The Things They Never Taught Us in Law School

Few days later, I got a call. I had been selected. It was my first internship. I was excited. Extremely excited. I walked into that office with the enthusiasm of someone who had just been handed the keys to the legal profession. I read files, memorized statutes and researched precedents. I tried to absorb each and everything around me.

For the first time, the things I had been studying in classrooms began appearing in front of me as actual files, actual disputes, actual people. The partner himself did not pay much attention to me. I was placed under the supervision of one of his associates, Rahim, Rahim became my mentor. He used to teach me everything about the profession, and for a while, I genuinely enjoyed the place.

Then came Khojo. A man from a place with a very peculiar name joined the office as an associate. He was in his early forties and had completed his law degree in his late thirties. I never paid much attention to him at first. As far as I could tell, his principal occupation was being the partner's favorite. His intellectual universe was one I never quite managed to understand. He could sound like a feminist in one sentence and then somehow arrive at a thoroughly misogynistic conclusion in the next. It was a peculiar talent.

Still, I ignored him. Or at least, I tried to.

Then a new batch of interns arrived. Khojo began giving me instructions.

“Keep them under your foot.”

“Act like an associate.”

“You're a senior intern now.”

A senior intern. I still don't know what that was supposed to mean. Senior intern? Really? It was perhaps the funniest promotion I had ever received. I had not been given a designation, a salary, or even additional authority. Apparently, I had been given interns to intimidate.

Khojo wanted me to stay away from them. Naturally, I did the exact opposite. I started talking to them. Then laughing with them. Then spending time with them. And whenever Khojo saw us laughing together, something inside him seemed to malfunction. We noticed. We discussed it.

And, as is customary among bored law students with too much time and too little supervision, we gave him a name. A beautiful name. A name worthy of history.

ANWAR RATOL.

A mango originating from Sindh. And somehow, it stuck.

My fellow interns and I clicked almost immediately. Most of us were in the early years of law school, except one. We had very little in common academically, but we had discovered something far more powerful:

We could make fun of absolutely everything.

Every person. Every room. Every chair. Every sofa. Every roof. Nothing was safe.

We created a WhatsApp group where we spilled the tea of the day. It was not really a WhatsApp group. It was a digital crime scene. And we laughed. We laughed until our stomachs hurt. Somehow, somewhere between the gossip and the lunches, these people stopped feeling like fellow interns. They became siblings. We ate together. We laughed together. We complained together. Sometimes, we cried together.

And our pupil master, who was not particularly fond of our habit of disappearing together, seemed almost jealous that we never roamed around with him. Then came the lectures. There were always lectures. But after a while, I began to realize that the lectures were not really about teaching me. They were about me. He would make fun of me. Scold me for doing nothing. Humiliate me over things that mattered to nobody except him. The irony was that he himself seemed perfectly capable of doing absolutely nothing. But I remained quiet. Not because I was afraid. Because I respected his age.

That distinction mattered to me. Perhaps it mattered too much. I never answered him back. I never threw his own words in his face. I never humiliated him the way he humiliated me. I simply absorbed it. I became very Kafkaesque at that time.

And I remember what that felt like. I remember leaving the office and sitting on my way home, trying to hold myself together. I remember the words replaying in my head long after the office had disappeared behind me. I remember crying. Not because I had done something wrong. But because I had done nothing wrong and was still being made to feel as though I had.

Perhaps that was the strangest part. I had never disrespected him. Never deliberately offended him. Never given him a reason to treat me the way he did. Yet I became his easiest target. Because I was quiet. And quiet people are often mistaken for weak people.

He was a religious man. At times, I found myself wondering where all those teachings about kindness, patience and humanity disappeared when he was standing in front of me. That experience left me with a thought that has stayed with me ever since:

A person can be religious without necessarily being humane.

The two should never have been separated, but sometimes they are. And I had witnessed the separation firsthand.

Eventually, one of the interns managed to leave. I was jealous of her. Not because I wanted her gone. Because I wanted to leave too. I wanted to walk out of that office, close the door behind me, and never hear another lecture again. But I did not have the courage to confront that man. I knew what would happen. Another lecture. Another humiliation. Another journey home pretending that I was fine.

Then, one by one, all my fellow interns left. The office became quieter. The WhatsApp group became quieter. Lunch became something I remembered rather than something I did. And I was still there. So, I devised a plan. If I could not bring myself to resign, I would make them fire me. It seemed logical. I started staying at home and going to the office only three times a week. I thought someone would notice.

Eventually, another batch of interns arrived. And, naturally, I started talking to them. We gossiped about the office. We laughed about the people there. We created another WhatsApp group. The tradition continued. I was once again the one spilling the tea. I had no idea that this time, there was a traitor among us. He sent everything to the partner. Everything. The next day, we were called into the office. The partner took out his phone. Opened the messages. And showed us the conversation. My messages. He started laughing.

“I wasn't expecting this from you,” he said.

Then came the lecture. Morality. Professionalism. Respect.

The irony of being lectured about morality using evidence obtained from a WhatsApp group was apparently lost on him. But something had changed. For once, I did not feel embarrassed. I started laughing too. I looked at him. Gave him a death stare. And said:

“I'm done with this. Today is my last day.”

He did not argue. He did not lecture me again. He simply smiled. A fake smile. And I walked out. That was it. No dramatic goodbye. No final speech. No music playing in the background. Just a door closing behind me. And, strangely enough, I felt lighter.

Looking back, I probably would have left that place much earlier if I had never met those interns. But then I would have missed the best part of the internship. I still miss them. I miss the gossip. I miss the lunches. I miss the ridiculous conversations. I miss the laughter that somehow made an otherwise miserable place bearable. Most of all, I miss the people.

I wish I could have left with them. But perhaps life rarely gives us the exits we want. Sometimes, we leave late. Sometimes, we leave angry. Sometimes, we leave after being pushed to the edge. And sometimes, we leave carrying something far more valuable than the reason we went there in the first place. I left with memories. I left with stories. And, perhaps, I left with a few friends for life. I assume.

But the internship left something else behind. It changed the way I looked at religion. Every religion in the world teaches humanity in one form or another. Yet I learned that wearing religion on your sleeve does not automatically make you a good human being.

You can pray, preach and quote scriptures. You can speak endlessly about morality. But if the person standing in front of you leaves feeling smaller, humiliated, and worthless because of the way you treated them, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Religion was never supposed to be a costume. And humanity was never supposed to be optional. Perhaps that is what I carried away from that office. Not the statutes, precedents or case files. Not even the lessons about law. It was something much simpler.

Anyways. I remember one more thing, that when I was leaving the place, Anwar Ratol suddenly became sentimental.

“Abdullah, you were a good guy. What happened to you?”

It was a dramatic thing to say at the exit of a law firm, but before I could decide whether I was supposed to feel guilty, betrayed, or merely confused, Anwar promoted himself.

Apparently, he was the Senior Associate of the firm. Senior Associate. After two months. I stared at him for a moment, waiting for him to give some sort of justification. There wasn't one. My brain had stopped braining by then.

I couldn't tell whether he was referring to his age or his designation. In the conventional legal universe, becoming a Senior Associate usually requires years of practice and progression through the ranks. Anwar, however, appeared to have discovered a more efficient route: simply announce it. Two months. Senior Associate. At that rate, I suppose partnership was scheduled for Thursday and ownership of the building by Friday. And Anwar did not stop there. From time to time, he would casually inform us that he had been given the authority to “govern the entire firm.”

Govern.

It was a magnificent word for someone whose principal weapon appeared to be saying magnificent things.

He delivered these declarations with such solemnity that I initially wondered whether I had missed a board meeting. Perhaps, while we were busy researching cases, Anwar had quietly been crowned Emperor of Corporate Affairs. Perhaps there had been an election or I failed to check my emails.

But no.

It was just our beloved Anwar Ratol.

He was, in the most endearing sense, a child playing with the vocabulary of power. He had discovered that certain words—authority, govern, senior associate—sounded intimidating when spoken confidently, and he used them accordingly. I suppose every workplace has one person who mistakes volume for hierarchy. We had Anwar Ratol.

And then, as if the firm had not already provided enough material for satire, I later discovered what had happened to the Most Senior Associate of Our Previous Trauma.

He had apparently escaped. Not merely escaped, in fact. He had started his own independent legal practice after leaving his position as Managing Partner. I learned this through LinkedIn, the great digital cemetery where lawyers bury modesty.

His professional update announced his new practice with the confidence one would expect from a man who had finally broken free from the shackles of institutional employment. I clicked through, expecting perhaps constitutional litigation, corporate advisory, commercial arbitration—something suitably grand for a former Managing Partner.

Instead, I discovered that his current professional life seemed to involve two principal activities:

hiring interns and arguing post-arrest bail matters in Family Court.

I am not making this up. This was, more or less, what his own LinkedIn post conveyed. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I had misunderstood the entire legal profession. Perhaps this was the natural career progression. First, you become Managing Partner. Then you leave the firm. Then you establish an independent practice. Then you hire an unlimited supply of interns. And finally, you spend your days arguing bail matters in places where, depending on the case, bail is not even the most conceptually comfortable thing to be arguing about.

I assume he was representing the juvenile. I should probably mention that I am not entirely sure.

At this point, certainty seemed unnecessarily ambitious. The strange thing was that none of this surprised me anymore. After Anwar Ratol had become Senior Associate in two months and acquired the authority to govern an entire firm, my standards for professional absurdity had been permanently recalibrated.

Law, I had discovered, was not merely a profession of statutes, precedents, pleadings and principles. It was also theatre. There were titles to perform, authority to announce, interns to recruit, LinkedIn posts to publish, and occasionally a courtroom in which someone had to stand up and argue something with a straight face.

And somewhere in all of this were the interns.

The poor interns. Every firm has them: young, ambitious, sleep-deprived creatures carrying files they haven't been allowed to read and making tea for people who have spent the morning explaining the Rule of Law to them.

I only hope that none of his interns are being infected with what I privately call Main Character Syndrome—that peculiar occupational illness in which every ordinary professional development is interpreted as the beginning of an epic career narrative. After all, if two months can make someone a Senior Associate, imagine what six months can do.

Perhaps Managing Partner, Governor and finally, an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Larkana.

At this point, I wouldn't rule anything out.