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

So I would beseech them to give no opportunity to the authorities to send them back to
their own cells. Agreeing with me, they had all remained outside till the day of the
Coronation in December 1911. After the first strike and after the Coronation, some four
more were let out from this prison, and my brother and myself were not in that number.
The letting off of these four prisoners had, at least, this good side to it that political
prisoners could be so let off. And I hoped that I could take full advantage of the
precedent. Hence, I worked on with hope and courage waiting for the day when I could
be as free as the three or four who had gone ahead. But news began to filter in that these
political prisoners had a very hard time of it even outside the prison-walls. They were
given such heart-breaking work to do that they preferred to it the swallowing of some
drug that would bring on illness and get them back to the kind of life they had left behind.
We always think of medicines that cure a malady. They thought of potions which would
bring them one. Strange, indeed, is the psychology of prison-life !

Give me medicine for fever and diarrhea !

When any prisoner asked this favour of another in a suppressed voice and with a
dejected mind, it did not imply that he demanded mixture to drive out these maladies but
to induce them into him. A man, it was reported, gets high fever if he swallows the paste
of 'Kanheri' roots; another told me that the easiest way to get loose continuous motions,
with blood in them, was to drink the paste of red berries called "Gunja." If a thread
soaked in some liquid—I forgot which—were sewn into a wound, another said, the
wound remained raw and open for six months on end. This was the talk of the prison.
And if I questioned the authenticity of these reports, they told me that the medicines were
tried and found effective for these purposes. Prisoners, put on the oil-mill or sent out to
cut down the jungles or detailed to pick oakum and weave the threads into a coil of rope,
were so much done up with the work and felt such a terror for it, that they preferred
anything else to going on with it. Hence, they would resort to these dangerous shrubs,
roots and berries or would make a wound to their feet, with the scythe they carried, to fall
ill and come back into the hospital. They would sow a thread into that wound to keep it
from healing. They would prick their throats with a needle and to convince the physician
in charge that the blood had come out with their spit and from their chest. Any of these
tricks they employed for purposes of escape from the toil under which they were being
ground down in their prison-life.
Others feigned madness, and, to prove that they were really mad, would besmear
their faces with urine and excreta, and, occasionally ate them also.
To convince the doctor and obtain his certificate to be transferred to the hospital
was the one aim of these self-imposed tortures. I have seen such specimens in the prison
with my own eyes; and travellers spending a week in the Andaman Settlement have
testified what I have stated here. These prisoners would dupe the doctor endlessly with
these methods, and it became hard for him, at times, to mark the genuine from the