City as death
After killing his mother, Thivai gets arrested together with his father, but soon they escape with a man called Custer. Thivai decides to make a move to Paris. On the street he approaches a prostitute but is soon yanked away from her by another man. When he looks at her face, he sees tears in her eyes and concludes that city is indeed death for some people.
The blood flowing into the dropper is a river
The novel is filled with various ambiguous metaphors and similes to compare the inner state of a human with the surrounding world. In that sense, city is death, blood is compared to roses, woman's body is compared to meat and a person's personality is compared to an iceberg. In that sense, the metaphorical image of Thivai dropping the drug needle and the eye dropper he previously used into a cup being compared to a river is quite striking.
Death is a person
Overlapping motif in this novel is death or rather the reality and finality of it. Most characters are on a brink of suicide because they are surrounded by death. Death is described as the only true thing that comes with life. Death is personified as a person, in one part of the novel Abhor is talking to Death and saying that Death is in her thoughts.
