There is a word I hear constantly in courts and for years I treated it as background noise: dilaasa. Comfort. The thing you offer a frightened person so they can keep standing.

We are not trained to think of it as part of the job; law school teaches you the CrPC (now, the BNSS), how to read a statute, how to oppose bail. Yet, nobody teaches you what to say to a person whose savings have vanished in a fraud, or to someone who has to sit on a wooden bench and watch the person who wronged them walk out on anticipatory bail. And yet, that moment - what you say and how you say it - often decides everything.

I have watched cases collapse not because the evidence was weak, but because the person carrying it was simply too exhausted and afraid to continue. A complainant turns hostile, stops returning calls and stops showing up. The file calls it a failed prosecution. What actually failed was reassurance - nobody held the rope. So I have come to believe that dilaasa is not soft or sentimental at all. It is, quite practically, case management. A steadied client is a case that survives; a frightened, uninformed one is a case quietly dying in the next adjournment.

But here is the harder question, the one that has bothered me longer: how far do you go?

Comfort has a dark twin and its name is false hope. The temptation is enormous. A wronged client wants you to promise the accused will be in jail by Diwali; an accused wants to hear that this will all blow over. In that moment of someone's raw fear, the kindest-sounding thing to say is the lie they are pleading for. It feels like mercy. It is actually a slow betrayal. The bill always comes due, usually on the worst possible date.

So I have landed on a line and I try not to cross it. Dilaasa is owed in full to the human being - their fear is real, their dignity is real and they should never feel alone in the proceedings. But it is not owed to the facts. You comfort the person; you do not comfort the case. ‘I am with you in this, and I will fight it properly’ is dilaasa. ‘We will definitely win’ is malpractice in the costume of kindness. The real skill - often harder than any drafting - is being warm towards the person and cold about the prognosis, in the same breath, to someone who can barely tell the two apart.

I would extend this even to the accused, which is often where people get uncomfortable. We reserve all our sympathy for the victim, as if the person in the dock has forfeited their claim to be treated as human. But the presumption of innocence is not a slogan you recite. It means the person standing there may actually be innocent and is in any case facing the entire machinery of the State alone. Steadiness, patience, an honest account of where the person stands - that is not weakness toward crime. It is a refusal to let the process become the punishment before any court has said so.

The Indian system is slow, crowded and often impersonal. We cannot fix that this week. But the one thing it structurally withholds - the assurance that you are not alone in this - is the one thing any of us can choose to provide, for free, on any matter, on any date. That is what dilaasa really is. The discipline is in giving it generously to the person while refusing, absolutely, to lie to them about the law.

Comfort the frightened. Never flatter the file. Somewhere in the gap between those two is most of what it means to do this job honestly.

Anoopam Prasad is a lawyer practicing in Delhi.