ABSTRACT
The author seeks permission to highlight the gravitational power that paper has in the courtroom through an ethnographic vignette from the trial of Mohammed Hanif. The names of places and persons have been changed to maintain confidentiality. The anti-terror police in Delhi, called the 'Special Cell', claimed that Hanif had gone to a southern city, Manipal, where he met a handler who provided him with the explosives. The police claim that in order to contact this handler, they used a public telephone that was operated by a witness, Anthony. Four years later Anthony was summoned to the court to identify the person who made the call from his telephone booth. When Anthony appeared before the Delhi trial court it was clear that he did not understand or speak Hindi or Urdu, the languages spoken in Delhi's trial courts. The examination began in a mixture of English and Hindi, which Anthony struggled to understand and to speak, but somehow managed.
