ARVIND KANJI MEHTA

High Court judge, birdwatcher and maker of Nakuru's most dreadful, beloved masala chai

Nobody remembers Justice Arvind Mehta raising his voice, which is exactly why everybody remembers the one time he did. A junior advocate had mocked a village witness for not knowing his own age; the judge put down his pen, asked the courtroom to stand and apologise to a man who had walked eleven kilometres to be heard, and then asked the junior to do the same. The court rose. The witness, by all accounts, was too astonished to speak.

Arvind was born in 1944 in Nakuru, above his father's hardware shop on Kenyatta Avenue, and grew up counting nails and weighing sacks of cement. He read law at the University of London, was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1967 and came home to practise in Nakuru because, he said, 'a town you owe is a town you stay in.' After fifteen years as an advocate he served as a magistrate, and in 1992 he was appointed to the High Court of Kenya, where he sat for seventeen years, known for short judgments, long silences and rulings that were almost never overturned.

Off the bench he was a different man: a birdwatcher who could name every flamingo colony on Lake Nakuru by its mood, a middling but passionate cricketer at Nakuru Sports Club, and the maker of a dreadful, much-loved masala chai which he served to lawyers, clerks and once a visiting judge from Uganda in chipped enamel mugs. He married Hansa in 1971 and spoiled her with silence and fresh jalebi on Sundays. He sat on the Nakuru Hindu Union committee for forty years and mentored dozens of young African, Asian and European lawyers without ever distinguishing between them.

Arvind died in Nakuru in September 2019 after a short illness, having finished, the family says, the crossword and his tea. He leaves Hansa, two children and three grandchildren.

“A judgment is only as good as the peace it leaves behind.”