Colors and scents
When Lenny wants to block out a stressful conversation about politics at the restaurant, the narration uses imagery related to colors and scents: “I try not to inhale, but I must; the charged air about our table distills poisonous insights. Blue envy: green avidity: the gray and black stirrings of predators and the incipient distillation of fear in their prey. A slim gray-green balloon forms behind my shut lids. There is something so dangerous about the tangible colors the passions around me have assumed that I blink open my eyes and sit up.” The tensions between communities have become like dangerous perfumes.
Riots and hellfire
The riots in Lahore are described with hellfire imagery: “The hellish fires of Lahore spawn monstrous mobs.” These fires are also contrasted to the peaceful fire that Imam Din fans to cook food in the kitchen.
Rivers
Imagery related to rivers is used to describe the mobs in the city: “The terrible procession, like a sluggish river, flows beneath is. Every short while a group of men, like a whirling eddy, stalls.”
Monsters and mobs
A mob of Sikhs attacking Muslims is described with monster imagery: “A crimson fury blinds me. I want to dive into the bestial creature clawing entrails, plucking eyes, tearing limbs, gouging hearts, smashing brains; but the creature has too many stony hearts, too many sightless eyes, deaf ears, mindless brains and tons of entwined entrails.”
Individuals and mass
Lenny describes the mob who comes to her house as both an individual and a mass at the same time. When they act friendly, “the men are no longer just fragmented parts of a procession: they become individual personalities whose faces I study, seeking friends.” When she thinks someone will help her family, the crowd becomes one single person: “The whole disorderly melee dissolved and consolidated into a single face. The face, amber-eyed, spread before me: hypnotic, reassuring, blotting out the ugly frightening crowd.”
Explosions and anger
When Lenny learns what Ice-candy-man has done to Ayah, she is seized by anger described with imagery related to explosions: “There is a suffocating explosion within my eyes and head. A blinding blast of pity and disillusion and a savage rage. My sight is disoriented. I see Ice-candy-man float away in a bubble and dwindle to a gray speck in the aftermath of the blast and then come so close that I can see every pore and muddy crease in his skin magnified in dazzling luminosity.”
