Sanjay Dutt is in his tiny cell in Pune and Pramod Dattatrey Kode is back in his special TADA court. It’s been a busy season. After 12 death sentences, 20 life sentences and then the one case that had the nation rivetted, the 55-year-old judge is back at doing what he’s best known for — meticulously dotting all his i’s and crossing his t’s.

The man who sealed the fate of over 100 people accused of being involved in the March 1993 serial blasts of Mumbai is also known for his sangfroid. People who are acquainted with him say that the élan emerges from his knowledge of the law. “It is this that makes him so formidable,” says the Central Bureau of Investigation’s deputy superintendent of police Raman Tyagi who handled the case. “Lawyers sometimes fumbled before him. He took no time to zero in on the loopholes in the defence.”

Yet neither the prosecution nor the defence has accused him of high-handedness or being partial. Some may differ with him about the severity of a sentence, but nobody denies that he is a judge who goes by the rule book.

Perhaps his style of working has earned him the sobriquet of a slow judge. Kode took 12 years to bring the curtains down on the trial. But then, he had to weave his way through 13,000 pages of oral evidence; 7,000 pages of documentary evidence and 6,700 pages of statements by the accused.

“He was like a king who presided over his fiefdom. He didn’t allow anybody to rule his little court and he dominated it like a larger-than-life figure,” says a legal observer. A lawyer, who does not wish to be named, says the trial made him more “polished.” He says: “His English improved and his reasoning became very sound. He was aware the Supreme Court would eventually go over his judgements, so he was very careful.”

Anywhere else, he’d come under immense scrutiny for presiding over such a high-profile court. But little is known of the man who was born to a humble family and lived in a small house on the fringes of Thane’s Masunda lake. His father was acquainted with the then legal luminary of Thane, Ramakant Ovalekar, the man who unglued then Maharashtra chief minister A.R. Antulay from the cement scandal. Senior Kode asked Ovalekar to take his son under his wing. While working as a lawyer in Ovalekar’s chamber, Pramod Kode pored over piles of books on law and learnt the ropes of the trade from his mentor.

Strangely, when he was in the sessions court in Mumbai in the early nineties, he was generally known as a judge who didn’t go for heavy convictions. Lawyer Subhash Kanse recalls that he was called an “acquittal-minded” judge. He recalls a case where a group of men was accused of kidnapping a girl from Calcutta and forcing her into prostitution. Kode acquitted the accused for lack of evidence.

But his claim to fame is the special TADA court. Judge Pramod Kode presided over the March 1993 serial blasts trial for over 12 years. He continues to be with the court, which is likely to take its time winding up, for the judgements have to be formally issued. He took over the case from Judge J.N. Patel in March 1996 after Patel was elevated — and since then lived with the cases every waking moment.The day Kode’s father died, he was in court and had to be persuaded to go home. The next day he was back at work after cremating his father, and he did the same when his mother died. Friends recall that he did not allow the upheavals in his personal life to cloud his professional work. The judge also didn’t take a single day’s leave in the last 12 years.

Over the years, he was almost like a family to the accused — which is one reason for his sentences being received with equanimity. Everybody bowed in respect, except accused Yakub Memon, who said, “God, forgive him for he does not know what he has done.”

Among all the accused, Kode’s handling of the cases relating to Sanjay Dutt and Yakub Memon was something that many of the defence lawyers — with whom he had a good rapport — didn’t agree with.

“I felt the death sentence on Yakub Memon was very harsh. I told Kode that Yakub didn’t participate in the training in Pakistan or in Shekhadi or Dighi in India for smuggling RDX,” says defence lawyer Subhash Kanse. “I told him that we were simply going by the CBI version that Yakub Memon was captured in India while ignoring the body of evidence that he had come back on his own.”

But Judge Kode was very secretive and never discussed the cases. He had a computer at home where he typed his judgements. Nobody had any inkling of what he had in his mind. So when the spate of death sentences followed, his peers were surprised. For a man known for his acquittals, he had pronounced the death sentence on every bomber who placed a bomb, irrespective of whether it went off or not.

The judge, known for his integrity, also has a deeply religious side. A firm believer in astrology, he has rings on almost every finger and is a devotee of the Shirdi Sai Baba. He believes nine is his lucky number, and eight doesn’t gel with his stars.

On the occasional weekends when it was possible for him to slip away from the mounds of paper work, Kode would rush to Shirdi, some 200 km from Mumbai, with his Z-category security. On Tuesdays, he would visit the Siddhivinayak Ganesha temple in Prabhadevi and the Mahalaxmi temple in south Mumbai.

Last week, on Ashadi Ekadashi, considered an auspicious day by Maharashtrians, Judge Kode refused to hand out any sentences. In his spare time in the courts, Kode, who loves to talk about the problems that technology poses, would offer solutions to the country’s problems. The vicious circle of crime, he holds, will come to an end only when villagers are self-sufficient and stop migrating to the cities where they are forced to live in slums. The sociology of crime, observers say, fascinates him.

And, seemingly, so does cinema. Kode urged Sanjay Dutt to be like Gregory Peck — and hoped that he’d act till he was 100. Judges, alas, have a retirement age.