Rekha Merchant and her three children’s fatal leap from Everest Vilas gives Gibreel Farishta’s farewell language of flight a terrible, literal consequence. After reading his note in the newspapers, Rekha takes her two daughters and son to the roof; all four fall to their deaths. The event is at once a private catastrophe and a public story, its meaning disputed by the press, by gossip, and by a narrator who offers an interpretation without claiming to settle what Rekha intended.

Setting and circumstances

The deaths follow Gibreel’s unexplained departure from the penthouse at Everest Vilas, the skyscraper on Malabar Hill where he had lived in an apartment directly above Rekha’s. The building is presented as an emblem of height and separation: it stands on the city’s highest ground, and its apartments offer views across Marine Drive or toward Scandal Point and the sea. Gibreel’s own home had been decorated to resemble a Bedouin tent, an elaborate illusion staged at a vertiginous remove from ordinary city life. After he vanishes, that illusion becomes another of the things his absence unsettles.

Rekha is wealthy and established in her own right. She has been married for thirteen years to a man prominent in the ball-bearing business, and her carpet and antique showrooms occupy sought-after sites in Colaba. The narrator describes her as beautiful, forceful, and accustomed to knowing what she wants; her husband, by contrast, is sketched as a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. These details do not explain her decision, but they place it against a life of affluence and social confidence rather than presenting her as an anonymous figure in Gibreel’s story.

The narrator also identifies Rekha as Gibreel’s neighbour and friend, while pointedly refusing to repeat the city magazines’ insinuations about their relationship. That refusal matters: the account acknowledges the gossip and its power over the public version of the deaths, but does not convert it into fact. Rekha’s proximity to Gibreel is established; the scandalous explanations circulated about it remain innuendo.

The note and Rekha’s decision

Gibreel’s farewell note is discovered by the police in his penthouse. Its imagery describes human beings as creatures of air, rooted in dreams and clouds and reborn in flight, before bidding goodbye. Newspapers amplify the mystery of his disappearance with competing headlines: some suggest that he has gone underground, others that he has flown away. In a city of tongues and whispers, no one can establish where he has gone.

Rekha, however, reads the message differently from the rest of the public. She follows the newspaper coverage and broadcasts, including Doordarshan programmes, and appears to find a meaning in Gibreel’s words that others miss. She writes a letter of her own and leaves a newspaper on her bed, Gibreel’s message circled in red and underlined so forcefully that one stroke tears the page. Her letter says, “Many years ago, I married out of cowardice. Now, finally, I’m doing something brave.” The contrast she draws is explicit: an earlier choice made from fear, and a present act she names as courage.

The narrator proposes, tentatively, that Rekha too may have been caught by the idea of rebirth, and that she took Gibreel’s language of flight literally. This is offered as a possible reading, not a settled account of her inner state. The image of the sky is made newly perilous by the setting: Rekha lives high above the ground at Everest Vilas, and the message’s promise of being winged can be read as if height itself offered passage into another life. Yet the narrator’s qualification—that Gibreel may not have understood the terrible power of metaphor—keeps the episode from becoming a simple explanation of the deaths.

The fall and its immediate aftermath

Rekha gathers her children, takes the elevator upward, and goes to the roof. A gatekeeper in the Everest Vilas compound later gives a blunt account of the sequence: the oldest daughter’s body hits the ground first, followed by the boy and the younger girl; Rekha comes after them, her sari floating and her hair loose. He turns his eyes away as she falls, describing the gesture as respect. The account preserves the awful order of the falls without making the witness’s limited view into an explanation of what happened above.

There are no survivors. The narrative’s stark confirmation of the deaths cuts through the newspapers’ melodramatic headlines, which turn the event into a story of a lovelorn woman and a broken-hearted beauty. The labels offer a ready-made motive, but the account has already shown how quickly conjecture attaches itself to Rekha. Her own letter provides evidence of how she described her decision; it does not answer every question about why she included her children or what she believed would follow.

Public story and narrative significance

The city’s response makes the leap inseparable from Gibreel’s disappearance. The press converts his note into a spectacle and Rekha’s death into another headline; the whispers blame Gibreel, though the narrator declines to pronounce judgment and leaves the accusation unresolved. The result is an unstable chain of interpretation: a message meant as farewell becomes, for Rekha, something like a direction; for the newspapers, it becomes a clue; and for the public, a basis for blame.

The episode also continues beyond the immediate deaths. Gibreel later sees Rekha after she has died, and sees her several times. Her presence therefore returns as part of his later experience rather than ending with the fall or with the city’s reports. The event binds the language of rebirth to an irreversible loss: flight is imagined as release, but the narrative records bodies on the ground and no passage back. By holding together Rekha’s own claim of bravery, the narrator’s uncertain account of metaphor, and the public’s unverified blame, the episode makes interpretation itself part of the tragedy.