The Lawyer · The Salt Road · Pulse Beat
The only lawyer in Bhuj who would see her at nine at night was an elderly Parsi woman with a cat on her desk. Mrs Dastur listened to the whole story, over cups of milky tea that she made herself…
The only lawyer in Bhuj who would see her at nine at night was an elderly Parsi woman with a cat on her desk.
Mrs Dastur listened to the whole story, over cups of milky tea that she made herself, with her glasses pushed up into her white hair. When Kavita finished, she took off the glasses and cleaned them very slowly.
"This is quite a thing," she said. "Adverse possession is real, and fifty years of continuous, open possession is as strong as it comes. Your father, and nineteen other families, could well have a claim to the land. And a company that gets people to sign that away by misrepresenting the situation..." She smiled thinly. "That is called something else."
"Can you stop it?"
"I can file an injunction in the morning. It will freeze everything until a court looks at it." She put the glasses back on. "It will be ugly, and long. They have money."
"We have a lot of people," said Kavita.
Mrs Dastur looked at her for a moment over the rims. "Yes," she said. "That is generally what these cases come down to."