The Ground Beneath Her Feet Read Online Free PDF Page A

that had no place else to go.
    From the sky, a larger insect bore down upon us, burdening us with the insistent downdraft of its raucous wings. The helicopter had taken off just in time to escape destruction. Now the pilot brought it down almost to ground zero, and beckoned, hovering. “Let’s get out of here,” Vina shouted. I shook my head. “You go,” I yelled back at her. Work before play. I had to get my pictures on to the wires. “I’ll see you later,” I bellowed. “What?” “Later.” “What?”
    The plan had been for the helicopter to fly us, for a weekend’s relaxation, to a remote villa on the Pacific coast, the Villa Huracán, co-owned by the president of the Colchis record company and located to the north of Puerto Vallarta, in privileged isolation, sandwiched like a magic kingdom between the jungle and the sea. Now there was no way of knowing if the villa still stood. The world had changed. Yet, like the townspeople clinging to their framed photographs, like Don Ángel with his saucepans, Vina Apsara clung to the idea of continuity, of theprearranged itinerary. She was staying with the programme. Until my kidnapped images were off to the world’s news desks to be ransomed, however, there could be no tropical Shangri-la for me.
    “I’m going, then,” she screamed.
    “I can’t go.”
    “What?”
    “Go.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “What?”
    Then she was in the helicopter, and it was rising, and I had not gone with her, and I never saw her again, none of us did, and the last words she screamed down at me break my heart every time I think of them, and I think of them a few hundred times a day, every day, and then there are the endless, sleepless nights.
    “Goodbye, Hope.”
    I began to use the workname “Rai” when I was taken on by the famous Nebuchadnezzar Agency. Pseudonyms, stage names, work-names: for writers, for actors, for spies, these are useful masks, hiding or altering one’s true identity. But when I began to call myself Rai , prince, it felt like removing a disguise, because I was letting the world in on my most cherished secret, which was that ever since childhood this had been Vina’s private pet name for me, the badge of my puppy love. “Because you carry yourself like a little rajah,” she’d told me, fondly, when I was only nine and had braces on my teeth, “so it’s only your friends who know you’re just some no-account jerk.”
    That was Rai: a boy princeling. But childhood ends, and in adult life it was Ormus Cama who became Vina’s Prince Charming, not I. Still, the nickname clung to me. And Ormus was good enough to use it too, or let’s say he caught it off Vina like an infection, or let’s say he never dreamed I could give him any competition, that I could be a threat, and that’s why he could think of me as a friend.… But never mind that just now. Rai . It also meant desire: a man’s personal inclination, the direction he chose to go in; and will, the force of a man’s character. All that I liked. I liked that it was a name that travelled easily; everyone could say it, it sounded good on every tongue. And if on occasion Iturned into “Hey, Ray” in that mighty democracy of mispronunciation, the United States, then I was not disposed to argue, I just took the plum assignments and left town. And in another part of the world, Rai was music. In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us free will, rai , but prefers us not to be free.
    Anyway, now everybody says it: Rai. Just the one name, it’s easy, it’s a style. Most people don’t even know my real name. Umeed Merchant, did I mention that? Umeed Merchant, raised in a different universe, a different dimension of time, in a bungalow on Cuffe Parade, Bombay, which burned down long ago. The name Merchant, I should perhaps explain, means “merchant.”