At the Lahore High Court continues...

I felt that my clients had lost the case partly because of my status at the Bar. I advised them now to engage as a senior counsel Rai Bahadur Pundit Shiv Narain Shamim whose status at the Bar was in no way inferior to that of Bakshi Tek Chand. I gave him my written arguments in the case. When I went to his office for consultation, he was squatting on the carpet enjoying a smoke at his favourite Hukka. I sat on the floor besides him and he told me that the case was a strong one and my written arguments contained all that could be said in favour of our client. The next morning when the case was called for hearing, the Bench called upon Bakshi Tek Chand to defend the judgment of Justice Scot-Smith. He failed to convince the Bench that his clients had rightly won their victory with the result that in Gobinda vs. Nandu—a reported judgment-my clients succeeded.

Sometime towards the close of the year 1918, I visited Karachi for the first time in my life to settle the terms of a sale deed in respect of a tea estate in the District of Kangra. Here I had my first contact with solicitors and their orthodox ways of drawing up conveyance deeds. I felt that such documents could easily be drawn up in a simpler and less formal language without using the conveyancing phraseology made popular by English conveyancing lawyers under quite a different set of conditions. To a layman—and even to lawyers where the Bar was not divided among solicitors and advocates—these forms of conveyancing seemed to have been invented by solicitors in order to impress their clients and thereby earn huge fees! Documents drawn up by the old petition-writers in India outside the three Presidencies have served the same purpose at a fairly small expense.

There was an addition in my family during this year. Raj Kumari, my first daughter, was born.


to be continued...

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