The Rickshaw Run - Some Background

It was 2020. Some time in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic time where everything just seemed pretty dismal. We were on the back deck, sipping cocktails after a harrowing day of working at home. We had dressed up. He was wearing a tux and a top hat, and I was wearing a fabulously colorful sleeveless gown. I think it was a Wednesday.

“Hey honey”, I asked. “You’ll be turning 60 in January of 2023. Assuming the entire world hasn’t disintegrated by then, how would you like to celebrate your 60th birthday?”

He looked at me in his sly kind of way. I could tell he was ready to talk to me about something he had been thinking about for weeks or months, which happens often with Joe.

“I’d like to drive an auto-rickshaw across India,” he said, with an amazingly straight face.

I stared at him. We had been at home together for weeks in COVID quarantine so I assumed this was some kind of joke to enlighten the despair we had all been living with.

“That’s pretty funny,” I replied.

“No, I’m serious,” he responded, eyes twinkling.

The thing about Joe is that he rarely says things he doesn’t mean. Well, he never says things he doesn’t mean.

And so it began.Read more