A Suitable Boy(248)

What a lawyer did was to fight for his client – his client, right or wrong – with all the intelligence and experience he could summon. What a judge could do was to weigh matters with equity, to decide what was right. He had the power to do justice, and it was a noble power. When he met the Chief Justice at the end of the week, Mr Chatterji told him he would be honoured if his name was submitted to the government. A few months later he was sworn in.

*

He enjoyed his work, though he did not mix a great deal with his brethren. He had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and he did not, as some judges did, distance himself from them. He had no ambition to become Chief Justice or to go to the Supreme Court in Delhi. (The Federal Court and appeal to the Privy Council had ceased to exist.)

Apart from everything else, he liked Calcutta too much to uproot himself. He found his uniformed and turbaned servitor irksome and slightly ridiculous, unlike one of his brother judges, who insisted on being trailed by him even when he went to buy fish in the market. But he did not mind being addressed as My Lord or even, by certain barristers, as M’Lud.

Most of all he enjoyed what Biswas Babu, for all his own love of pomp and display, had known would be at the core of his satisfaction: the dispensation of justice within the law. Two cases that he had recently tried illustrated this. One was a case under the Preventive Detention Act of 1950 by which a labour organizer who was Muslim had been detained without being informed of the grounds of his detention except in the broadest terms. One of several such allegations was that he was an agent for Pakistan, although no proof of this was adduced. Another bald and sweeping statement, impossible to rebut, was that he was fomenting public strife. The vagueness and uncertainty of the allegations induced Mr Justice Chatterji and his colleague on the division bench to set aside the order on the basis of Article 22 clause 5 of the Constitution.

In another recent case, when an appeal against conviction for conspiracy of one accused was successful but his single co-accused had not – possibly because of poverty – filed an appeal against his own conviction, Mr Justice Chatterji and a fellow judge had themselves issued a Rule on the State to show cause why the conviction and sentence on the co-accused should not also be set aside. This suo motu ruling had led to a great deal of complex jurisdictional wrangling, but finally the court had decided that it was within its inherent jurisdiction to pass a proper order when a manifest injustice was being perpetrated.

Even in the case at present before him, though it gave Mr Justice Chatterji no pleasure to confirm sentences of death, he felt that he was doing what was just. His judgment was clearly thought out and robustly expressed. But he was considerably worried by the fact that in the first draft of his judgment he had named five of the dacoits and missed out the sixth. This was just the kind of potential disaster that the careful housekeeping of Biswas Babu was always saving him from in his lawyering days.

For a moment his mind turned to Biswas Babu. He wondered how he was and what he was doing. The sound of Kuku at the piano wafted through the open door of his study. He remembered what she had said at lunch about shallybhery juishes. Then he had been annoyed, now he was amused. Biswas Babu’s written legal English may have been sharp and economical (except for the occasional misplaced article), but his general English was a thing of tortuous beauty. And one could hardly expect the high-spirited Kuku not to be alive to its expressive possibilities.





7.38


BISWAS BABU, as it happened, was at that very moment with his friend and fellow clerk, the burra babu of the insurance department of Bentsen Pryce. They had been friends for over twenty years now, and Biswas Babu’s adda or den had slowly cemented this relationship. (When Arun had married Meenakshi it was almost as if their families had suddenly found themselves allied.) The burra babu would visit Biswas Babu’s house most evenings; here a number of old companions would gather to talk about the world or simply to sit around, drinking tea and reading the newspapers with an occasional comment. Today some of them were thinking of going to a play.

‘So it seems that your High Court building has been struck by lightning,’ ventured one man.

‘No damage, no damage,’ said Biswas Babu. ‘The main problem is the refugees from East Bengal who have begun to camp in the corridors.’ No one here referred to it as East Pakistan.

‘The Hindus there are being terrified and driven out. Every day one reads in the Hindustan Standard of Hindu girls being kidnapped –’

‘Ay, Ma’ – this was addressed to Biswas Babu’s youngest granddaughter, a girl of six – ‘tell your mother to send some more tea.’