as he had so far done by the kaffirs, so now they would do unto him. A funny incident will prove to you the truth of what I say. In these days he had some disease affecting his hand. Whatever he did, the pain would not stop. As Mr. Barrie's whole body had suffered from the atrophy of limbs, so was it with Mirza Khan's hand. The foolish and fanatical Mirza Khan took it into his head that I had done something to it by my miraculous powers. The spectacled Bada Babu of Chawl No. 7 was the cause of it! He had no doubt about it. Mr. Barrie was free from this kind of superstition. But Mirza Khan went about telling that he and his master suffered from the magic I had practised upon them. He, therefore, sent me a message to beg my pardon for all his hundred sins. "Let Savarkar Babu but forgive me, and all will be well with me." That is what he kept on harping. "Do please request him to restore me my hand. Let him do me that kind turn", he repeated to all of them, I tried to convince him that I had nothing whatever to do with his ailment, that I had done no magic, and I did not believe in magic. But he would not listen. And just to please him, I said I would try to cure him. I called him and said, "If you have such faith in my power to cure you, well, then, I say sincerely that I bear no ill-will to you, and may God cure you." In course of time, Mirza Khan got back the strength his hand had lost, and he was cured not by me but by the medicine he had used. However, he thought that I had done the