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THE MUSH REGISTER

ROAD TO LOVE Rachel and Ian Bayles from England

Ian

We are an example that the course and nature of a relationship can be determined by `the corporate rule-book.' I was an electronics engineer and she, an accounts administrator; as her sphere of influence extended across my area of professional activity, I had to report to her — in other words, she was my boss. We were doing well in the company and it would be utterly senseless to relinquish the security it provided, just because we were in a "this-is-forever" kind of love and badly wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. Thanks to one of the explicit regulations governing our organisation, spouses could not be colleagues and, as in our case, colleagues could not turn spouses. So, we were in a live-in relationship for a long time, but the idea of being married to each other held a lot of charm and one day, both of us handed in our resignation letters and the very next instant became man and wife.

Rachel

We've never lived away from each other, and each of us has adopted the other's interests. He has always been enthusiastic about off-road adventures and I was a stranger to this experience that gets you and your all-wheel-drive machine through mud, dunes and rocky terrain, until I met him. Now, it is one of the leisure activities that we enjoy together. We also have a fascination for endurance races, but until recently we had to restrict ourselves to watching some famous ones such as the Dakar and the Gumball rally on television. We were tied down to home, because our children's welfare was uppermost on our minds. About a year ago, we suddenly woke up to the fact that the children had grown up and we needed to pamper ourselves a bit. We had to rediscover the reasons that brought us together in the first place. The two of us have now been on some long and exotic journeys which include a camel ride in Rajasthan and a trip from Chennai to Kanyakumari in an auto-rickshaw. Called the Indian Autorickshaw Challenge, this is our first rally, together or separately.

As told to PRINCE FREDERICK

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