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

provided for them. Their slogan was:- “ Enjoy till thou goest, mad! Enjoy, for tomorrow we die! Laugh till you go mad, and tomorrow be a morsel to fill the jaws of death!” In these pleasure-houses, the frenzy of laughter sometimes overstepped the bounds of decency, and let itself go in reckless dancing and mirth. For the reveler knew to certainty that his name, that was today on the dancing card, was to be enrolled tomorrow in the casualities of death. Verily the laughter of sorrow is the most hideous of all laughters. These prisoners, deprived of all the good things of life and reduced to a condition of existence which beast even may tremble to live in, their hands and feet bound in chains, their hearts seared and deadened by a career of crime, some of them, being new to sin, feeling the stings of conscience within them, fretting and fuming with anger, sighing and sobbing for grief, were still roaring with laughter- a hundred of them and more were weeping and laughing at the same time. The poignancy of their grief found no relief in light fun and humour. They reeled with the intoxication of the obscene of which they drank deep in this hell on earth. Some came from the province of Sindh, others from Dharwar, some belonged to Kathiawad and Gujarat, and others again were drawn from the Kokan. They talked in different tongues; their thoughts and feelings were so diverse, one form the other; they scarcely understood each other. But the obscene formed the common bond between them all. That had become their national language in which they could thoroughly participate and fully enjoy. This social union had come to them as an opportunity of a life-time, and they used it to the full and abandoned themselves completely to its pleasures and pastimes. The evening was the hour when this rebellious mood of frank and free indulgence in the broadly humourous found its fullest outburst. The whole wing on that side of the person was one pandemonium of shouts and cries, of abuses and peals of laughter, and of irrepressible utterance of coarse and foul language. But in this orgy of self-indulgence even, there ran an undercurrent of honour and duty. Human nature is, indeed, a strange amalgam of conflicting elements. These convicts indulged in this uproarious pastime as if it was a duty which they owed to themselves. It the lowest of the low had not laid this flattering unction to their souls, they could not have shamelessly gone in for the kind of life they were leading. The meanest and the most case-hardened among them egged on others, less perverse and less inured to these ways, by the slogans “ O, my brethren, sing, O, you fools, go on, for the name and notoriety of our outward-bound phalanx.” And they stressed their homily by adding that when they had been last in this place they had all caught hold of the prison bars and shaken them with all their might. They had hurled their pots and pans against the walls and the warders were hard put to it to control them and restore silence. They cajoled, they wept, the6y went down on their knees and they doled out to each one of us a little tobacco as a solatium. “Shout, shout, O, you nincompoops, do not disgrace the name of this gang.” Its Fair Name For it had made a name-this chalan to the Andamans-in the prison-world of those days. It was no mean institution of a body of men. To aspire to the membership of that notorious gang was no mean achievement. We had to pass through several examinations