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

The Prestige Of A Barrister
I may have suffered the same fate but I escaped because I happened to be a bar-at-
law, a member of the legal profession, and, hence, a man of prestige. The criminal class,
and the worst of that class, fears a barrister as they do not fear or revere a poet, a man of
learning, a saint or an astute statesman, even if the last be the Premier of England. Utter
the name of a barrister and you will see the most hardened criminal raise his brows and
ejaculate-“ Is it?” the reason for it was plain enough. Men whose life is spent in thieving
and dacoity, in courts and prisons, fear and respect him who can unearth their sins,
unravel their threads, and expose them to the world by his legal acumen or can shield
them by equal chicanery from the arm of the law. He can prove them guilty or not guilty
according to the position he takes up towards them. How can they not quail before him?
Or how can they fail to regard him as their saviour? They look upon him as an
extraordinary being, and, as such, fear him. The criminal class fears the lawyer and seeks
to curry his favour. Stories go round about him in the prison world, not unlike those one
hears about the great Birbal and his monarch. The prisoner in the dock trembles before
the lawyer as people in Birbal’s time quaked before him. In brief, I must say that my
professional degree, if it had served me for nothing else, did serve me in this, that it
spared me the insolence and insult of neighbours around me. The most confirmed
criminal at once felt humbled before me.
I was standing that night near the door of my room. And I quietly watched them
in their revelry, dance and riotous behaviour. For many days now I had never heard such
noise, never witnessed such a scene. The mind fretting in solitude should have recoiled
from the obscenity and riotry of the scene. But it happened to me otherwise. It was like
an ignited match thrown into a tin of kerosine. All my repressed feeling flared up and in
that blaze I stood there and lost myself in the show. And as I watched its progress, the
mind analysed the emotion and traced its genesis to the wretched condition of my own
heart. The heart in its woe-be-gone condition could not help turning outside for any relief
it might have there. I watched the show because I could do nothing else and in order to
forget myself in the ecstasy and revolt of grief I witnessed without me. I did not
participate in it, and I found rest and sleep when the whole show had stopped on the
admonition of its leader not to disturb me. He seemed to forgive me for not joining in the
revelry. As the clock struck eleven the noise had reached its peak, when the warders
reminded the party that my sleep was spoiled by their uproar. They had the goodness to
listen and to end their shouting. It was about twelve midnight that my eyes drooped and I
fell asleep.
As I woke up in the morning, the idea came into my head that my elder brother,
who was now a prisoner in the Andamans, may have proceeded with a chalan like this
and must have stayed in this prison before being carried over. I asked the warder about
him but, as he was new to his post, he could give me no information on the subject. An
older man, after further enquiry, told me that my brother did occupy the very cell in
which I was locked up now. The old man had left, when my brother’s image came up