How to kill a djinn and get away with it: The Figure in the Fog by Manini Brar

On a balmy night in May 1958, in a small village in Balasore district in Orissa, a Nepali man called Ram Bahadur Thapa stabbed and killed a ghost.

This is not a made up story. Reality, as they say, is often stranger than fiction.

Ghosts aren't real, of course, but Ram Bahadur believed in good faith that he was indeed attacking ghosts. The ghosts were in fact village women gathering flowers and the attack left one woman dead and the others severely injured.

Ram Bahadur was tried and acquitted by a trial court which held that widespread local superstition among the Adivasi communities in the area made his mistaken belief a genuine defence under the mistake-of-fact provision (Section 79) of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code.

This is one of the themes in The Figure in the Fog: Malti Jakhar Case Files, authored by Manini Brar, who writes about a fictional tribal village called Pitthoo whose inhabitants believe that a djinn haunts their forest.

But Brar manages to make the case surprisingly relevant to a contemporary audience, even one far removed from the world of law.

The story follows Malti Jakhar, a struggling lawyer with ten years of practice who runs a small, financially shaky practice. She practices before district courts in Delhi assisted by her clerk Chandan Pal and a sole junior Charu.

Chandan's characterisation as an irreverent yet supportive and knowledgeable clerk with a rich vein of malapropisms will instantly endear him to readers.

Charu appears in fewer pages but her aspiration to be a Rachel Zane-esque character set in the world of Suits is an easy reminder of the juxtaposition between the district courts in Delhi and the tribal village of Pitthoo.

The book opens with a distinctly millennial self-deprecating first-person voice that might be recognisable to readers of Brar's column in Bar & Bench - The Obiter Truth.

Malti's day consists of playing Solitaire between hard-won clients, tripping in heels outside courtrooms, worrying about unpaid electricity bills and grabbing a beer with her friends, all while dealing with the hustle of making a mark in Indian courts as a woman lawyer.

On one such day, a young tribal man named Gola Pitthan, from the ficional forest village of Pitthoo somewhere near the UP-MP border, arrives at her office, confessing to killing a man with an axe on the night of a religious festival, believing he was striking a djinn.

Brar takes the tale in a far more interesting direction than State Of Orissa v. Ram Bahadur Thapa. In her book, Gola's case is bankrolled by a political body ostensibly championing tribal rights.

As Malti and Chandan travel to Pitthoo, they run into wall after wall made up of silence from the villagers, a language gap between Malti's legal vocabulary and Pitthoo's vernacular, strong-rooted folklore of the djinn, fated omens and a community that seems to be harbouring a secret more sinister than Gola's actions.

It is in this backdrop that Brar poses the central question: what happens when a legal system built on mens rea collides with an accused who sincerely believes in a supernatural threat?

But the tale that Brar weaves also explores the origins of superstitions and, pertinently, the impact of capitalist and political incursion into tribal spaces. We perhaps get closest to Brar's own views on this pressing yet oft-ignored issue in Malti's closing arguments in Gola's trial.

Speaking to Bar & Bench's Giti Pratap, Brar said that she hopes readers sit with those larger questions.

"I hope people read it and see that this is not just about one case. This is about every case where sometimes you think you're doing the right thing, but you don't. Or you win but you feel like you have lost. I hope people are able to internalise that and sit with themselves after the book is over and think about what we are doing as lawyers. Are we doing the right things? Are we doing enough?"

Brar also says that the central theme between the articles she writes for Bar & Bench and the book remains unchanged. One of those musings is on the nature of justice.

"When there is so much divide as we see now, do you even see that what you are doing is criminal? Or are you not even able to see each other as equal human beings? So that is an interesting jurisprudential question. Because intention is not only the intention in the moment. Intention is what has been built in your psyche from your social, political, all kinds of conditioning. So that is an interesting question to me."

On why a lawyer whose legal practice is focused primarily on commercial law and arbitration chose a criminal trial and a tribal setting for her book, Brar said,

"I think every lawyer, when they start out, has a human rights inclination for why they want to do law. I started in the same way. You have these dreams of being that lawyer who can save helpless people. That is a part of the law that still holds a lot of fascination for me. Besides, I have also done criminal cases so it is not an alien field to me."

You can purchase the The Figure in The Fog on Amazon at this link.

Disclaimer: Manini Brar is a regular columnist with several published articles on Bar & Bench.