Some tidbits from my practice in the District Court of Colombo

(Excerpted from A Life in the Law)

by Nimal Wikremanayake

After an initial period of hardship, my practice took off and by 1968 I had become one of the leading Junior Counsel in the District Court of Colombo. Everything was easy and I was not subjected to any exertion whatsoever.I had acquired a special car parking spot dose to the District Court of Colombo in the most unusual circumstances. Shortly after I was called to the Bar, I drove into the court complex and saw a vacant area there. I parked my car in a spot under the window of a large building.

I was unaware that the spot was near the Chief Justice’s chambers. An attendant came out from inside the courts and started screaming at me, ordering me to move my car. The chief attendant then came running out and said, “Do you know whom you are shouting at? That is Mr Guy Wikramanayake, the Queen’s Counsel’s son.’ The attendant apologized profusely to me for his rudeness and I never had any trouble parking my car by that window for the next 10 years.

When I left for court every morning, the servant woman would prepare my lunch, which consisted of rice and curry. I took this lunch to work in a large thermos flask called a tiffin carrier. When I arrived at court I would be met by an attendant who took my lunch into the lunch room where I had a special seat assigned to me. Then he would take my bag into the robing room and place it on a table in my Uncle Eric’s robing cupboard. Uncle Eric, Dad’s elder brother, had a special robing cupboard, one of the few in the robing room.

After 1967, as I was in court most days, I would give the attendant a list of the books I needed and told him which court they had to be taken to. He would collect these books from the library and take them to that court. Shortly before 10.30 am I would robe and go to court.By 1968,1 had two or three cases a day in the five District Courts. A small fee was paid to keep my case down when I was occupied in another court. Judges were accommodating so when they were told that I was on my feet in another court, they would keep the case down for me.

All of us advocates were paid in cash for all the cases we had on any one day. This was what I was to leave behind. The reverse occurs in Australia. A barrister has to wait, often a considerable period of time, before he receives his fees.I remembered the advice Michael Dias gave me when I was preparing for my final examination at Cambridge. His advice stood me in good stead in 1968. A proctor who briefed me regularly asked me whether I knew anything about the law of defamation. I knew nothing about it but I boldly said, “Of course, I know quite a lot about it.” Hearing this, he handed me three large defamation briefs.

I took a month off and went to Trincomalee on the east coast of Ceylon for a holiday to read Gatley on Libel and Slander from cover to cover three times in the month. When I came back, I won all three cases all against eminent Queen’s Counsel even though I had been only ten years at the bar.

A well-acted divorce case

By 1968 I had a large practice in the District Court in Colombo. A substantial part of it involved divorce work. I was young and enthusiastic, and reveled in breaking up marriages until the time I had a most unusual divorce case. My client’s brother had been gambling heavily and got into serious financial difficulties, My client, a woman, went to assist him and borrowed money from an Afghan money lender. Afghan money lenders were numerous in Ceylon and they had no respect for the Money Lending Act which kept the interest rate at 32 per cent. These Afghans charged 132 per cent per annum for one year and at the end of the year the loan was renegotiated.

What they did was if one borrowed Rs 10,000, the loan was fixed at Rs 20,000 with interest at a maximum of 32 per cent. At the end of a few years, the loan had blown up considerably. I successfully appeared in many money lending cases against these moneylenders later on in my career in Ceylon.

To return to my story, this poor lady went to a money lender to help her brother out. Soon she was heavily in debt. Her husband was furious and brought proceedings for divorce on the ground of constructive malicious desertion. My lady was a Pentecostalist and still loved her husband very much. She turned up for the consultation with her daughter, a slip of a girl of 16. Throughout the consultation, the daughter kept sobbing and crying and pleading with me to prevent her father divorcing her mother. What could I do?

When the case was called, I got up and asked the judge for his indulgence to open my case for the defendant. The judge and plaintiff’s counsel agreed. I started with the parties’ marriage. I spoke slowly and softly. You could hear a pin drop in the court. I spoke for twenty minutes, tracing their marriage, the ups and downs and the highs and lows. The love they had for each other. The gift they received when they had a baby girl. What a little treasure she was.

I had a purpose in this address, which was to break the little girl down. Suddenly the girl started screaming and yelling at the top of her voice, “Daddy, darling daddy, don’t divorce mummy!” It was a sight to behold. I went over to her, cradled her in my arms and pacified her. The judge looked over at my opponent and said, “Mr Sethukavalar, there is no way known that I am going to give your client a divorce.” The little girl saved the day for me. The parties were reconciled.

Now that I am on the subject of divorce, I might mention a strange divorce case my father was involved in. He was appearing for a co-respondent in a divorce case, a young man in his twenties who had one unusual feature: he was completely bald. As Dad was walking to court, he saw his opponent who was acting for the plaintiff/husband talking to a servant boy who was obviously giving evidence for the husband.

The advocate was facing the other way and did not see Dad. Dad stopped to light a cigarette and listened to the conversation. The advocate, Joe Fernandopulle, told the servant boy that the co-respondent would be seated behind the lawyer on the other side. Dad got the co-respondent to sit in the well of the court and got his brother, who had a full head of hair, to sit behind Dad. When giving evidence, the servant boy mistakenly identified the brother, so the case was lost.