Rekha Merchant’s carpet

Rekha Merchant’s carpet is a supernatural vehicle and recurring image in Gibreel Farishta’s flight through London. It carries Rekha into places where Gibreel encounters her, while its appearances shift between a floating carpet, a rolled object, and an image in an advertisement. That instability links the carpet’s familiar association with magical travel to Gibreel’s disorienting experience of the city and his inability to escape Rekha.

Appearances and Forms

At Victoria station, Gibreel finds Rekha waiting on her carpet, floating above the ground and visible only to him. The carpet gives her an impossible presence within the station: Londoners see Gibreel running and speaking alone, while he sees her poised above the floor. Its supernatural appearance establishes the pattern of their encounters, in which Rekha can be present to him while remaining unseen by everyone around him.

On the Victoria Line, the carpet appears in another form. Gibreel first sees Rekha as a color photograph on a large poster advertising international direct-dial calls, pictured with the carpet as part of an appeal to imagine a call as magical travel to India. When he flees to the opposite platform and boards a southbound train, Rekha is there again, this time with the carpet rolled across her knees. The sequence moves from apparition, to commercial image, to an apparently tangible object without resolving the boundary between them.

The Carpet in Gibreel’s Pursuit

As Gibreel runs through the London Underground, Rekha finds him repeatedly. At Oxford Circus she sits beside him on an escalator; in the elevators at Tufnell Park she presses close behind him. The carpet is not described at each encounter, but its earlier appearances frame Rekha as a pursuer able to surface wherever he goes, turning the possibility of magical transport into part of a larger, relentless chase.

The pursuit also disrupts Gibreel’s sense of the city. Underground stations seem to change lines and follow one another in a random order, while attempts to leave the system and hail a taxi fail. He comes to experience the network as a maze in which ordinary movement offers no reliable escape. The carpet’s association with effortless passage contrasts with his exhausting, futile journey: Rekha can find him, but Gibreel cannot use the city to get away from her.

Image, Magic, and Narrative Role

The advertisement makes the carpet’s fantastic promise part of ordinary urban commerce. Its image turns a supernatural means of travel into a sales pitch for telephone calls, connecting London and India through a modern communications system. For Gibreel, however, the poster does not hold magic at a safe distance as an illustration: Rekha appears to him in it, then appears on a train with the carpet rolled beside her. The scene leaves uncertain whether the object is a stable physical thing, a supernatural vehicle, or one form taken by his pursuit.

The carpet therefore joins the fantasy of crossing distance to Gibreel’s inability to escape a figure from his past. Its repeated association with Rekha makes it a marker of her reach across the city, while its changing appearances echo the Underground’s shifting, dreamlike geography. After an exhausting journey, Gibreel collapses in an unknown park and imagines that a woman approaching through the snow is Rekha; the passage does not establish that the carpet is there or that the woman is Rekha. Its final significance lies instead in how its earlier appearances have made the expectation of her return difficult for Gibreel to evade.