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.

The institute bus started seconds after I boarded it. 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 heavenwards 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 came. 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 close 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. There seemed to be

no going back. Suddenly, in the twinkling 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 bus.

Relieved, we turned to see the cat triumphantly twirling our saviour, an unfortunate rat, on which it had lunged. No glamourous model sashaying alluringly down the ramp could have compared with this tantalising catwalk!