JUDGMENT

KRISHNA IYER, J. :—A small event may mark a great portent as this tiny proceeding for eviction, from a mini-shop of a little man, will presently disclose.

2. The appellant, a Harijan by birth and a cobbler by vocation, was a petty tenant of the eastern half of a shop in Ram Bazar, Simla. The original landlord passed away and his sons, the respondents, stepped into his shoes a legal representatives. He filed a petition for eviction of the appellant-tenant under S. 13 (2) (ii) (b) of the East Punjab Urban Rent Restriction Act, 1949, as applied to Himachal Pradesh on the ground that the premises were being used for a purpose other than the one for which they were let out. The Rent Controller having held in favour of the landlord, an eviction order ensued. The appellate authority reversed this finding and dismissed the petition for eviction. The High Court, in revision, reversed the appellate decision and restored the Rent Controllers order. The cobbler-appellant, in the last lap of litigation, has landed in this Court. The poverty of the appellant is reflected in the chequered career of the case in this Court where it was dismissed more than one for default in payment but ultimately, thanks to the persistence of the appellant, he got this Courts order to pay the balance amount extended. He complied with that direction and thus could not be priced out of the justice market, if we may use that expression.

3. The short point for adjudication is as to whether the respondent landlord made out the statutory ground for eviction, of having diverted the building for a use radically different from the one for which it was let, without his consent. There is no case of written consent put forward by the tenant. But he contested the landlords claim by asserting that there was no specific commercial purposes inscribed in the demise and, therefore, it was not possible to postulate a diversion of purpose. Secondly, he urged that, even assuming that the letting was for a commercial purpose, the fact that he had cooked his food or stayed at night in the rear portion of the small shop did not offend against S. 13 (2) (ii) (b) of the Act.

4. S. 13 (2) (ii) (b) reads :

"used the building ...... for a purpose other than that for which it was leased."

5. The factual matrix may be shortly projected; for as Mr. Justice Cardozo luminously stated :

"More and more we lawyers are awaking to a perception of the truth that what divides and distracts us in the solution of a legal problem is not so much uncertainty about the law as uncertainty about the facts - the facts which generate the law. Let the facts be known as they are, and the law will sprout from the seed and turn its branches toward the light."*(1)

* (1) Benjamin Nathan Cardozo "What Medicine can do for Law" address before the New York Academy of Medicine Nov. 1 1928 - Readings in Law and Psychiatry.

A cobbler - the appellant - was the lessee of a portion of a shop in Ram Bazar, Simla, since 1963, on an annual rent of Rs. 300 (i.e. Rs. 25 per month). Ex. P1, the lease deed, disclosed no purpose; but inferentially it has been held by the High Court that the lease being of a shop the purpose must have been commercial. Possible; not necessarily sure. The actual life-situations and urban conditions of India, especially where poor tradesmen like cobblers, candle-stick makers, cycle repairers and tanduri bakers, take out small spaces on rent, do not warrant an irresistible inference that if the lease is of a shop the purpose of the lease must be commercial. It is common knowledge that in the small towns - why even in the big cities, - little men plying little crafts and possessing little resources take on lease little work places to trade and to live, the two being interlaced for the lower, larger bracket of Indian humanity. You struggle to make a small income and work late into the night from early in the morn and, during intervals, rest your bones in the same place, drawing down the shutters of the sho