


It wasn’t just the great San Francisco earthquake of 1984: the 1980s had beenīutton-back leather chesterfield sofa in his Apollo Bunder library with his eyes closed and a cut-glass tumbler and a decanter of whisky by his side and dreaming. I could be your official tour photographer. She said, You don’t know how alike you are, you two, except that he’s going down for the third time and you’re coming up for air. She said she was disoriented, confused, she needed time to think, all of that. It had been their story now, at long last, it was mine too. For too long it had been a case of Ormus and Vina sailing along with Rai clinging to the side of their racing yacht. I was no longer an occasional snack, a side dish. In those days before the tour she at last admitted what I’d waited my whole life to hear, namely that I had become a factor, a problem.
