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

sorrows and bereavements. Hail to you, Savarkar, may God bless you. The whole country rejoices today and its joy knows no bounds."

I could not contain myself for the kind words spoken by them and for the affectionate heart they betokened. And I replied, "There is one great omission in this comparison. Rama went into exile, but Rama finished Ravana and won the battle. I have gone into exile and suffered, but Ravana is still alive. I shall feel myself free only when that is accomplished. With God's grace even that task will accomplish itself like many other minor things to which I have put my hand. Some day, sometime, that also will happen and you must realise the difference, and it must give you acute pain."

My relative had come to fetch me away. The prison-gate was opened and I came out. What varied means I had used to secure my release! And how I felt then that I was escaping, not through the open gate, but through its keyhole.

At last I was a free man. I looked about me and said to myself I had scored over my life-sentence of fifty years. But who dares say that I may not be sent back to serve it to the full? It was not yet time, methought, to bid final goodbye to this prison. I must not forget it yet. Was I not free at Marseilles? Had I not made my escape? This may be but the repetition of that experience, for India's battle for freedom has yet to be won, and the struggle must go on.

Indulging in such kind of talk with my friends, and, smiling at the same time, I entered the car and it moved on its wheels. It brought me into the land of the living and had left behind my sentence to perish. The boundary line was crossed and I was both alive and free.

The greetings that I received from the whole country, as I came back alive to them, made me for a time oblivious of myself. On the very first day of my freedom, I was floating, as it were, in the upper air of my country. When it hailed me as a hero and patted me on the back, all the wounds inflicted on me during my fourteen years of prison-life seemed to heal. And the only thing that remained with me were these reminiscences.

Therefore, as I had invoked the Goddess with the words "That another image", in order to fortify myself against the intending shadow of death-sentence and to be prepared to swallow the cup of poison it was holding out to my lips, I now recall the same Goddess to my mind with deep gratitude for my survival and bowing my head take final leave of her. I pray that the heavenly Goddess may go back, for the time being to her abode.

End of Chapter XIII

CHAPTER XIV Dear Reader The story is told. The curtain is rung down on it. Two life-sentences have been run. And I have brought together my recollections of them within the cover of this book. They are narrated in brief outline to you; they are put together within the narrowest compass. When I came into this world, God sent me in it on* a sort of life-sentence. It was the span of life allotted to me by Time to stay in this "prison-house of life." This story is but a chapter of that book of life—a longer story not yet ended. As I completed this chapter as a dedication to my great worship of the ideal, so the book of life may end as a dedication to it without break or faltering. Yes, I am free. The iron fetters on my feet are broken. But the chain of longing that binds my heart still remains. I have come out of the stone-walls which had buried me. But my soul is still imprisoned for my vision is not yet reached. The horizon that limits it is not yet crossed. It engirdles my soul and stifles it. Dear Reader, Surely you must have been wearied to hear my story, and put out by the endless repetitions in contains. But I am as much tired in writing, as you may begin reading it, this weary tale of my life. It has been a long and weary way for me also. How I, have suffered and how much fatigue of the mind I have passed through in putting it on paper! But I shall be more than paid for it, if you feel the same disgust for it that I have felt. For you can finish reading it in a day, while I had to live it for fourteen long years of transportation. And if the story is so tiresome, unendurable and disgusting to you, how much must be the living of it to me! Every moment of those fourteen years in that jail has been an agony of the soul and the body to me, and to my fellow-convicts in that jail. It was not only fatiguing, unbearable and futile to us all. It was equally or more excruciating as well, to them and to me. And it is only that you may know it, and feel the fatigue, the disgust and the pain of it, as we have felt it, that I have chosen to write it for you. I hope you will have through it some idea of what we have passed through, what we have endured. Dear Reader, I lay down my pen and take leave of you. My broken pen I cannot put aside, however, without telling you never to forget those who stuck to their task, disheartening and trying though it was; who embraced it to the last; who were nearly burnt up in that fiery ordeal; and who came out of it because nothing could burn them up completely in it, Lest you forget! Dear Reader, I say it to you as my last word, do not

forget them. For sooner or later the memory of them will serve you and be your salvation; nothing else will avail! End of Chapter XIV End of Book “My Transportation for Life” Composed and created by Chandrashekhar V.Sane Ebook © Chandrashekhar V.Sane