New Year’s morning found Isaac inordinately crabby and complainy, even for him: I slept for hours as he warned of mounting hunger pangs, and when we finally made it out of our guesthouse I deemed Kashi, our favorite café in Fort Cohin, too crowded with tourists for my taste, dragging him to a malarial “eco” garden restaurant where he waited yet another forty minutes for stale toast. A subsequent cold coffee at Kashi restored his spirits somewhat, but what really turned his frown upside down was seeing the flag drop for The Rickshaw Run, in which over sixty autorickshaw teams from countries with traffic laws attempt to race each other over the potholed, cow-infested streets between Fort Cochin and Katmandu, a distance of over 2,000 miles, in two weeks. He rhapsodized about the race all day, until our new expat friend Mathew, who keeps an autorickshaw handy for dissertation breaks during the monsoon season, offered to let him drive his.
Several days later Isaac and I met Mathew in front of the Santa Cruz Basilica and drove south to the Veli field, a dusty parade ground adjacent to the municipal crematorium and the Little Flower Church Cemetery. Isaac wasn’t the only student that day: we saw ladies being tutored by the St. Jude’s School of Motor Driving and Mathew’s wife Susana, who never learned to ride a bike growing up in Cairo, was practicing independently on a rusty three speed without working brakes.
Isaac had some trouble starting the autorickshaw, but once Mathew got it going, he took right off. Of course, if you give a license-less man a taste of motorized power, he is loath to give it up, and Isaac made three or four long passes before he stopped to take us on as passengers. We bumped around the Veli field with Isaac changing gears, dodging novice scooter riders, honking the horn; Mathew proclaimed him a natural. But perhaps it’s for the best Mathew remembered he had laundry to drop off at the dhobi khana next door and interrupted our jaunt: Isaac, grown bold, was anxious to try some “maneuvers”—perhaps reversing at full-speed, as Mathew had rehearsed in his former capacity as an Iraq-bound Australian diplomat?
Alas, no stunts for Isaac. When Mathew tried to re-start his vehicle, it simply shuddered with the same painful metal-scraping-metal noise we had briefly heard and ignored earlier, on our ride to the field. This time, though, the noise persisted. The left axle turned out to be broken, and divine intervention must have kept it functioning long enough for the blind man to have his ride. Eight hundred rupees and one enterprising mechanic eventually fixed the problem, but that afternoon, Isaac’s driving lesson ended with the boys pushing the vehicle into the shade while we sat and waited for help. But I don't think this is the end of the story...
Mathew has plans to cover his autorickshaw with chrome paint (the black-and-yellow is reserved for taxis); unbeknownst to him, Isaac has plans to adds plans to add airplane wings and film a music video. And I have a sure-fire way to lure Isaac back to India.
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