“TeaImmy, let’s go for a walk,” ordered my new boss, one evening when we were in a sparsely populated operational area. We had walked about a kilometer and he used me as a sounding board for his plans. It suddenly froze after a cat crossed our path. “Let’s wait here,” he said.
Then I realized that he was a superstitious person. He wanted someone else to cross the path that the wild cat described as “unlucky”.
“I’ll cross the path, sir. I’m not superstitious,” I gladly volunteered and went about the exit, when he grabbed me by the hand and roared, “don’t be a fool.” I, then a captain, was delighted by his concern for me. “What a fine example of following Chetvod’s principle,” I said to myself. We try to live by the words of Field Marshal Philip Chatwood, an officer in the Armed Forces, who calls upon us to ensure that the honor, welfare and comfort of the men commanded by us are second only to the security, dignity and welfare of our nation. comes on. Here my new boss was so worried about me. But he poured cold water on it and said, “If anything happens to you, it will still be my problem.”
Although he was reconciling to wait there, I began to feel uneasy. I conveyed my concerns to him, “Sir, this area is uninhabited. Only the personnel of our unit are likely to come like this. Maybe a dispatch rider or a store collection vehicle. If they cross it…” She silenced me, “Speak good luck.” (“Say something auspicious”, which stems from another superstition that one should refrain from saying anything inauspicious, lest one should say something bad. May it be true.)
In my enthusiasm to help the boss overcome that situation, I offered another solution, “Sir, who knows when someone will come this way, why don’t we return to our unit location, if allowed to go further. Isn’t it?” That was also not acceptable to him, as it meant Cat-1, Boss-0. He was irritated by my suggestions when suddenly the same cat, chased by the dog, returned to where it had come from.
“What now, sir,” I asked. “Now what happened?”
Perhaps he had not encountered such a situation before and was unaware that a cat going to one side alone and returning in the same way with a dog on his heels was not good or bad. Also no human had crossed the path yet. Seeing the confusion he was in, I hammered the last nail, “Sir, it’s like two negatives making up a positive. So the original crossing is cancelled. The dog chasing him is another positive sign, please. Let us go.” Although not completely convinced, he reluctantly agreed because this strange situation was not included in his superstition rulebook. We were on our way, though he wasn’t his normal self after that.
Later, before retiring for the night, he called me on the field telephone to check on me and I was relieved to hear that all was well and that nothing untoward had happened anywhere near us. I lulled myself to sleep while humming the iconic rendition of one of my favorite numbers from Rod Stewart in the late 1960s, “I’m not superstitious, but a black cat crossed my path, bad luck to me.” Haven’t found it yet, and I won’t let it stop me now.
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