A family plot of about two thousand four hundred square feet on a northern island, offered for transfer, with a buyer who had already agreed a price and wanted to pay a deposit that week.
We asked him to wait, and the waiting took four months.
The first thing we found was arithmetic. The plot measured on the ground was smaller than the paperwork said by a little over two hundred square feet, because a boundary wall had been rebuilt at some point a foot and a half inside the line on one side and the neighbour's store had been standing in the difference for years. That is not a dispute anybody had noticed and it is exactly the kind that arrives on the day somebody starts digging foundations. It was settled between the two families, in writing, with the council aware of it, before anything else happened.
The second thing was consent. Four people had to agree and one of them had been working overseas for six years. Everybody assured everybody that he would have no objection, and he did not, but an assurance is not a consent and a transfer that depends on somebody who never signed is a problem that surfaces years later. It took seven weeks to arrange properly.
The third thing was the building standing on it, which had never been recorded anywhere, and the position on the access track along the eastern edge, which turned out to be a habit rather than a road.
We set all of that out in a written opinion for 7,500 rufiyaa and then a lawyer carried it, which is the correct order and not the order anybody wanted at the time. The money moved last, on the day the last consent was in hand.
It completed. Everybody is still speaking to each other, including the neighbour, which on a small island matters more than the plot did.