I have often felt that that a lawyer sees the very worst that a human being has to offer. He is exposed to sights which will make him sick in the stomach, hear confessions that make his skin crawl and very often, “offered” a glimpse into the darkest corners of a human mind. For a litigating lawyer is, more often than not, an Accompanier in Sorrow and not Happiness. One rarely goes to a lawyer in moments of joy or celebration.

I think I first began to notice this when I interned with a lawyer who worked in the Family Court. Being a second year law student and someone who had led a fairly protected life, this internship had a profound impact on me. I saw, first-hand, the negative and destructive side of human nature and the many ways in which a relationship can crumble. I witnessed parents using their children as bargaining tools, wives denying “visiting rights” out of sheer spite, husbands subjecting their “better halves” to years of torture. In short, over the course of the internship I was witness to some distinctly unpleasant incidents and I around this time, realized that a good lawyer is exposed to some fairly disturbing stuff.

This belief was only reinforced upon joining the Bar. Due to the sheer diversity of Boss’s practice, civil matters were often interjected with the odd criminal matter. I have often been asked (and frankly this gets tiresome after a while) how lawyers can defend the guilty and how they can sleep at night knowing that they have allowed murderers and rapists to walk free; this is an argument which I am not inclined to enter at the moment.

Anyway, the few criminal matters which did land up on my desk made for some really challenging work. There were alleged kidnappings, murders, rapes and desperate pleas for bail. Some would contend that they were made scapegoats in a family feud, others were positive that they were being framed by “vested interests” etc. And for all these cases, Boss required a detailed list of the chain of events, down to the last possible time frame. The idea was to re-create the sequence of events on paper. Some of the matters were pretty tough to understand with contradictory FIRs, a spattering of vernacular here and there, trial court judgments which went on and on, convoluted depositions of a hundred different witnesses and so on and so forth.porn german porno german porno german porno german porno

And all the time, somewhere in the back of your mind, you are aware that your efforts may just end up saving a man’s life. You may try and brush away that thought but it does weigh in your mind. There were times when I would begin judging the client, wondering if he was actually innocent. It is a dangerous path to tread though and I soon learnt that a lawyer is meant to serve his client, not be a judge.

Perhaps the most interesting part of doing criminal matters was the sheer diversity of experiences on offer. It was through these matters that I visited my first police station (quite an intimidating experience), was threatened with “dire consequences” for the first time, saw men quaking and quivering in front of the judge and begging not to be sent to jail. I don’t think I will ever forget that smell of fear, pure fear. Another matter allowed me to talk with a prisoner while yet another case gave me the chance to speak to experts on DNA and forensics.

To be honest, some of these “experiences” were quite disturbing and it was only through time that I learnt to deal with them properly. However, the most haunting memory I have been forced to preserve, arose from the most unlikely of events: an amicus brief on drug abuse amongst minors. Boss had been appointed amicus on a particular matter and I was supposed to do the research. Initially the work was limited to finding out about rehabilitation techniques, NGOs who were involved in this field etc. One day, however, Boss was directed to conduct a surprise visit on a de-addiction centre which had recently been established.

The de-addiction centre was attached to the juvenile justice home (“home”), the place where juvenile delinquents are sent upon conviction since they are too young to be sent to jail. While the de-addiction centre itself appeared to be an honest effort by the government, it was the home that I will never forget. We were shown the canteen where the boys ate their meals. A pile of unwashed trays stood in the corner. “They are supposed to wash their own plates but they just don’t listen to us. They have no fear”, one staff member told me. Last month, the boys had made a huge pile of their mattresses and set the entire thing on fire. There were scorch marks twenty feet up on the walls. “We can’t do anything to them, one false complaint and I will lose my job” another staff confided. Another kid kept asking me to get him out of here for he had been forced into the home on cooked up charges. He had done absolutely nothing wrong, he told me. Later on, upon enquiry, I was told that he had a recurring drug habit; his own mother had refused to take him back. In one room (it appeared to be the dormitory), three boys were sitting and praying in a corner. Rays of light were falling through the window bars and onto their faces. They looked like angels. They had been charged with murder. 

I left that home with more than a few troubled thoughts and even boss was unusually silent. He told me that in his twenty odd years of practice, this was one of the most depressing things he had ever witnessed. Don’t let these things get you down, he told me, no matter how hard that is. You have to live to fight another day. That is what lawyers do.

Kroswami, after five glorious years in Calcutta, chose to litigate in Delhi. Two years later, Kroswami decided to leave the Rajdhani and shift to Bombay where he occasionally meets people dressed in white shirts and black pants.

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