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

To add to this desolation and grief, only a few of us happened to be detained here
when the rest of my political compatriots had been sent back to India, and could look
forward to the remission of their sentences in their respective jails in India. We found our
separation from them the gloomiest experience of our life. Our extreme solitude on this
account would sometime become unendurable. A deep yearning came into the soul to call
out someone by name, to ask someone to come and sit beside me. But in that heartless
prison who was there to answer to my affectionate call? My mind thus began to prey
upon itself. Nights were found too long and did not pass quickly into day-break. No new
friends to make, no new work to organise, no new food for hope, the mind dwelt
constantly on past memories, long-gone and forgotten activities, on friends in these years;
and it played with these fantasies. But one does not feed on sugar and rice by merely
drawing their picture on a piece of paper. These famished longings and thoughts
sometime rebelled against me like unruly and riotous bands of robbers. Nothing that I
could do would suppress them. The hunger was left unsatisfied; and it made the heart
restless. This used to be my experience in prison for months together in succession. How
much harassed by loneliness, how much eager for the society of friends, how much
yearning and restless for friendship and love, and yet how much keen on duty to be done,
my mind was during this period, none could know and describe except the few who had
pined away with me in that prison. Do what we will to satisfy the authorities with our
day's work, there was no hope in it for our discharge from that prison. There was only
one way out of this dire position. That was a chance of escape from the settlement when
and if we were sent out for our daily labour. And with that aim, we were punctilious in
attending to our daily work in prison. But when I learnt that I was to stay and work for
fourteen long years within the precincts of the Silver Jail alone, that chance again faded
out of my view. In retrospect today I cannot say how I must have passed those days in
that place. Months went by in these musings when, all of a sudden, as bolt from the blue,
news came to us of a war having broken out between England and some foreign power.
First, we could put no faith in this news from the market-place. For the prisoners
had been long in the habit of catching at some such thread of news in their helpless
condition. Every four or five months some one would start the canard of a jubilee or
similar celebration in which the prisoners were sure to get their freedom, and the
prisoners welcomed the news in the hope of the drowning man catching at a straw. And it
was bound to prove a hoax. Another news came floating in on a similar rising tide. The
news of war was the most hopeful news of them all. But we did not yet know between
whom the war had broken. For the prison-world knew only of two powers under the sun,
the British power in India and England, and the Amir of Afghanisthan. The Muslim
section of it knew, besides, of Turkey and its Sultan. Therefore, when it was definitely
known that war had broken out, it must be a war between the British and the Amir, or
between Britain and Turkey. Britain had nothing to lose in her war either with
Afghanisthan or Turkey. Hence, for two or three days subsequently, I paid no attention to
that news. Later on, news had filtered that the English* monarch had gone to war with
his son-in-law. But who was this precious son-in-law? Outsiders used to hint of
Germany. But those who brought the news to me spoke often of an English Princess
married to a foreigner on the continent of Europe. It was a war, they said to me, between
these two sides. They could make some meaning of this relationship. But to me it came as