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

that the report indicated that I would be released within a week. But I knew how the matter stood at the time. The gentleman in question was travelling by the same compartment out of deep sympathy for me, and helped me the best he could, without being noticed by the officer-in-charge. He read the news items aloud that I could follow him. The Anglo-Indian officers in charge gave me no trouble on the way and at last I reached Bombay. Our train reached Nasik at night, as I learnt from the words 'Nasik', 'Nasik' falling upon my ears. The shutters of my compartment had already been let down and I was seated in the centre between officers on either side. In the next compartment some passengers from Nasik got in. Twelve years had passed since I had left Nasik and now I was passing it in a train! A new generation had grown up during the interval, and who was there that could know and recognise me after such a long interval? And yet the word 'Nasik' itself raised such a flood-tide of thoughts in my mind. So many send-offs and entertainments on that very station; journeys to college and back, and packets of fried grains mixed together; water-melons, faces of friends lit up with joy, friends who had come on the station to see me off to England, and their tears of leave-taking; their cries of "Victory to the Goddess of Freedom"; and now their transformation into prisoners in fetters; and some of them sent to the gallows,—these pictures passed rapidly before my mind not unlike the moving pictures of today in a cinematograph. In Bombay I was put straightaway on a steamer. At the end of the voyage, I was again locked up in jail at about ten o'clock at night. This was no other than The jail at Ratnagiri. I can no more describe in detail and one after another my experiences in the jail at Ratnagiri. Circumstances prevent me from doing it. The main reason for my reticence is that they are very recent matters and concern a jail in our own province. I shall finish the whole by stating what I have to say about the matter in the briefest outline. The first two or three weeks in the jail at Ratnagiri passed away very badly for me. In the Andamans during my last days I was given well-cooked food and milk along with it which had helped to improve considerably my digestion and my general constitution. I was just looking up and had recovered from serious illness, when, sent to Ratnagiri jail, milk was denied to me, even in the small quantity that was allowed to me in the Andamans. And I had to fall back once again upon the usual ration of prison-life which was hard and ill-baked bread. This bad food had brought on continual illness to me for two years in the Andamans, and I was almost dying. The most experienced doctors had therefore prescribed for me milk and well-cooked food, as I have already told my reader in a previous chapter. But now my representation proved of no avail.