All I wanted to do was to get out of that place as quickly as possible. The huge high-ceilinged room was packed. There was a continuous eddy of movement as bodies pushed in and out, talking to one another in whispers. The emotional registers all around were high: every face appeared marked by anxiety, fear, aggression, resentment, despondency. The only calm ones seemed to be the black coats dotting the landscape, penguins in their element, skating smoothly through the heartless glacier of organized justice. Within five minutes of entering the stately iron gates of the Patiala House courts I’d become aware that I was entering a zone of experience that would forever change the way I looked at the wonder that was India. Before the day was out I would know that no middle-class Indian, from any old st mary-john-mark school with trilling nuns and caning fathers, who twittered in the queen’s English and held forth on freedom and democracy, had any real idea of this country if he had not wandered through the frozen glaciers of its legal system.
What do You think about The Story Of My Assassins?
