The Brickhall fire is remembered as the crisis in which Gibreel Farishta saved Saladin Chamcha’s life—and as the apparent proof that their hatred might give way to something more humane. Its significance lies not in a narrated account of the fire’s mechanics, but in the meaning Saladin later gives the rescue, and in the painful failure of that meaning to endure.

The Rescue and Its Meaning

When Saladin recalls the fire, he believes that Gibreel’s act may have changed them both. He had imagined the flames consuming the devils between them, as if the rescue could cleanse the two men and allow love to exert a humanizing force equal to hatred. The fire thus becomes more than the setting for Saladin’s survival: in his memory, it offers a brief possibility that virtue, like vice, can transform people.

What Followed

Gibreel’s return to Bombay after his time in London unsettles that hopeful interpretation. He has come back to resume his film career, but reports of erratic conduct and personal troubles circulate through the city. Alleluia Cone, Saladin learns, had refused to take Gibreel back after the Brickhall fires. Saladin had also believed that the fire had driven their shared demons out for good; hearing of Gibreel’s apparent decline forces him to confront how little the rescue guaranteed about what came afterward.

The Event’s Afterlife

The fire’s importance is therefore retrospective. Saladin does not dismiss Gibreel’s lifesaving act, but he can no longer treat it as a complete cure or lasting reconciliation: no cure, he concludes, is necessarily complete. The remembered rescue holds together two truths that the later reports pull apart—Gibreel saved him, and that act did not permanently free either man from the forces that had divided them.