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

A Sudden Onslaught
The overseer picked it up and asked me what it was. I told him that it contained
my notes. Whereupon he strictly enjoined me that I was not to make notes in this fashion
from any book given me in this prison. But, anxious as he was to make a political capital
out of this episode, he subjected that paper to the closest scrutiny. He held it up in light
and against the just lighted lamp, and began to read it minutely. What did he find in it?
Words like Pliocene, Miocene, Neolithic, which were abracadabra to him. "What cipher
is this"? he questioned me and showed from his face that at last he had caught me. I told
him in a light-hearted mood, "It was the language of geology." He then muttered
something to himself and calling the Jamadar, asked him to bring me to his office the
following morning, and that he was going to prosecute me. Accordingly, I was taken to
the office the following day, I was treed for the offence, but, it being my first offence in
that prison, I was warned and discharged. And for two following weeds I was to get no
book to read. The question then arose how I was to summarise and make notes of the
books I was reading The political prisoners must have summaries of the weekly lectures I
had given them. How were they otherwise to remember and make progress in their
knowledge? Where was I to get so much paper and writing material? And, if at all I could
procure it, where was the place to hide it? Suppose I were to write sheet after sheet who
will be able to read them under the very nose of the supervising warder and Jamadar? All
of a sudden and whale I was cudgelling my brains, I suddenly happened to look at the
wall and there I found the paper to write on. A white- washed wall-a paper-a broad sheet
to write on ! What a relief the discovery gave me.
The wall-a paper; the cordage plant-thorn-a pencil
I had already treed an experiment of that kind in the jail at Byculla when I wrote
on the wall with the sharpened point of a stone I sought to perfect it in the Silver Jail of
the Andamans. And I made a full use of it till my release from here after a full period of
fourteen years' imprisonment. I used to hide a pointed nail in the bolt of my door. And as
soon as I was locked up inside the room and the door was shut, I would began to write on
the wall with that pencil in columns which I drew upon it. All the wales of the 7th crawl
were thus scrawled over and each constituted for me a book by it self. For example the
cell in which I was confined to weave the stranded cord was written with a full outline of
Spencer's 'First Principles.' My poem 'Kamala' was composed and copied in full on the
walls of this seventh division. In another cell I wrote all the definitions of political
economy as I had learnt from Mill's Work on the subject. My object was that when I was
changed from that room to another, a political prisoner, brought in there, may learn those
definitions as he was learning that subject from me, With a little management such a
student could succeed being put up in this lock-up. He could then learn them off in a
month before his turn came for transference elsewhere. As I was being changed from
division to division I saw to it that every division and every cell in that division had its
writings on the walls from my improvised pen. And the political prisoners who had
turned students took the fullest advantage of these written tablets-their books of study in