Courting Courts

During my adolescence, I devoured the books by Erle Stanley Gardener's featuring Perry Mason. Perry Mason the suave criminal lawyer assisted ably by the elegant Della Street and the dependable detective Paul Drake opened a the whole world of Court and lawyers to me. I started to dream of becoming a lawyer when I grew up. This ambition was fueled by other masterpieces of English Literature like Harper Lee's "To kill a Mockingbird", Michael Connelly's series of books on lawyers, more recently the novels of John Grisham and others. The vivid imagery of the spacious courts where brilliant, handsome lawyers waged a verbal battle to protect the poor and downtrodden filled me with awe. I always felt that it was a zone of no-corruption where Lady Justice with her eyes blind folded held a fair and just reign to help the poor and downtrodden.

After sixty years of staying out of courts, I was very excited when an opportunity came to attend the court. The night before the hearing, I could hardly sleep with vivid visualisation of our lawyer engaging in witty repartee with the opposing lawyer and the judge.  The first shock I got was on beholding the dirty dingy buildings in which the court was located. There was a revolting all pervading  smell of a mixture of urine, unwashed bodies and the walls were abstract painted with red paan stains so ubiquitous in all public buildings of India. After seeing that the  lift doors had to be pried open to release the tortured souls trapped therein, I decided to go up the stairs to the third floor where the case was to be held.The staircase as well as the corridors were dark, with neither ventilation nor light. The whole place was squalid with absolutely no effort to maintain the physical structure with even a modicum of cleanliness and hygiene. The halls, where the cases were heard, were poky little rooms hardly worthy of the title "hall" They were like large drawing rooms that you would see in an upper class family in urban areas.

The lawyers who bustled about the court corridors were a far caricature of lawyers so famed in our literature and cinema. The torture they had to undergo with their black robes and tight white collar in the Indian summer heat was sufficient for us to say "Poor souls." They do not have to go to Milton's Hell  after their death - they are already in it in the Indian courts. The rush of the people, with anxiety writ large on their faces on one side and brazen men with a don't care attitude on the other side provided a palette of the human cosmos populating the courts.

After spending six hours in the overcrowded hall, there were no arguments to enable me to judge the brilliance or otherwise of the lawyers' wit since the judge just pronounced, "The case is adjourned to June 26th"  at the end of the day.

Why does no one talk about the physical conditions of the Indian courts?  How can justice be meted out under such horrible working conditions? Why the arcane dressing code for the lawyers not suited to our climatic conditions?