Take it on faith

Col DS Cheema (retd)

Promotions in the Army have become much faster now than when I was in uniform. Because of the tough professional lives, there was a fierce competition for promotion to the next rank.

One evening, a friend who was also due for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, asked me to accompany him to someone who had the reputation of forecasting the future. The person we went to was a havildar from the local Signal Regiment. After sitting quietly for some time in the presence of Baba ji, as the havildar was famously called, my friend asked the question agitating his mind. Baba ji vigorously shook his head in denial. When I asked him the same question, I received an affirmative response. The prediction turned out to be true but only to that extent, as my friend later retired as a Brigadier.

When I was posted at Leh, the unit had a beautiful temple with huge idols of Lord Ram and Sita. The pandit ji, Bhardwaj Naib Subedar, was invariably the first to receive me, offering a prasad of ilaichi and mishri, and stamping the vermilion teeka on my forehead.

But being a self-proclaimed rationalist, I always kept him at a respectable distance. Leh was a station which was visited by many Generals from Delhi during the summer. When I called on one such visitor towards the end of my tenure, he felt I deserved a good ‘peace’ posting and suggested Bareilly in UP where my job would be exercising technical control over 18 static EME units. I readily agreed and flew back to Leh the next day, happy at the success of my visit. Our closed-door discussion was of extremely confidential nature, for obvious reasons.

On arrival at Leh, I sent for the pandit ji, and confidently asked him where I would be heading for posting, wanting to have a little harmless fun at his expense. After I had provided him the details he had asked for, he looked minutely at the lines of my right palm. I was not sure of the exact date, or even month and year of my birth, but gave him the details as in the official records.

When he came to my office the next day, I asked him to sit, perhaps for the first time in two years. He announced in Hindi: ‘Aap Uttar Bharat ka shehar jis ka naam baa se shuru hota hai ko prasthan karenge, Shriman.’

I didn’t know how to react because there was no way he could have known about my expected posting to Bareilly. I forced a faint smile and thanked him politely without throwing any hint that he had hit the nail on the head.

The next day, a signal was received in the divisional headquarters with a copy to my unit posting me as the Colonel (EME), HQ UP Area, Bareilly. Needless to say, pandit ji’s stock went up. For all their valour, even the men in uniform need reassurance to stand up for what they believe in.