In his 54 years, Judge Pramod Dattatreya Kode, who’s handling the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts trial, had several opportunities to be the man of the moment. He could have got his share of five minutes of fame in his 25-year career anytime he wanted. After all, he kick-started his career in the chamber of advocate Ramakant Ovalekar — a giant in the legal fraternity who got former Maharashtra chief minister A.R. Antulay acquitted in the troublesome cement scam.

Kode followed in the footsteps of his illustrious godfather. Like Ovalekar, he was thorough and an authority on his subject. A senior advocate in the Thane district and session court who was in the same chamber remembers Kode as “somebody who could cite cases offhand without referring to them or doing any homework”.

So it is no surprise that Kode went through 13,000 pages of oral evidence; 7,000 pages of documentary evidence and 6,700 pages of statements of the accused in the Mumbai blasts. And now, as the case draws to an end, he is expected to regurgitate all this matter in 3,000 pages of verdict involving the 123 accused in the case.

But then, even as an advocate Pramod Kode was known to be meticulous. A colleague recalls the way he presented his cases before judges. “First he used to fill in the facts of the case, then the law applicable and lastly how that law was applicable to that matter,” he says. “Many lawyers botch up a case by presenting it in a haphazard fashion. But Kode was different.”

His background, too, was different. The son of a blue-collar worker, Kode lived in a small house near the city’s famous landmark, the Masunda lake. After he completed his law degree, his father implored Ovalekar, whom he knew well, to take the young boy under his wing.

In the initial days, Kode — who would gorge on missal, a concoction of gram, onion and chanachur cooked in a thin spicy gravy, from the canteen — was known as a reserved man who would not easily mix with the rest of the legal crowd. But he was at the same time somebody who went out of his way to help those who worked under him,” says a lawyer who was Kode’s junior in Ovalekar’s chamber, recalling the “fairly large number of cases” that he passed on to him.

Not all recollections are pleasant, though. Kode also had the habit of chewing tobacco. “He would chew tobacco like crazy. He would bring a dabba of paan masala with him. He would take out a sizeable portion of the paan masala, mix it with some scented tobacco, turn it into a ball the size of a ladoo and then put that in his mouth. For the next half-an-hour you could not speak to him,” a former colleague recalls. Later, when he became a judge, he was discreet enough to carry a paper cone into which he spat out the remnants of the tobacco.

There were other changes in his life, too. After he took over the blasts trial, he complained to his old lawyer friends in Thane about the lack of a social life since he had been placed under the high risk Z-category security drill. But despite the difficulties, the judge — who once had quite a collection of birds in his house — laboured on. He lived with the case every day and was a permanent fixture in the make-shift TADA court in Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail almost every single day in the last 10 years (he inherited the case from another judge who handled it for three years). Advocate Farhana Shah, who represents over 80 accused in the case, says that Judge Kode also made it to the court the day his mother died in 1999 and his father, in 2001.

But there was a human side to his professional armour. Once he allowed a key accused in the blasts case to attend his mother’s funeral. When 78-year-old Sharif Parkar — accused among other things of helping one Dawood Taklya from Raigad to go to Dubai to meet the don, Dawood Ibrahim — lost his mother, Kode helped him to attend her funeral. He was also accommodating with actor Sanjay Dutt who was allowed to travel abroad for his film shoots.

During the 10 years that he helmed the trial, Judge Kode had to also deal with some not-so-weighty issues that propped up during the course of the trial. Once, residents of Al Hussaini building in Mahim, where one of the main accused, Tiger Memon, lived and fled from, complained of a foul smell emanating from the sealed house. So Kode had to intervene to break the seal and get the place cleaned up. On another occasion, a famous schizophrenic actress, now deceased, sent letters to him declaring that she had details of an international conspiracy behind the blasts.

Kode had to deal with all that and more. During the 2003 Cricket World Cup, for instance, television sets were installed in one of the most sensitive cells of the jail after some inmates expressed the desire to watch the World Cup matches.

But critics believe that the case has dragged on for too long. “The wheels of Justice Kode’s court have been churning slowly,” was what one police officer had to say on the case. The verdict has been postponed to September, but there is hope that justice may be round the corner. The wheels may be slow, but as long as they continue to move, Judge Kode would have done his job.