The Mumbai terrorist tragedy tests a Nashville couple's devotion

On Nov. 26, 2008, Santos Lopez was brining a Thanksgiving turkey in his mother's kitchen in Lexington, Ky., when his cell phone rang. His hands were slick with grease, but he managed to fish out his phone. Instantly, he knew something was wrong. "Boo," came the shaky voice on the line. "I've been shot."

Santos listened, and when his wife hung up he was proud for remaining calm. That's when he realized, sometime during the call, he had crumpled to his knees.

He did not know it at the time, but he had just received one of the first inklings on American soil of a ghastly crime a world away, in Mumbai, India. Over the days to come, its magnitude would become horrifically familiar: an unthinkable planned assault, mass casualties, a bustling megapolis paralyzed by fear and grief.

But at that moment, Santos Lopez's only concern was one woman, a single pinpoint on the other side of the earth. He would not stop until he reached her.

"The beloved," he calls her—so often, and so naturally, that when news reports began to surface that a Nashville woman named Rudrani Devi had been shot execution-style, as part of a terrorist attack on a luxury hotel in Mumbai, some of his friends didn't make the connection. Still others didn't recognize Rudrani as Andi Varagona, a longtime Nashville video producer who took the name ("one who takes away others' pain") as part of her spiritual focus.

But their romance was legend, even beyond their circle of friends—who ranged from staff at CMT, where Santos works as a producer, to Rudrani's celebrity clientele as a spiritual instructor. There was the night on the beach at Florida's St. George Island. A glowing sun was setting on the Gulf, and Santos sent Rudrani to fetch something from their car. She returned in time to see a bottle bobbing in the surf. The map inside led her to an object buried in the sand: a book handmade by Santos. Every page charted what had brought them to this spot, this night. On the last page, hidden in a walnut shell, was an engagement ring.

They had been in each other's orbit without knowing since the 1980s, when the Venezuela-born Santos was a spike-haired fixture in Nashville rock clubs and Andi fronted an all-girl rock combo called the Paper Dolls. As a couple, they were now so close that from the moment Rudrani left for India, Santos wore two watches, one with his time, the other reading her time in Mumbai. He would have been with her, had he been able to get off work.

Instead, he was spending a hasty Thanksgiving in Lexington as Rudrani was just sitting down to a late-evening meal with friends, around 10 o'clock in Mumbai's Trident-Oberoi Hotel. Rudrani, who has practiced meditation for 25 years, had gone to Mumbai with members of the Synchronicity Foundation, the Virginia-based spiritual community led by her own instructor, Master Charles Cannon.

She spent the day in sessions, then joined five members of her group downstairs in the hotel restaurant. There was Linda Ragsdale, the Nashville children's-book author who had taken Santos' place. There was Michael Rudder, a Canadian actor, and a Canadian yoga instructor named Helen Connelly. There was Alan Scherr, a former art professor from Virginia, and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi.

You would expect Rudrani to remember what happened next with tears and hysterics, or to block the memory altogether. She was struck recently by a news report that described the mental processes of people under terrorist attack—that because the brain seizes upon previous experiences (e.g., touching a hot stove) to respond in the moment, terrorist victims tend to freeze because their minds have no earlier frame of reference.

That is not the case with Rudrani Devi.

"I remember everything everybody ate," Rudrani says. Even with her fractured leg propped, as it is every day, on a plump red pillow in her South Nashville living room, she and Santos make a glamorous, mischievous couple. They talk literally gazing into each other's eyes. "I remember the conversations: I even remember what everybody said," she continues. "I remember hearing Helen doing mantra. I was doing my mantra silently."

Just as clearly, she remembers hearing gunfire in the distance. Had she known, she says, about India's relatively strict gun laws—an issue that would come up again during her medical treatment—she would have been more concerned. Just as their food arrived, about 10:10 p.m., she heard the gunfire in the building.

"I said, 'We all have to get under the table, now,' " Rudrani says, with the clarity of someone describing a movie. "So we all got under the table. There were six of us. And then they were firing."

Someone would later tell Rudrani the assassins looked like "kids with school backpacks." She herself never saw them. The first to be shot was Rudder, who had done voiceover work on the Splinter Cell videogame. As Rudrani remembers, he seemed initially to regard his wounds with puzzlement, as if expecting fake blood, until he collapsed. That may have saved his life. Under the table, the others tried to reach "stillness"—basically, to play dead. Lying next to Alan Scherr, Rudrani put her hand on the back of his neck, to get his attention. Then she ducked her own head.