To Meher from Aitbaar,
Did getting married into the Baloch gang negatively affect your career as a lawyer ? And when did you realise that having a gang at your disposal meant you can get certain proofs that are otherwise hard to get legally ? Any interesting case files to share with us ?
Heyya girl!
I am a defence attorney who has defended quite a few bigshots who can be called morally ambiguous if not outright criminals so no, it didn't affect my career negatively at all, on the contrary, it just added to my notoriety. Rehman bhai's associates mostly avail my services now. But yes, I do take pro bono cases too in my leisure and at my own discretion. For a short period of time, common people were a little apprehensive of approaching me because, well in Lyari, Rehman Dakait's name might be synonymous with modern day Robin Hood but in Karachi and the rest of Sindh, he is still an infamous and very powerful warlord.
My father and brother are considered Pakistani aristocracy and thus are very well politically connected so getting information had never been much of an issue but yes, having the Baloch gang at my disposal has made the entire process much easier. Taking help of my brother or father usually made everything too exposed, too juicy for the media and too visible because of their reputations. Having an army of street rats who can tail anyone unnoticed and get information almost invisibly and most importantly noiselessly has been an unexpected blessing.
Once Siyahi helped me get not only the whereabouts of but also physically brought back the pregnant mistress of a very powerful politician whose wife had been accused of the mistress's murder and whom I had been trying to defend. The mistress was evidently alive and had been hidden in a seemingly abandoned warehouse in Kalakot. And Siyahi got her out within a single night and without the media getting wind of it.
Most of the case files are so high profile, almost all of them are under lock and key due to attorney client privileges but I can share one case that had been quite a twisted affair.
trigger warning : mentions of sexual assault.
I had to defend a man who had been raped by a woman and then accused by her of having raped her instead. She was only two years older than him and was his father's third wife. As a woman herself, who has always been quite vocal about women's safety and has notoriously always asked for the death sentence for rapists in every case that I have fought for abused women, you can imagine how difficult it would have been to fight a case such as this. It had been strange from the get go and I had almost refused it but then Uzair of all people told me that he has an intuition that the man is telling the truth.
For a man who has lived on the streets of Lyari for the better part of his childhood and fended off predators himself, I was inclined to listen to his gut instinct and I went forward with it. He was right. The woman had indeed drugged him and then raped him as we discovered during the course of the court case and our own investigation into the matter. Then she cried victim. It had been for money. The ailing husband would have removed the son from his will that would have given a major chunk of his property and liquid assets to that woman instead.
It had left quite a bitter aftertaste in my mouth.
The woman had been abused by her husband for the entirety of their marriage which we learned had been forced upon her as well. The son himself was a typical orthodox patriarch with archaic views on women and their roles in society like his father and had been flirting with his own step mother for months. But they hadn't slept together consensually. The woman may have thought that forcing it would have had the man remain quiet about the property issue and the sexual assault case. But instead the man won and I helped him.
I hated my client yet I did everything to defend him and prosecute the woman because rape is wrong, no matter the circumstances and the intentions and the gender.
I still think about that case some times and wonder about the dichotomy of morality versus justice versus the law.
