“To be born again, first you have to die”

“To be born again, first you have to die” is a recurring refrain that gives Gibreel Farishta a language for survival and transformation. First sung as he and Saladin Chamcha fall from the sky, it acquires a practical, almost comic meaning during their captivity, then returns as Gibreel describes his own reappearance in London. The words sound absolute, but their uses are not: the men survive their fall, Gibreel’s account gathers together very different traditions of rebirth, and the phrase eventually stands beside a new beginning whose speaker is not identified.

The refrain in the fall

The line appears first as part of Gibreel’s improvised song during the men’s descent from the destroyed Bostan airliner. He sings of dying before being born again while tumbling from a height of twenty-nine thousand and two feet toward the English Channel. The setting puts the refrain under immediate pressure: its singer is not speaking from safety about some distant renewal but falling toward what appears to be certain death. The song’s buoyant performance and the danger of the descent occupy the same moment.

The fall gives the phrase a counterpart in action, though not a simple proof of its claim. When an unseen force commands Gibreel to fly and sing, he flaps his arms while Saladin holds on to him. Gibreel’s song, which he believes celestial, accompanies their gradual slowing; the two men float down and are found on a beach. They are the only survivors from the plane. Gibreel later maintains that song and flight saved them, while Saladin rejects the account of walking on water and calls them lucky. The refrain thus begins in a scene of miraculous survival, but the different explanations remain side by side: for Gibreel, the experience confirms the song’s power; for Saladin, it does not settle what happened.

Rebirth during captivity

The phrase returns in Gibreel’s talk to the hostages aboard Flight AI-420, where it becomes an argument about waiting. As his sleeplessness makes him increasingly talkative, he describes the group’s time on the airstrip beside Zamzam Spring as a second gestation. In this telling, captivity has made them dead to the world, and release will amount to being made anew. He tries to turn the prospect of release into reassurance: if everyone is born again on the same day, he reasons, everyone will share a birthday and be the same age from then on. His fanciful question about what to call fifty children born of one mother ends in a joke about “Fiftuplets.”

That performance changes the refrain’s scale. It no longer concerns only the two men’s descent; Gibreel applies it to an entire captive group and imagines a shared future after confinement. The optimism briefly calms his audience, although his theories also irritate hostages who want the captivity to end rather than to be redescribed. Rebirth here is less a settled doctrine than a way Gibreel makes an intolerable present seem temporary: the promised new life begins on the day of release, a day whose arrival remains outside his control.

A theory assembled from many traditions

Gibreel’s account of rebirth expands well beyond the immediate ordeal. He gathers under the term reincarnation the phoenix rising from ashes, the resurrection of Christ, the transmigration of the Dalai Lama’s soul into a newborn child, the avatars of Vishnu, Jupiter’s metamorphoses, and the passage of human beings through successive lives, from cockroaches to kings, toward release from return. The list mixes resurrection, reincarnation, divine transformation, and cycles of successive lives. Its breadth is part of the point: Gibreel’s refrain supplies a common verbal shelter for ideas that do not share one account of how renewal happens.

Saladin notices the gap between the refrain’s certainty and the examples assembled around it. He does not interrupt to point out that many of Gibreel’s transformations do not require a death; new flesh can be entered by other means. Gibreel, arms waving like wings, allows no interruption. Sometimes his tirades end in tears, and Saladin comforts him; at other times Saladin’s irritation breaks through. On the seventh repetition of a saying attributed to Gramsci, Saladin proposes that perhaps Gibreel’s old self is dying and the dream-angel is trying to be born into his body. The exchange makes the phrase a way to understand bodily change as well as survival, but it leaves the cause and meaning of that change unsettled.

Return and changed lives

After disappearing from a hospital, Gibreel boards Flight AI-420 for London under the name Ismail Najmuddin. Much later, speaking to Saladin, he repeats the refrain and describes having “halfexpired” twice, in hospital and on the plane, as enough to count. He presents his arrival in London as regeneration, a new man entering a new life. The recurrence turns the earlier song into a personal account of return: the phrase that accompanied a fall now gives shape to Gibreel’s claim that he has come back from illness and absence renewed.

The refrain’s final supplied appearance is different in form. It stands alone after Saladin has returned to Pamela Chamcha’s house, proposed a practical arrangement while awaiting the restoration of his presumed-dead status, and said that they should sell the house and divorce. The words are not assigned to a speaker there. Their placement nevertheless brings the motif beside Saladin’s own altered circumstances, without making the line a direct statement of his belief or declaring him reborn. Across these appearances, the phrase moves from song to theory to isolated textual refrain. It offers Gibreel a forceful pattern for making sense of survival and change, while the differing responses around him preserve the possibility that renewal can be asserted, imagined, or witnessed without being explained.