CHAPTER 1
AHMEDNAGAR FORT
Ahmadnagar Fort, 13th April 1944
IT IS MORE THAN TWENTY MONTHS SINCE WE WERE BROUGHT HERE,
more than twenty months of my ninth term of imprisonment.
The new moon, a shimmering crescent in the darkening sky,
greeted us on our arrival here. The bright fortnight of the waxing
moon had begun. Ever since then each coming of the new moon
has been a reminder to me that another month of my imprison-
ment is over. So it was with my last term of imprisonment which
began with the new moon, just after the Deepavali, the festival of
light. The moon, ever a companion to me in prison, has grown
more friendly with closer acquaintance, a reminder of the loveli-
ness of this world, of the waxing and waning of life, of light
following darkness, of death and resurrection following each other
in interminable succession. Ever changing, yet ever the same, I
have watched it in its different phases and its many moods in the
evening, as the shadows lengthen, in the still hours of the night,
and when the breath and whisper of dawn bring promise of the
coming day. How helpful is the moon in counting the days and the
months, for the size and shape of the moon, when it is visible,
indicate the day of the month with a fair measure of exactitude.
It is an easy calendar (though it must be adjusted from time to
time), and for the peasant in the field the most-convenient one to
indicate the passage of the days and the gradual changing of the
seasons.
Three weeks we spent here cut off completely from all news
of the outside world. There were no contacts of any kind, no
interviews, no letters, no newspapers, no radio. Even our presence
here was supposed to be a state secret unknown to any except to
the officials in charge of us, a poor secret, for all India knew where
we were.
Then newspapers were allowed and, some weeks later, letters
from near relatives dealing with domestic affairs. But no interviews during these 20 months, no other contacts.
The newspapers contained heavily censored news. Yet they
gave us some idea of the war that was consuming more than half
the world, and of how it fared with our people in India. Little
we knew about these people of ours except that scores of thou-
sands lay in prison or internment camp without trial, that thou-
sands had been shot to death, that tens of thousands had been
driven out of schools and colleges, that something indistinguish-
able from martial law prevailed over the whole country, that terror
and frightfulness darkened the land. They were worse off, far
worse than us, those scores of thousands in prison, like us, without
trial, for there were not only no interviews but also no letters or
newspapers for them, and even books were seldom allowed. Many
sickened for lack of healthy food, some of our dear ones died for
lack of proper care and treatment.
There were many thousands of prisoners of war kept in India,
mostly from Italy. We compared their lot with the lot of our own
people. We were told that they were governed by the Geneva
Convention. But there was no convention or law or rule to govern
the conditions under which Indian prisoners and detenus had to
exist, except such ordinances which it pleased our British rulers to
issue from time to time.
Famine came, ghastly, staggering, horrible beyond words. In
Malabar, in Bijapur, in Orissa, and, above all, in the rich and
fertile province of Bengal, men and women and little children
died in their thousands daily for lack of food. They dropped down
dead before the palaces of Calcutta, their corpses lay in the mud-
huts of Bengal's innumerable villages and covered the roads and
fields of its rural areas. Men were dying all over the world and
killing each other in battle; usually a quick death, often a brave
death, death for a cause, death with a purpose, death which
seemed in this mad world of ours an inexorable logic of events,
a sudden end to the life we could not mould or control. Death
was common enough everywhere.
But here death had no purpose, no logic, no necessity; it was
the result of man's incompetence and callousness, man-made, a
slow creeping thing of horror with nothing to redeem it, life
merging and fading into death, with death looking out of the
shrunken eyes and withered frame while life still lingered for a
while. And so it was not considered right or proper to mention
it; it was not good form to talk or write of unsavoury topics. To
do so was to 'dramatize' an unfortunate situation. False reports ...