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

What the madmen saw and spoke they believed for the time being as gospel truth. Some imagined that the mice were running all over their body and mounting up their chests. Some believed that all the people around were shouting out abuse towards them, and they would wake up at night, sit on the neighbour's chest, each one of them, and were about to belabour them with fisticuffs. Others were rolling pell-mell in their own vomits and urine. And we were planted ourselves in their midst! Who are mad, whom can you call mad? For a moment I could not help asking myself the question, who is really mad and who is not. How do we know that what our senses apprehend is really the truth? Perhaps, what the senses of these madmen perceive may be the reality! On the side of the sane as on the side of the insane, the senses alone constitute the witness. And some one sense alone is to determine that the other sense reports correctly. If the senses of us all were like the senses of these lunatics, we should have felt like them the mice running over our bodies. Why then should we take it that we are right? Perhaps, they may be right and we, seated in the midst of their vomitting and discharges, are deluded that we are in that foul and dirty place! For aught we know, we are mad and they are in their senses! These musings gave me a shock. In the whirring noise of the rolling steamer, in those offals around me, in the obscene chatter of the lunatics thereby, and in the fetid and oppressive atmosphere of the place, I felt my life choking within me. I had often the fear and the feeling that this philosophic reverie may be the first intimation of lunacy creeping over my being, and under it things visible may be rapidly melting away into illusion. I felt the weakness of my shattered nerves at the time as I had never felt them during the ten years of my life in prison. The weak nerves were due to that life, no doubt, but I felt it overwhelmingly in the steamer and at that moment, as I had never experienced them before. I appealed and protested to the officers on board the steamer to remove us from that place. There was a part of the steamer occupied by other Indian passengers bound for India, and they also interceded on our behalf. Their efforts and chiefly the persuasion of one who shall remain unnamed secured for both of us seats in the other half of the compartment, and somewhat detached from the space allotted to the lunatics. But there was no breeze on that side. There were other prisoners carried by the same steamer to India and among them were some consumptives, dacoits and robbers. These convicts were accommodated on the deck that they might get fresh air to breathe. My brother, who was more sick than any one of them, had to rot in the cage on the lower deck—the cellar of the ship as it were—and in the cage I have already described. He was