Honour Bound

ON A COLD, DAMP DAY IN JANUARY 1975, a young Parsi lawyer took the cheapest flight out of Mumbai to the city of his dreams – London. With youthful enthusiasm, he was raring to take the English courts by storm. Little did he anticipate the challenges that lay ahead – back in those days the City was largely unwelcoming of outsiders and run by a network of old boys’ clubs. Just getting a foot in the door seemed a big ask.

Four decades later, sitting on a bench outside his country home overlooking the English Channel, the view is very different. In Honour Bound, Sarosh Zaiwalla looks back on his career – from his passage to England at a time when diversity had barely begun to take root in its legal circles, to now leading a ground-breaking law firm.

In an eventful life, Zaiwalla has walked the corridors of power and rubbed shoulders with ministers, diplomats, industrialists and celebrities. His memoir is filled with drama and intrigue, from instructing a young barrister called Tony Blair to dealing with some of the biggest cases ever heard.

While he still has many chapters ahead of him (a lawyer never retires after all), some of the cases that have concluded have created a storm in India and feature a diverse cast, including Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, V.P. Singh, the Hinduja brothers, the Dalai Lama, Benazir Bhutto and the Bachchans.

This is the story of a solicitor who made his way on his own terms, with creativity but without ever compromising on his values. In this bold yet measured tale of trial and triumph, Zaiwalla tells all – as much as lawyer-client privilege permits, of course.