Everest Vilas

Everest Vilas is a luxury skyscraper on Malabar Hill whose commanding height and vertiginous views make it more than a residence: it becomes a place where fantasies of elevation meet bodily danger. Gibreel Farishta lives in its top-floor penthouse, while Rekha Merchant occupies the apartment directly beneath him. Their homes, and the tower’s roof, gather the novel’s recurring images of flight, rebirth, disappearance, and fatal descent.

Height, views, and interiors

The building is described as standing on the highest ground in the city, with Gibreel’s penthouse on its highest floor. Its double vista looks one way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive and the other toward Scandal Point and the sea. The apartment’s elevation makes it seem almost detached from ordinary urban life: the city appears below as a panorama, while the penthouse becomes a conspicuous stage on which private events acquire public consequence.

The interior intensifies this sense of constructed escape. French decorators, whose credentials included work at Persepolis for Reza Pahlevi, spent a million dollars recreating the effect of a Bedouin tent at this exalted height. The design turns a modern luxury apartment into an imagined elsewhere. When Gibreel vanishes, newspaper headlines treat his absence as another departure from the set: the tent seems to have been struck, but no one knows whether he has gone up, down, or sideways. The carefully manufactured illusion of a dwelling thus becomes an image of uncertainty, unable to explain where its inhabitant has gone.

Neighbors and the affair

Rekha Merchant lives directly below Gibreel and is at once his neighbor, friend, and lover. She is wealthy, married for thirteen years, and successful in carpets and antiques, with showrooms at prime sites in Colaba. Her home reflects that business and her taste: it contains stone latticework from Jaisalmer, carved wooden handrails from Kerala palaces, and a Mughal stone chhatri converted into a whirlpool bath. When her husband is away at a worldwide ball-bearings manufacturers’ congress in Gothenburg, she shows Gibreel her collection over French champagne.

Their affair begins in the building’s intimate vertical arrangement: the celebrated actor above, the businesswoman below, separated by a floor but drawn together through their neighboring homes. Rekha teases Gibreel that gods should not drink alcohol; he answers with a joke that the champagne turns to water when it touches his lips. Their intimacy follows soon afterward. The apartment is also where Rekha explains the realities behind her trade, including that art silk means artificial rather than artistic, and that the brochure’s story about wool plucked from baby lambs is advertising for low-grade wool. Her practical knowledge punctures the luxurious surfaces around them even as their relationship is conducted within those surfaces.

Gibreel repeatedly neglects Rekha, forgetting birthdays and failing to return calls, yet she continues to forgive him after berating him for his conduct. The affair therefore gives the tower’s proximity a troubled meaning: physical closeness does not amount to emotional responsibility. When Gibreel later disappears, Rekha reads his farewell message in the papers differently from the public. She marks it on the page, takes her two daughters and son, and goes up to the roof of her high-rise home. Her death with her children makes the building’s upward movement, previously associated with luxury and escape, inseparable from a devastating fall.

Disappearance and public spectacle

Gibreel’s penthouse becomes the center of a public search after the police discover an enigmatic note there. The location itself contributes to the story that gathers around his absence: it is a celebrated home at the top of the city, with a spectacular view and a million-dollar interior, yet neither its height nor its conspicuousness makes him easier to find. Newspapers turn the disappearance into competing headlines, while the city’s many tongues and whispers produce no reliable account of his destination.

Everest Vilas also links Gibreel’s private life to the consequences borne by others. Rekha’s death is followed, years later, by renewed attention to the tower when S. S. Sisodia’s body is found in the center of the living-room rug in Gibreel’s apartment, a hole through his heart. Alleluia Cone, described in the report as involved in a related incident, has fallen to her death from the skyscraper’s roof. The papers announce that Gibreel has absconded under suspicion. The building’s vertical layout now holds an apartment murder and a fatal fall within the same address, joining Gibreel’s disappearance to a widening pattern of loss.

A tower of elevation and fall

Everest Vilas gathers several different meanings of height without resolving them into a single explanation. The penthouse promises distance from the ground; its interior imitates a tent from elsewhere; its views turn the city into a spectacle. Yet the tower cannot secure escape from consequence. Rekha understands Gibreel’s message as an invitation to rebirth and flight, while the physical act associated with that interpretation ends in death. Later, Alleluia’s fatal fall and the discovery of Sisodia’s body make the building’s grandeur a frame for further violence rather than a refuge from it.

The tower’s recurrence also joins private grief to public narration. Rekha’s act is interpreted through sensational headlines, just as Gibreel’s disappearance becomes a newspaper puzzle and the later deaths are reported as a double tragedy. Everest Vilas is therefore both a luxurious home and a media landmark: a place where intimate choices become spectacle, where apparent ascent is shadowed by descent, and where the people around Gibreel bear consequences that the penthouse’s height cannot leave behind.