This is the art of darkness : a woman offers a garland bows from the waist-and suddenly, the once and future hope of India,a figure invested with the symbolic weight of generations, is obliterate in a deafening roar and ball of flame. A man whose eminent family had long since become identified with one-six of the human race; Rajiv Gandhi rent the way of his of his mother Indira, falling victim yo a climate of violence that has steadily overtaken the subcontinent. Of Rajiv was heir to a miraculous name, he disappeared in a fiendish conjurer' s trick: amid the theatrics of an electioneering stop, and in the puff of smoke from a bomb.