You can only enter the Karnataka High Court on official business - no tourists allowed. Fortunately, I’m only a tourist after 5pm.

The building itself is built in what Wikipedia assures me is a Graeco-Roman style. It is also bright red - on the outside. Inside, the corridors and cloisters are painted white, which removes something of the utterly striking appearance of the outside but is, I suppose, more conducive to sanity (given that it might be more difficult to conduct serious legal business inside a giant red castle). Inside, the building consists of endless shaded corridors, which connect up in strange and inexplicable ways, and staircases which lead up to floors which you could have sworn were in fact down.

The courtrooms are surprisingly small - except for the Chief Justice’s courtroom, which feels like a school assembly hall. The puisne judges’ courtrooms are furnished in dark woods and broken chairs; they feel used, little changed since the days of the Mysore High Court - the Constitution has evolved and the nation has evolved and the world has spun on and on, but the decor has not. The Chief Justice’s courtroom shines with veneer and polish, and the fluorescent lighting gives it a curiously sterile feel.

Oral arguments are digressive, frequently amusing and often completely inexplicable. Some judges are prone to soliloquies on the issues of the day, or the headlines, or the state of the nation - the sorrows of the middle class and the moral obliquy of tax evasion. Some judges have a terriers’ eye for the jugular - they seize on a particular point and they hammer it, again and again, unwilling to let the advocate escape what the judge clearly sees as their terrible, terrible shame.

Proceedings are generally conducted in English, lapsing into Kannada or Hindi as the capacities of the advocates or the mood of the judge may strike them. Some advocates are clearly more fluent in English than others, and different judges go to different lengths to accommodate them.

Even if floors seem to be on different levels from moment to moment, and even if the law zooms in different directions as the mood of the judge or the skill of the advocate would dictate, and even if a wrong turn leaves you falling back to the Wodeyers…it works, it really does seem to work and wheels do seem to spin and cogs seem to whir day by day, even if one cannot quite explain why.