Rekha Merchant

Rekha Merchant is a former lover of Gibreel Farishta who appears after her death as a woman riding a flying carpet, pursuing him through visions that unsettle his grasp of the world around him. Her appearances give their affair an afterlife in the plot: she reminds Gibreel of the harm he caused, claims responsibility for his misfortunes, and offers an explanation that remains entangled with his uncertain visions. She is at once an intimate accuser and a presence through which the novel makes private guilt difficult to separate from supernatural or psychological disturbance.

Identity and Background

Before becoming a spectre in Gibreel’s experience, Rekha had been his lover. Their relationship was unequal in its demands and obligations. Gibreel did not love her faithfully: he forgot her birthdays, failed to return her calls, and turned up at inconvenient moments. Yet Rekha continued to forgive him. Her forgiveness was not quiet acquiescence. She openly complained, berated him, and accused him of being superficial; after these confrontations, she nevertheless allowed the relationship to continue. Gibreel was drawn to the force and theatricality of that forgiveness, even as his conduct repeatedly gave her reason to protest.

Rekha’s account of their separation is bound to Gibreel’s illness. She recalls that she stayed away while he was sick because seeing him might have caused a scandal, and says that he later used her absence as an excuse to leave her. In her telling, the illness became cover for a departure whose emotional consequences he did not accept. The evidence presents this as Rekha’s grievance, not as a neutral account independently confirmed by Gibreel. After her death, she tells him that she can no longer forgive him and curses him, associating his destination with the hell she believes he sent her to. Her reproach turns the relationship’s old pattern inside out: the woman who had repeatedly forgiven him now insists that forgiveness has ended.

First Appearance and Pursuit

Rekha first materializes to Gibreel amid the clouds as he falls from the sky. She appears composed on a flying carpet, dressed in a green-and-gold brocade sari, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer holding her high-coiled hair in place against the wind. Gibreel recognizes her and greets her with a flippant remark about whether she had failed to find her way to heaven. The passage makes his response part of the scene’s instability: he is concussed and plummeting, while the person he addresses is a dead woman appearing in the clouds. His condition may mitigate his insensitivity, but it does not undo the accusation that follows.

Rekha tells him that others have always forgiven him and that he has escaped responsibility for his actions. Her complaint connects their personal history to a broader pattern in which Gibreel receives pardon without being made to answer for the damage he causes. She also attacks his self-importance and the assumptions he makes about his origins. The encounter therefore does more than revive an old romance: it confronts him with a judgment he has been able to avoid from the living people around him.

When Gibreel reaches London, Rekha is initially nowhere in sight. He runs from the arriving train at Victoria station, falls among the waiting crowd, and clings to his battered hat. At the ticket barrier he finds her again, floating above the ground on her carpet, visible to him but not to the other people there. She says that she has come to watch him fall and points to the humiliation he has already suffered. The city becomes the setting for a prolonged pursuit. Gibreel flees through the Underground, but Rekha finds him at Oxford Circus and in the elevators at Tufnell Park, then appears elsewhere along his route. Her persistence turns public London into the stage for a confrontation that only he can see.

During this pursuit she conjures images of her children falling from trees and presents herself as falling from the pediment of the Bank of England. These repetitions bring the deaths of her children into Gibreel’s encounter with her and make the haunting inseparable from the consequences of her own death. As he runs, he becomes convinced that the city itself is changing shape, with Underground stations shifting lines and following one another in unfamiliar ways. The episode leaves open whether the changing city is part of Rekha’s power, Gibreel’s disorientation, or the larger uncertainty surrounding his visions. At one point he hears a woman’s shocked cry and briefly reaches what seems to be a safe haven; the passage suggests that Rekha has allowed him that respite so that her eventual triumph over him will be more complete.

A Ghost Among Other Visions

Rekha’s pursuit forms part of a wider pattern of concealed and private visions. Alleluia Cone has seen Maurice Wilson among the chimneypots after her return to London, while Gibreel does not tell her about his own pursuit by Rekha. Each keeps a dangerous ghostly encounter secret from the other, even as they share physical intimacy. Their silence matters to Gibreel because Alleluia’s other visions intensify his sense that dreams are leaking into waking life and that the boundary between them is failing. Rekha is thus not an isolated apparition within a stable world; she belongs to a series of experiences that make the stability of that world increasingly doubtful.

Later, after Gibreel sees a lost soul disappear, Rekha appears again on her carpet and mocks his claim to be an archangel. She questions his trust in the deity he believes in and challenges a clear division between good and evil. Her comments bring their personal antagonism into contact with Gibreel’s religious and metaphysical uncertainty. She also recalls the former relationship in comparative terms, arguing that she knew how to love and contrasting her capacity with what she presents as the self-centredness of Alleluia and the distance of Gibreel’s God. These are Rekha’s provocations rather than settled explanations of the novel’s supernatural events, but they show how readily she turns a theological dispute back toward the injury between former lovers.

Revenge, Refusal, and Narrative Significance

Rekha eventually claims that she has caused Gibreel’s tribulations. She says that her death for love has given her the right to take revenge and describes herself as having turned his life inside out. At the same time, she offers a possible compromise: she says that she has come to propose a settlement, and the condition presented is that Gibreel acknowledge that he loves her. The demand exposes the continuing emotional structure of her appearances. Her revenge is not presented merely as punishment from beyond the grave; it remains tied to the recognition she believes their living relationship denied her.

At dawn, Gibreel rejects the proposed bargain. He declares that there is one God and that Rekha is neither God nor its adversary, but only an insubstantial apparition; he refuses to make a deal with her. As he speaks, the emeralds and brocades fall away, then her flesh, until her skeleton too crumbles. What remains vanishes with a piercing cry into the sun. The scene gives Gibreel a decisive refusal, but it does not establish an uncomplicated victory over a literal supernatural enemy: the apparition’s status has been contested throughout, and her disappearance occurs within the same unstable field of visions.

Rekha’s recurrence also outlasts this apparent defeat. A later newspaper account of deaths at Everest Vilas recalls that Rekha had previously thrown herself and her children from the building, connecting the present-day report to the history that her visions have forced Gibreel to confront. Near the novel’s close she is remembered again as the woman on the flying carpet, and her idea of taking a character to the summit of Everest is recalled alongside the motif that, once there, the only way is down. These returns keep her from being reduced to a single apparition that disappears when Gibreel refuses her demand. She remains part of the novel’s unfinished business: a figure through whom past choices recur, forgiveness becomes conditional, and the line between memory, guilt, and haunting stays unresolved.