68 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
sick prisoner any longer in Burmese jails, but the powers- that- be re-
fused to relent. Meanwhile, Subhas’s patience snapped and he lost his
temper with Major Flowerdew, the superintendent of the Rangoon Jail.
Accusing him of highly discourteous behavior, Subhas demanded to be
transferred to another prison.^47
On March 25 he was dispatched to Insein Jail, where the friendly
jailer, Major Findlay, who had known Subhas in Mandalay, was ap-
palled to see him in his emaciated state. After receiving Findlay’s report
on the poor state of his prisoner’s health, the government made an of-
fer through a statement in the Bengal legislative council: they would
release Subhas if he went straight from Rangoon to Switzerland, at his
own expense, to regain his health. He also would not be permitted to
return to India, Burma, or Ceylon until the expiration in 1930 of the
Bengal criminal law amendment act—a different law from the 1818
regulation used for his arrest, under which he was now being held.
Subhas was contemptuous of this offer of indefi nite European exile.
It did not even give him an opportunity to visit his elderly parents,
whom he had not seen for two and a half years. He had come to regard
tyaga (“renunciation”) and amrita (“realization”) as “two faces of the
same medal”; “to attain hundred per cent and to sac ri fice hundred per
cent” had become a passion with him.^48 In a long letter to Sarat on
April 4, 1927, he explained why he was going to reject the government’s
offer. If he had “the remotest intention of becoming a Bolshevik agent,”
he would have jumped at it and “joined the gay band who trot from
Paris to Leningrad talking of world revolution and emitting blood and
thunder in their utterances.” He was not inclined in that direction. The
government seemed to have forgotten that they had in flicted suf fering
on him for two and a half years with no jus tifi ca tion, and that he was
“the aggrieved party,” not they. He could not persuade himself that
permanent exile from his homeland “would be better than life in a Jail
leading to the sepulcher.” “I do not quail before this cheerless prospect,”
he wrote, “for I believe as the poet does, that ‘the paths of glory lead
but to the grave.’” He asked Sarat to console their dear parents, but
warned that more suf fering was in store before “the priceless trea sure
of freedom” could be secured.^49