Books

On Uncivil Lines

A Rs 60 crore Delhi property. Salman's in the courts again.

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On Uncivil Lines
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Address 4, Flagstaff Road, in Delhi’s posh Civil Lines
Property size 5,373 sq yards
Estimated current value Upwards of Rs 60 crore
Courtroom battle Going on for 30 years now
Occupied By two families, the Lals and the Jains

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"Once divided, always divided; in that household it was a fightto the bloody finish."
—Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh

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The Moor's Last Sigh
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Shani Lal in her drawing room

The Jain clan has good-sized homes in Civil Lines, but nowhere near the size of the Rs 60-crore prize they have their sights set on. Unfortunately for them, it's a prize that Rushdie also has his eyes on—even if the house, as Shankardass agrees, does not have for him the emotional resonance of Windsor Villa, the Bombay home he grew up in. He once wrote that he "felt an abyss opening up under my feet" the day he heard his father had suddenly sold Windsor Villa, which features in his most celebrated work, Midnight's Children. As for 4, Flagstaff Road, it is just one of a prodigious number of properties that Anees, a very wealthy barrister with an appetite for real estate, owned—in Solan, in prime locations in Delhi, among them the upscale Aurangzeb Road, and in Mumbai. Anees, who moved from Delhi to Bombay shortly before Partition, and left India for good in 1963 (for Britain, says Shankardass, not Pakistan, as is commonly believed), sold many of these properties. Others, like this one, got mired in court cases.

As this particular case trundled its way through the courts, compromises were attempted, according to Shankardass, but fell through. "The Jain brothers approached me from time to time for a compromise, but they have to be realistic," he says enigmatically. Arvind Jain, however, denies approaching Rushdie's lawyer, and says the family has no intention of compromising. It's a waiting game, and it's anybody's guess how long that wait will be. The story has well-etched plots and subplots, but the final chapter is yet to be written.

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