Gibreel was particularly well acquainted with the notions of reincarnation and rebirth. Above all, he was an Indian theological movies actor. Even his name change from Ismail to Gibreel was a worldly reincarnation. In addition, his adopted father, fat like Buddha and amateur psychic, had inculcated notions of reincarnation and spectral visitations on him. Once he had told Gibreel about a visit by a co-operative spirit, to shed light on the existence of God and devil. This had left a deep mark on Gibreel’s consciousness. And as stated before, consciousness was the fountainhead of dreams.
Of the events leading up to his miraculous fall, his most personal encounter with the notion of rebirth took place on a hospital bed. All of a sudden, at the height of his career, he had become gravely ill, due to an inexplicable internal hemorrhage. The hospital called it strangely mysterious, a divine incident. But after a week of internal bleeding, he rapidly and miraculously recovered. This time, the hospital called it a godly development. Gibreel’s return from the brink of death generated rebirth in another sense too, in that he completely lost his Islamic faith and became an atheist. This had come about in several stages: desperate pleas to God for help, a sense of divine punishment for wrongs done that made his pains justifiable and bearable, eventual anger for the unevenness of his divine punishment, realization that he was talking to thin air and that there was no God, the terrible sense of nothingness that came with this discovery, and a renewed longing for God out of desperation, and—finally—his coming to terms with the nonexistence of God and nothingness.
There was an additional twist to his rebirth after internal hemorrhage. He fell in love. Immediately upon discharge from the hospital, he had gone to Bombay’s most famous hotel, the Taj, to eat Islamically forbidden—or unclean—foods and, thereby, ascertain the nonexistence of God. Based on his new sense of unbelief and secularism, he filled his plate with Wiltshire pork sausages, York cured hams, bacon rashers, gammon stakes, and pig’s trotters. And there, by chance, he spoke to Alleluia Cone, a Jewish visitor from London, who was watching him. He explained, the point was lack of divine punishment. She retorted, the point was, he had returned back to life, he was not dead.
Alleluia’s incisively witty remark had a disturbing effect on Gibreel. After consuming pork, religiously forbidden, he began to suffer from retributive dreams, which resembled divine punishment. If so, Alleluia’s role in triggering Gibreel’s prolonged and painful return back to faith was not coincidental. Her name, a variant of Hallelujah, meant God be praised, and she had prophetic qualities. She claimed to have seen the face of God at Mount Everest, and she routinely experienced spectral visits by Maurice Wilson, a mountaineer who died in the Everest. And due to her physical appearance, Alleluia had an angelic aura. She had rather whitish light blond hair. Her translucent complexion resembled mountain ice. Notably, as angel Gibreel’s lover to be, she was possibly his supernatural peer.
However, like Gibreel, who had chronic halitosis and was rather dark and gloomy instead of haloed, Alleluia’s qualities were not impeccable. Consequent to their first encounter, they had spent three carnal days in a hotel room. Nevertheless, then, she had delivered a morally worthy challenge to Gibreel, a philandering womanizer. She had urged him to pursue a different life, as his return from the brink of death had to be for something.
Gibreel took up Alleluia’s challenge for a new life, built on genuine love. When Bostan exploded, he was on his way to London for a new life with her. Hence like The Satanic Verses’ numerous other characters, Gibreel’s was pursuing rebirth. He was pressed by the urgency of an unthinkable conception to actually realize itself. He later explained to Saladin, his two experiences with half-expiry, internal hemorrhage and celestial free fall, added up to one complete, and to be born again one had to die at first. However, his figurative death comprised other deaths. As he had disappeared from Bombay, a heartbroken Rekha had committed suicide. And miraculously, his face on billboards began to rot and crumble, his images on the covers of newly printed shiny magazines faded and then blanked, and movie projectors unaccountably jammed the moment he appeared on film. Thereby, his celluloid memory literally got burned.
Chapter I.3
Alternative rebirth scenarios in the novel were not exclusive to Gibreel and his dream revelations. As chapter I.3 revealed, the story of Saladin, Gibreel’s counterpart in the main plot, also concerned transmutation or rebirth. Saladin’s story, which was based on an immigrant’s struggle to wholly redefine his identity, was essentially secular, although Rushdie took great pains to convey it in religious terms. Thus the novel’s narrator alerted, anyone wishing to recreate himself was practically assuming the position of God. As such, he was acting unnaturally, blasphemously, and truly becoming utterly loathsome. Yet the narrator also saw heroism in this ungodly attempt at identity reconstruction, which might come to a tragic end. After all, survival of mutants’ was risky business, a matter of chance.
To the extent that Saladin’s heroic attempt at identity reconstruction was devilish, there was a comparable precedent in his father, Changez. After Saladin’s mother Nasreen had died, his father had married another woman, also named Nasreen. On that occasion, Changez had enjoined his son to be glad because of the rebirth of the deceased. And Saladin, albeit secularized, had retorted in traditional terms that were relevant to his reclusive father, who—according to rumor—had lately become preoccupied with the supernatural;10 he had accused him of devilment and possession. Then years after, when Saladin visited his father’s mansion, he saw another woman, his former nanny, wearing his deceased mother’s clothes, which he for a moment took to be her ghost. For the narrator, their reunion amounted to an unholy trinity of the father, his son, and mistress.
As Saladin’s begetter, his originator, was satanic, Saladin logically represented a continuation of the same traits, but the narrator momentarily highlighted another dimension, this time psychological, which denied the biological influence of the father over the son. By pointing out a usually prudish reaction against satanic fathers by their sons, the narrator briefly distinguished between Saladin and Changez on moral grounds. Indeed Saladin had blamed his father for worshiping his deceased wife and the erotic role-play involved in the process, as they clearly evoked blasphemy. But in return, his father had accused him of devilry, due to his immigrant attempt at identity construction. For him, someone who betrayed himself was a walking falsehood, a creature that corresponded to the devil’s most perfect fabrication.
To save his son, Changez urged him to return to his origins. He claimed to have safely preserved Saladin’s immortal soul and asked him to abandon his form, which was devil-possessed. This precondition met, Saladin could retrieve his true essence. But any possibility for a return to his homeland after approximately a quarter century in England actually depended on Saladin’s ability to resolve his conflict with Changez.11 Truly, Saladin’s attempt at transformation to an Englishman was a direct reaction to childhood scars caused by his domineering father, although miscommunication rather than lack of love seemed to have lain at the root of the problem. It was his father who had sent Saladin to study in England at the age of thirteen, but the outcome had defied his expectations. After university, Saladin had settled in London and become an actor, despite his father’s strong objections. Uncoincidentally, Saladin was first attracted to show business through his mother’s social circles in Bombay.
On the surface of it, Saladin was fully committed to his anglicized new life and was absolutely not yearning for a return to the past. If anything, he was slavishly committed to his identity-transformation project. For example, he had substituted the funny-sounding and salad-like Saladin for his original name Salahuddin,