Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

After the British left, matters did not greatly change, particularly in Calcutta, which continued to have an Englishman as Chief Justice. Mr Justice Chatterji considered Sir Arthur Trevor Harries to be a good man and a good Chief Justice. He now recalled his own ‘interview’ with him when, as one of the leading barristers of Calcutta, he had been asked to visit him in his chambers.

As soon as they were both seated, Trevor Harries had said: ‘If I may, Mr Chatterji, I’ll come straight to the point. I would like to recommend your name for judgeship to the government. Would this be acceptable to you?’

Mr Chatterji had said: ‘Chief Justice, this is an honour, but I am afraid I must decline.’

Trevor Harries had been rather taken aback. ‘Might I ask why?’

‘I hope you do not mind if I am equally direct,’ had been Mr Chatterji’s reply. ‘A junior man was appointed before me some years ago, and his comparative competence could not have been the reason.’

‘An Englishman?’

‘As it happens. I am not speculating about the reason.’

Trevor Harries had nodded. ‘I believe I know whom you are referring to. But that was done by another Chief Justice — and I thought the man was your friend.’

‘Friend he is, and I’m not talking about the friendship. But the question is one of principle.’

After a pause, Trevor Harries had continued: ‘Well, I, like you, will not speculate about the correctness of that decision. But he was a sick man, and his time was running out.’

‘Nevertheless.’

Trevor Harries had smiled. ‘Your father made an excellent judge, Mr Chatterji. Just the other day I had occasion to quote a 1933 judgement of his on the question of estoppel.’

‘I shall tell him so. He will be most pleased.’

There had been a pause. Mr Chatterji had been about to get up when the Chief Justice, with the slightest suspicion of a sigh, had said:

‘Mr Chatterji, I respect you too much to wish to, well, tilt the scales of your judgement in this matter. But I don’t mind confessing my disappointment that you wish to decline. I dare say you realize that it is difficult for me to make up the loss of so many good judges at such short notice. Pakistan and England have each claimed several judges of this court. Our workload is increasing steadily, and what with the constitutional work that will be upon us soon, we will need the best new judges we can get. It is in this light that I have asked you to join, and it is in this light that I would like to ask you to reconsider your decision.’ He had paused before continuing. ‘May I take the liberty of asking you at the end of this coming week if your mind is still unchanged? If so, my regard will remain unchanged, but I will not trouble you further on this point.’

Mr Chatterji had gone home with no intention of changing his mind or of consulting anyone else on the matter. But while talking to his father, he had happened to mention what the Chief Justice had said about the 1933 judgement. ‘What did the Chief Justice want to see you about?’ his father had asked. And the story had come out.

His father had quoted a line of Sanskrit to him, to the effect that the best ornament for knowledge was humility. He had said nothing at all about duty.

Mrs Chatterji came to know about it because her husband carelessly left a little slip of paper near his bed before he went to sleep, which read: ‘CJ Fri 4:45 (?) re J’ship.’ When he woke up the next morning he found her quite cross. Again the facts came out. His wife said: ‘It’ll be much better for your health. No late-night conferences with juniors. A much more balanced life.’

‘My health’s fine, dear. I thrive on the work. And Orr, Dignam have a pretty good sense of how many cases they should brief me in.’

‘Well, I like the thought of your wearing a wig and scarlet robes.’

‘I’m afraid we only wear scarlet robes when trying criminal cases on the original side. And no wig. No, there’s much less sartorial splendour in it these days.’

‘Mr Justice Chatterji. It sounds just the thing.’

‘I’m afraid I shall turn into my father.’

‘You could do worse.’

How Biswas Babu came to know of it was a complete mystery. But he did. One evening in his chambers Mr Chatterji was dictating an opinion to him when Biswas Babu addressed him unconsciously as ‘My Lord’. Mr Chatterji sat up. ‘He must have slipped back into the past for a bit,’ he thought, ‘and have imagined that I’m my father.’ But Biswas Babu looked so startled and guilty at his slip that he gave himself away. And, having given himself away, he hastily added, shaking his knees swiftly: ‘I am so pleased, although prematurely, Sir, to administer my felici—’

‘I’m not taking it, Biswas Babu,’ said Mr Chatterji, very sharply, and in Bengali.

So shocked was his clerk that he quite forgot himself. ‘Why not, Sir?’ he replied, also in Bengali: ‘Don’t you want to do justice?’

Mr Chatterji, displeased, collected himself and continued to dictate his opinion. But Biswas Babu’s words had a slow but profound effect on him. He had not said, ‘Don’t you want to be a judge?’

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 the appeal against conviction for conspiracy of one accused had been 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.