By the time Chewing Gum Banerjee had become an adult, the ancestral property had many claimants. It was divided into four parts by the head of the previous generation, eight by the head of the current, and if this trend continued for one more generation, there would be no more rooms to divide. Some enterprising relatives of Banerjee’s grandfather’s cohort had banded together to start a new venture. The head of the Hindu undivided family at the time, in the conservative spirit of their age, refused to sign as a surety on the loan papers. The loan could not be procured. The capital could not be raised. The project did not take off. They were neither the first nor the last generation in the Banerjee family to be hamstrung by the previous. The trait of extinguishing the spirit of enterprise was transmitted intergenerationally in the Banerjee household. In line with their own experience from their younger ambitious days, the next generation vetoed all the projects of the young. Cousins, uncles and aunts, as a matter of tradition and principle, filed new cases in court and prolonged old ones, to the effect that the ancestral property remained under permanent dispute. While the cases ran for decades, the price of their land and holdings depreciated, similar to other properties of uncertain tenure. That one of the Banerjees worked in the civil disputes court only helped maintain this status quo. He was known as Judicial Banerjee. In the first month, he was called Legal Banerjee but then someone called out ‘there goes Legal Banerjee and the rest of the illegal Banerjees’. A month later, they decided on Civil Banerjee, but encountered the same problem: civil/uncivil Banerjees. They were glad that he was not in the criminal disputes section—imagine being called Criminal Banerjee. There was already a Revenue Banerjee. Finally, because of his penchant for the phrase ‘but this is a judicial matter’, despite being in charge of canteen services at the civil disputes court, the sobriquet ‘Judicial’ Banerjee stuck.