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

be careful. If you care for your job you must not say anything about them, do anything
for them; you hold a degree but I have more experience than you. I know who feign
illness and who do not; so that, be guided by me in these matters. When I say a man is
well, he is well; when I say a man is ill, he is ill. Understand me, will you?" He said this
as if lightly; and, smiling to himself, he went forward. Once, an hospital assistant realised
the pitiable case of my brother and could not contain himself. My brother had severe pain
in the head, and the doctor saw him dashing it against the prison wall, and yet carry on
his grinding work uninterruptedly. The doctor came up to him and told him that he was
removing him to the hospital as an observation case. He asked him to take up his bed and
proceed. My brother was making ready to depart, when, on a sudden, Mr. Barrie
confronted him, dashing his stick upon the floor. He accosted the Jamadar gruffy, "Where
is this bomb-thrower going?" The Jamadar shivered all over, and said, "It is under the
doctor's orders, Sir, that I am taking him to the hospital for observation." "Why the hell,
did you not ask me? Who is the wretched doctor to give the law here?" Mr. Barrie's voice
went like an echo and a thunder throughout the whole building. "Take him back to work",
he ordered, "I shall take care of the doctor. I must rate you as well; you, to take him out
without my orders?" And he saw the patient back into his cell and at work again. He had
the door locked before he went away. The doctor, strictly speaking, was not under the
gaoler but under the Superintendent of that jail. But the Hindu jailor and his Hindu
myrmidons took great care that no news about the political prisoners reached the ears of
the Superintendent As a sequel, the doctor had to eat his words; he apologised to the
jailor, and solemnly resolved never more to interfere with the political prisoners, and did
not take a single patient from them to the hospital without the permission of the
Superintendent. For all others the hospital remained an open door. Prisoners with ten
years' sentence against them, those who had broken open the prison itself , had free
access to it under any pretext of illness. Permission was never denied to them. It was for
the doctor to decide if he would keep the patient or discharge him. Of course, the jailor
had no voice in that decision. But, for political prisoners, the hospital ever remained a
closed door. With hemicrany and the hard labour of the grinding mill, my brother felt
dead-tired by the time he had finished it, and delivered his quantum of oil to the blessed
Jamadar. Sweated and exhausted, he tottered to his cell and threw himself at full length
on the wooden plank of his bed in that prison, where he groaned the whole night for the
pain all over his body. The day dawned again; hemicrany, the Jamadar, the insult to the
Indian doctor and the tortures of the oil-mill, stood like grim spectres before him Weeks,
months he had spent in this dire condition, and they were to be his inevitable lot, all his
life.

Enough of this life

Who can describe the suffering-these agonies of mind and body? I may give you
an instance, however, to point the moral. Of all the hardships of prison-life in the Silver
Jail of the Andamans-gruelling work, scanty food and clothing, occasional thrashing and
others-none was so annoying and disgusting as its provision for urinals and lavatories.
The prisoners had to control the demands of nature, of hours together, for want of these
arrangements in the cell itself. Morning, noon and evening-these were the only hours