flying on a Bokhara rug, in real life owned carpet showrooms. As to her flying, she had committed suicide by throwing herself down Bombay’s highest skyscraper, the Everest Vilas. She had committed suicide because Gibreel, with whom she was having an extramarital affair, had vanished. And Gibreel’s enigmatic farewell note that referred to airborne activity might have inspired the way in which she had committed suicide, for it referred to humans as aerial entities, with origins in dreams and clouds, and their flying to regenerate themselves. Hence while never explicitly admitted in the novel, Gibreel was possibly feeling responsible, or his sense of guilt lay at the root of Rekha’s frequent spectral visits to him.
Nonetheless, throughout his life Gibreel, a fictional Bollywood movie icon, was fed by a religious imaginary. He was born Ismail Najmuddin. His first name was inspired by the child that Ibrahim (Abraham) sought to sacrifice. His last name meant, the faith’s star. He substituted Gibreel for Ismail on his way to stardom. This was in homage to his mom who originated the idea. She considered him to be her personal angel and called him farishta, meaning angel.
Furthermore, in his fifteen years long career, Gibreel, the biggest star in the history of Indian movies, specialized in theological movies.8 He incarnated every god in the pantheon of gods, including blue-skinned Krishna, elephant-headed Ganesh, Hanuman the monkey king, and Gautama under the bodhi tree. For his fans across religious boundaries, he represented the most suitable and immediately noticeable image of God. When he mysteriously disappeared, it literally meant the demise of the Supreme. The demarcation line between the actor and his performances had for a long time become defunct. Interestingly, on the one hand, Gibreel suffered from halitosis, which the narrator suggested was a devilish trait, and his face was profane, sensual, and lately—after his mysterious near-fatal illness—debilitated. On the other hand, his face was godlike. Holy, perfect, and graceful.
Psychic notions were deeply ingrained in his mind. Even before stardom, he felt special. According to his mom who called him angel, just looking at him meant the fulfillment of her dreams. Earlier than anything else, this communicated to him a sense of uniqueness. Apparently, he was always able to satisfy others’ most intimate desires without even knowing how it happened. He had become an orphan at the age of twenty, but a well-off and well-connected childless couple took pity on him, and within five years he became a movie star. These bittersweet experiences fostered the feeling that he was not on his own, something in the world was watching over him. And he eventually came to believe in the existence of a guardian angel.
Since his formative years, Gibreel believed that the supernatural world existed, including God, angels, demons, djinns, and afreets. His mother had told him many stories of the Islamic prophet. Afterward, Gibreel was able to compare himself to Muhammad, who was once orphaned and poor, like him. Then, while a novice in the movie business, he devoured ancient Greek and Roman mythology and Western theology. Among his readings were the satanic verses incident at the dawn of Muhammad’s prophetic career, incidents at his harem after his triumphant return to Mecca and, separately, the surreal newspaper story of butterflies flying into damsels’ mouths, to be willingly consumed. Most plausibly, these readings fed Gibreel’s angelic dream revelations in subsequent chapters with Muhammad and the butterfly prophetess Ayesha.9 (In addition, chapter I.2 also offered a clue about the sources of Gibreel’s dream and revelation in part IV, featuring the Imam, who closely resembled Ayatollah Khomeini of the Iranian revolution. Gibreel’s apartment in Bombay was decorated like a Bedouin tent by a French interior designer, who was recommended through Shah Reza Pahlevi. Needless to say, Khomeini had toppled the Shah during the revolution.)
Gibreel was particularly well acquainted with the notions of reincarnation and rebirth. Above all, he was an Indian theological movies actor. Even his name change from Ismail to Gibreel was a worldly reincarnation. In addition, his adopted father, fat like Buddha and amateur psychic, had inculcated notions of reincarnation and spectral visitations on him. Once he had told Gibreel about a visit by a co-operative spirit, to shed light on the existence of God and devil. This had left a deep mark on Gibreel’s consciousness. And as stated before, consciousness was the fountainhead of dreams.
Of the events leading up to his miraculous fall, his most personal encounter with the notion of rebirth took place on a hospital bed. All of a sudden, at the height of his career, he had become gravely ill, due to an inexplicable internal hemorrhage. The hospital called it strangely mysterious, a divine incident. But after a week of internal bleeding, he rapidly and miraculously recovered. This time, the hospital called it a godly development. Gibreel’s return from the brink of death generated rebirth in another sense too, in that he completely lost his Islamic faith and became an atheist. This had come about in several stages: desperate pleas to God for help, a sense of divine punishment for wrongs done that made his pains justifiable and bearable, eventual anger for the unevenness of his divine punishment, realization that he was talking to thin air and that there was no God, the terrible sense of nothingness that came with this discovery, and a renewed longing for God out of desperation, and—finally—his coming to terms with the nonexistence of God and nothingness.
There was an additional twist to his rebirth after internal hemorrhage. He fell in love. Immediately upon discharge from the hospital, he had gone to Bombay’s most famous hotel, the Taj, to eat Islamically forbidden—or unclean—foods and, thereby, ascertain the nonexistence of God. Based on his new sense of unbelief and secularism, he filled his plate with Wiltshire pork sausages, York cured hams, bacon rashers, gammon stakes, and pig’s trotters. And there, by chance, he spoke to Alleluia Cone, a Jewish visitor from London, who was watching him. He explained, the point was lack of divine punishment. She retorted, the point was, he had returned back to life, he was not dead.
Alleluia’s incisively witty remark had a disturbing effect on Gibreel. After consuming pork, religiously forbidden, he began to suffer from retributive dreams, which resembled divine punishment. If so, Alleluia’s role in triggering Gibreel’s prolonged and painful return back to faith was not coincidental. Her name, a variant of Hallelujah, meant God be praised, and she had prophetic qualities. She claimed to have seen the face of God at Mount Everest, and she routinely experienced spectral visits by Maurice Wilson, a mountaineer who died in the Everest. And due to her physical appearance, Alleluia had an angelic aura. She had rather whitish light blond hair. Her translucent complexion resembled mountain ice. Notably, as angel Gibreel’s lover to be, she was possibly his supernatural peer.
However, like Gibreel, who had chronic halitosis and was rather dark and gloomy instead of haloed, Alleluia’s qualities were not impeccable. Consequent to their first encounter, they had spent three carnal days in a hotel room. Nevertheless, then, she had delivered a morally worthy challenge to Gibreel, a philandering womanizer. She had urged him to pursue a different life, as his return from the brink of death had to be for something.
Gibreel took up Alleluia’s challenge for a new life, built on genuine love. When Bostan exploded, he was on his way to London for a new life with her. Hence like The Satanic Verses’ numerous other characters, Gibreel’s was pursuing rebirth. He was pressed by the urgency of an unthinkable conception to actually realize itself. He later explained to Saladin, his two experiences with half-expiry, internal hemorrhage and celestial free fall, added up to one complete, and to be born again one had to die at first. However, his figurative death comprised other deaths. As he had disappeared from Bombay, a heartbroken Rekha had committed suicide. And miraculously, his face on billboards began to rot and crumble, his images on the covers of newly printed shiny magazines faded and then blanked, and movie projectors unaccountably jammed the moment he appeared on film. Thereby, his celluloid memory literally got burned.
Chapter I.3
Alternative rebirth scenarios in the novel were not exclusive to Gibreel and his dream revelations. As chapter I.3 revealed, the story of Saladin, Gibreel’s counterpart in the main plot, also concerned transmutation or rebirth. Saladin’s story, which was based on an immigrant’s struggle to wholly redefine his identity, was essentially secular,
