There are some heartening memories as well. Sarada remembers how several people of other castes helped them through the hard times. People like Parameswaran Pillai, an upper caste court clerk with her husband, who was locally influential. ‘’He encouraged my husband to go out and mingle with everyone and ignore taunts. When things were bad, he once held my husband to him and told everyone in a crowd that he was his brother. When Balakrishnan became a High Court judge, Pillai had a special puja performed for him and asked me to give the prasad to Balakrishnan before he took office. He said Balakrishnan was his son too.’’

THIS was where Balakrishnan grew up, walking many kilometres a day to school and back, shifting from school to school as his father was transferred. ‘’He was a calm and soft boy, he never complained, and mostly kept to himself. I remember him sleeping on the floor under the only cot in the room. He would sit up late with his books under the kerosene lamp, and by the time he went to sleep, other kids occupied the cot,’’ his mother remembers.

By the time he was in college, expenses pinched all the more. ‘’His father used to seek help from the lawyers that he knew, to support him. Many local people helped him too, they loved Balakrishnan,’’ she adds. Balakrishnan eventually passed his Master’s in law, with a first rank. He enrolled as a lawyer soon after. In 1973, he became a Munsif judge, the same job that had him in awe when he used to take lunch for his father, the court clerk, many years earlier, when his father was still a court shirastadar. After a stint as a subjudge in Alappuzha, he became a Deputy Registrar at the Kerala High Court, which he quit soon to resume his law practice. In 1985, he was made a judge in the Kerala High Court.

... contd.