“We are creatures of air, our roots in dreams and clouds, reborn in flight”

The expression We are creatures of air, our roots in dreams and clouds, reborn in flight is the opening of the enigmatic note left in Gibreel Farishta’s penthouse after his disappearance. In the novel, its airborne image of rebirth becomes more than a trace of Gibreel: Rekha Merchant reads it as a message that speaks to her own life, and acts on that interpretation with irreversible consequences.

The Note and Its Setting

Police discover the note in Gibreel’s penthouse at Everest Vilas, high above the city. It begins, “We are creatures of air,” continues through dreams, clouds, and rebirth in flight, and ends with “Goodbye.” The lines offer no destination or explanation for Gibreel’s disappearance. As newspapers speculate whether he has gone up, down, or sideways, the note supplies an evocative image but no reliable account of what has happened to him.

The setting intensifies the words’ upward pull. Gibreel’s apartment occupies the top floor of the highest building on the highest ground in the city; from its windows, the view stretches either toward Marine Drive or toward Scandal Point and the sea. The penthouse’s elaborate imitation of a Bedouin tent adds another layer of constructed illusion to a scene already organized around absence: Gibreel is gone, and neither his home nor his message makes his direction knowable.

A Message Read Differently

The note becomes consequential because Rekha, Gibreel’s neighbour in the apartment directly beneath his, hears in it something that others miss. She follows newspaper reports and radio and television coverage, while the public turns Gibreel’s disappearance into competing headlines. Rekha instead takes his words as a signal. The narration leaves the exact nature of her understanding uncertain, but links it to the note’s language of flight and rebirth.

The image’s openness is therefore also its danger. The note does not explicitly instruct Rekha to do anything, and the account does not establish that Gibreel intended it for her. Yet the narrator suggests that he failed to understand the terrible power of metaphor: an image of becoming new through flight could be taken literally by someone already searching for a way out of her life.

Rekha’s Response and the Outcome

Rekha circles Gibreel’s message in red on a newspaper and underscores it so heavily that one line tears through the page. She then gathers her two daughters and son, takes them by elevator to the roof of Everest Vilas, and leaves a letter explaining that she had married out of cowardice but was now doing something brave. The juxtaposition makes her decision legible as her own interpretation of the message, not as an explicit instruction contained in it.

The family jumps from the building and none survives. A compound gatekeeper recounts the falls in sequence: the older daughter strikes the ground first, then the boy and younger girl, and finally Rekha, whose sari floats outward as she falls. The physical image of her sari briefly resembling a balloon recalls the note’s aerial language, but the ending sharply reverses its promise. This is not a rebirth in flight; the fall ends in death.

The Expression’s Double Edge

The expression holds together two meanings that the episode cannot reconcile. Air, dreams, and clouds suggest release from ordinary limits, while “reborn” gives flight the promise of renewal. For Gibreel, the note remains an ambiguous farewell attached to an unexplained disappearance. For Rekha, the same language acquires the force of a personal summons, although the text never confirms that this was its intended meaning.

The contrast between the imagined ascent and the fatal descent exposes how a metaphor can travel beyond its maker’s control. Public headlines reduce the disappearances to spectacle, while Rekha’s private reading turns the note into a basis for action. Its words promise transformation, but the event provides no recovery or second life—only the devastating consequences of taking figurative flight as a way to be reborn.