Dr Purnima Chauhan, IAS (retd) as Secretary to Govt. of HP
The Civil Service generally evokes the image of a boring, ponderous, self-centred, file pushing, powerful nuisance with convoluted governance processes that one would avoid encountering until driven to the bureaucratic wall. ‘Humour in uniform’ doesn’t seem to have a place in the Civil Service world. Yet in my three and a half decades career I can recall umpteen mirthful instances buried in thick files; in the obscure ‘Hinglish’ notes written by babus aspiring to master the English language; and in odd twist that transformed serious circumstances into the butt of many jokes shared by colleagues at the IAS dinners. One such instance happened within days of my joining the Service.
It had been the most eventful fortnight of my life. Combining the staid Civil Services Training with my whirlwind wedding was no mean feat. The urgent message to join other probationers for a three-day rifle and pistol shooting stint at Junga, promptly jerked me out of my honeymoon reverie. After all these were mandated tests that each probationer had to pass to be confirmed. I was keen to see Junga which seemed so far from Shimla and is virtually its peripheral colony today.
The rickety bus of the Himachal Pradesh Institute of Public Administration (HIPA) started seconds after I boarded it. This oddball vehicle looked like a mutant of a truck and a written off bus making us all wonder if HIPA was financially sound. The sudden slamming of brakes jolted us rudely to an unscheduled halt. We anxiously craned our necks out of the window.
The driver of the bus was looking heaven-wards fearfully. He was mechanically chanting the Gayatri Mantra as if in a hypnotic trance. We followed his gaze to a black cat which was sauntering across the road.
“We can’t go any further,” he declared. “This cat has crossed our path.”
So, what was the need to be alarmed, we asked. Such superstitions were antiquated! His contemptuous glare seemed to label us all as a bunch of sceptical heretics. His dramatic moustaches quivered in anger as he dismissed us, “Yeh modern kaliyug ke zamaane waale kya jaante hain?” He unequivocally declared that he would not budge an inch from that spot. Imagine inviting the fury of the Gods merely to get a bunch of greenhorn probationers to their destination?
This was no dithering Hamlet, our driver. Persuasion failed to shake his belief. Suddenly inspiration dawned. All such superstitions have an upaaye, an expedient solution! I asked him. He condescendingly revealed that we could proceed only if a vehicle from the opposite direction crossed us. That seemed simple enough!
All eyes turned to look in the distance for a moving object. For two hours we kept up our vigil but nothing moved on the horizon. Hopes faded since the route to Junga was not well frequented. The possibility of being stranded for hours without encountering another vehicle was fast becoming a reality.
Just then the glare of sun on glass in the distance caught my eye. Hurray! It was a rickety old jeep trundling up the incline towards us. We held our breath expectantly, almost willing it to bridge the distance between us faster.
Suddenly, we heard the driver guffaw loudly. Sadistically amused, he was looking straight into the eyes of the same cat! This feline villain of the piece had been sleeping out in the sun. It now awoke, languorously stretched itself to its mischievous length and turned its half-open eyes towards the approaching jeep. Now, if it crossed the path of that jeep, and if that driver too was a diehard believer like ours, we would be left gazing haplessly at each other. We were totally at the mercy of this cat’s walk. Junga was miles away. The thought of walking there in my kohlapuri chappals was rather unpleasant.
The cat poised itself critically on the roadside, ready to jump across the path of the approaching vehicle. Blissfully unaware of being our messiah, the jeep driver looked nonplussed on seeing a busload of anxious faces stranded in the middle of nowhere.
As the jeep was within a yard of the bus, the cat majestically began to cross its path! We held our breath! There seemed no going back on our dismal fate. In the flash of an eye, the cat about-turned and jumped back. The jeep crossed us! The spell was broken! A joyful shout went up as our driver turned on the ignition of the rickety bus. We all heaved a sigh of relief on resuming our forward movement!
As we turned to see the cat it was triumphantly twirling our saviour, an unfortunate rat, on which it had lunged. The allure of the poor, martyred rat had tempted the cat to about turn without completing its ominous road crossing!
No glamorous model sashaying alluringly down the ramp could have compared with this tantalising catwalk that had held us hostage with our captor oblivious of the power it wielded as derived from embedded superstitions!
