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

CHAPTER XII

As we alighted from the steamer and touched the port at Calcutta we were put in the lock up at the Alipore Jail. The fear that I had felt on leaving the Andamans in the morning had but proved too true. Myself and my brother were put in different cells. Wearing our prison-garments and holding our bedding under the arm-pit and our pots and pans in one hand, we were both marching together like thieves directed by our escort of sepoys, when my elder brother was directed along a side passage by the sepoy in charge, and I was taken in a different direction by another. Then I felt that I and my brother were parted for good one from the other.

I heard him coughing hard as he was being moved away from me, and for a good long time after. Wearing his long coat of coarse wool and carrying his bed under the armpit, he was walking on groaning under the pain. "Whatever will happen to him? Who will care for him?"—'that was what kept me thinking. When he turned into the side pas- sage, I felt that he had not merely left me, but that he was taking the road to death while leaving me back on the road of life, and that I was having the last sight of him.

I cast my glance to have the last look of him, and walked silently on, though, within me, I was crying for the loss. I was taken to a lonely room in the prison's wing which was entirely vacated for me, and I was locked up therein. How sad and woe- begone I felt then!

Along with the sepoys appointed to keep guard over me, there used to come a warder, who was convicted for fourteen years' transportation for life, but was promoted to the place of the warder after serving only three years of that sentence and had thus become relatively a free man. How I envied him for that freedom! I had served my term of nearly twelve years and all the while in solitary confinement, and had not been free from restrictions of prison- life yet. Nor was I relieved of hardships bound up with that life. On the other hand, they threatened to be all the more oppressive now. I was standing near the door holding its bars. The evening was passing into darkness and , night. A sepoy was speaking something in an undertone. I gathered from one remark in that talk a partial proof of the foolishness that had run rampant in the politics of the day. Expressing his own notion of political agitation in Calcutta and other part of the country, he had remarked, "We are going to have Swaraj in two months. For a powerful Yogi of the name of Gandhi has begun his fight with the Government. The British are helpless against him. For a bullet-shot does not hurt him. If put in prison, he knows how to come out of it. Such superhuman powers he possesses. He vanishes from his cell and is seen standing beyond the outer wall. Such is the magic he wields. This has happened several times. Mahatma Gandhi had gone into prison several times, and, time after time, after short sentences, he had been let off. This fact had reflected itself in the mind of this man and in the minds of several persons like him in this queer fashion. I said to the sepoy smilingly, "What you