MIRACLE

It was the 25 Dec last year when we were returning by road from Dehradun to Lucknow. We were two couples and were travelling in a chauffeur driven SUV. Having started from Dehradun around 0830am, we were in Haridwar in an hours’ time. We visited Har Ki Paidi and Chandi Mata before starting our journey to Lucknow by around 1230. It was a bright sunny day though partially windy and intermittent clouds enroute- it was a beautiful journey with great company that we were in.

It became rather dark by the time we reached Rampur, just short of Bareilly and the visibility too appeared to be decreasing rapidly. Around 8pm we crossed Bareilly and there was a traffic jam of heavy trucks and carriers. To our horror there appeared to be no one making an effort to move things, in fact, some truckers were resting with fire lit indicating of a long haul. Our driver made a mention that at the same very stretch he was stuck a few days back for about six hours and things appeared worse today. We kept moving slowly on the side berms and suddenly there was a dead stop. One tractor- trolley had managed to get struck perpendicularly chocking the complete National Highway. There seemed little hope out of this mess.

As we were mulling the options suddenly a police vehicle with sirens blooming emerged and forced the tractor trolley to make way and we were out of this scary situation in less than five minutes and to our happiness we had overtaken almost 8 kms of the jam. Since the clearance of tractor trolley just took place when we were there, we managed to overtake the jammed traffic in about 15 minutes—a line of jammed vehicles stretching another few miles.

Having crossed Shahjehanpur, suddenly the fog started to thicken may be due to plans and lots of water bodies. We managed to drive for about half an hour through patches of low to medium to dense fog. We were thanking our luck and suddenly we had a thick blanket of fog where even a trained driver was feeling not too comfortable. We were driving near blind with visibility restricted to a few feet. In fact we were driving with the help of the edge of the road alignment which was giving some sense of the left side of the road. Halting not being an option till we reached a city with hotel accommodation we were just chugging keeping our fingers crossed. After 15 minutes, suddenly a car with all fog lights and other lights blinking overtook us and almost escorted us through the patch for almost an hour before leaving the highway for its destination. We were pondering about our next move and there we had state transport bus ahead of us. We followed that and moment the fog-stretch was over, the bus turned probably towards the bus stand and we headed homewards.

We reached home safely at 0230 instead of our calculated time of 9 pm. One is not too sure whether it was set of coincidences or a series of miracles. Whatever the rationalists say, I am bewildered and tend to think it was a miracle as one has never encountered anything of this kind in the past fifty years.