12
LITIGANTS, LAWYERS AND JUDGES continues...

The District Judge was Mr. Donald Falshaw—now Chief Justice of the Punjab High Court—and he had two assessors sitting with him. My contention was that a potential building site had to be valued like similar sites in the city and that the construction placed on the Act by the Allahabad High Court was not right. The District Judge accepted my contention, awarded compensation for the land as a potential residential building site and valued it according to its intended use. The Improvement Trust went up to the High Court in appeal but without success.

I had also to settle an interesting family dispute in Tika Nagrota, where our ancestral house had been divided between four brothers in a very curious manner. There were two rooms with a big dalan on the ground floor and there were two rooms on the first floor also with a dalan intervening. Arbitrators had awarded one room to each of the brothers, leaving the dalan for common use. The roof of the house became dilapidated and some of the rafters became rotten and had to be changed. It was a slate covered house and the slating also had to be redone. The owners of the first floor rooms were willing to pay their share of the cost of the repairs but my cousin, Hans Raj, who occupied a room on the ground floor refused to pay for repairs to be done to the roof over the first floor rooms. I told him that if the roof fell for want of repairs his room on the ground floor would also be damaged and, therefore, the roof was the responsibility of all the four. But no amount of argument or reasoning could make him budge an inch. Eventually thinking that if the house fell it would disgrace all the descendants of one common ancestor, I offered to buy his room for a price named by him and promised to give him a site in the quadrangle for a separate house! To this he eventually agreed. But he pocketed the money and never built anything!

to be continued...