The Case · The Salt Road · Pulse Beat
The court case lasted nineteen months. Mrs Dastur, with her glasses and her cat-haired cardigan, proved to be formidable. The injunction was granted in a week. Mr Sethi's lawyers filed motion after…
The court case lasted nineteen months.
Mrs Dastur, with her glasses and her cat-haired cardigan, proved to be formidable. The injunction was granted in a week. Mr Sethi's lawyers filed motion after motion, and the families of the pans, led by Kavita, who took a six-month leave from her firm and then, to her own surprise, resigned, came to Bhuj on every hearing day, two hundred of them, filling the court's corridor in their bright cotton.
The judge, a tired, careful man, listened to evidence about the land's history with an expression that grew steadily less neutral. A retired surveyor testified that the pans had been worked by the same families since before Independence. An old woman in a green sari, ninety years old, who had been Savita's cousin, was carried in on a chair and said, in a voice like paper, that the land had always been worked by the salt people, and that nobody had ever told them it was anyone else's.
When the verdict came, the whole corridor fell silent. The land, said the judge, belonged to those who had worked it.