Excrement appears as a recurring motif that serves the novel’s primary theme of Dehumanization as a Tool of Racist Ideology. Its repeated presence is a deliberate narrative strategy designed to associate the migrants with filth, contagion, and primal disgust, thereby stripping them of human dignity. The text weaponizes this motif to provoke revulsion in the reader, framing the migrants as a subhuman force that is inherently unclean and thus unworthy of human fellow feeling or empathy. This is starkly illustrated by the character of the Dalit man who is referred throughout the novel via the slur “coprophage,” or feces eater. The man, a “dung-roller by trade, a kneader of excrement” (72), rises to become the armada’s prophetic leader. By positioning a figure defined by his proximity to waste as the spiritual guide for the migrants, the novel ideologically links their entire movement to the profane and repulsive. The motif is extended to the collective life aboard the fleet, where people cook their rice by burning “excrement”—a practice of desperation that the novel nastily jokes is “a peasant technique tried and tested over three thousand years” (147). This grotesque detail is not merely for shock value; it functions to construct a racialized hierarchy in which the migrants are defined by practices that mark them as uncivilized and alien, justifying the West’s fear and exclusionary violence as a sanitary, rather than moral, response.

The Côte d’Azur setting symbolizes the pinnacle of Western civilization, privilege, and cultural purity, making it the ideological frontline in the novel’s invasion narrative. This geographical location is depicted as a carefully guarded paradise of leisure and wealth that is under attack: “a sea for the wealthy, seemingly all of a sudden stripped of the veneer of affluence that usually covered it” by the migrants (51). The novel portrays the fleet’s arrival as a desecration of a space defined by its exclusivity and beauty. This setting heightens the novel’s themes of Nationalism as Constructed Rather Than Inherent and “West” and “East” as Manufactured Identities. The Côte d’Azur is the physical and symbolic border where the idealized West confronts the racialized threat of what the novel terms the “East.” The area’s transformation from a playground for the rich into a military quarantine zone underscores the idea that national identity is not intrinsic but must be violently defended. The apocalyptic imagery of the “twenty giant pyres” burning corpses on its shores turns the luxurious landscape into a hellscape (56), symbolizing the destruction of Western order and aesthetics.

In the novel’s geography of racialized fear, the city of Calcutta represents the origin point for the West’s anxieties about formerly colonized states. These places become an ideological construction of the “East,” representing a nightmare of overpopulation, poverty, and disease. This portrayal serves the theme of “West” and “East” as Manufactured Identities by creating a simplified, threatening other against which the West defines itself. The narrative uses Calcutta to generate horror via scenes like the one at the Belgian consulate, where mothers present children with disabilities whom the novel’s deeply ableist language calls “unsellable monsters” for adoption (71). The most powerful symbol of this manufactured horror is the son of the Dalit man leading the fleet. The boy, who has physical differences, is made into a grotesque totem and described as an “enormous, sunken torso with hunched back; no neck, but a kind of extra stump” (72). This figure embodies the novel’s dehumanizing vision of the East as a source of alien and subhuman life. Calcutta is thus imagined as the heart of a “river of sperm that has abruptly changed course and is now flowing West” (89), a metaphor that crystallizes racist demographic panic. By framing Calcutta as the epicenter of this biological and civilizational threat, the novel justifies its apocalyptic narrative of invasion as a defensive reaction to an inherently chaotic and excessive East.

Belgium’s consulate in Calcutta serves as a symbolic setting through which the novel satirizes and condemns Western liberal humanitarianism. The consulate’s policy of facilitating adoptions is portrayed as the direct cause of the crisis, framing Western compassion as a fatal flaw that invites civilizational collapse. This connects to the theme of Racist Anxieties in the Postcolonial World, as aid and empathy are depicted as self-destructive gestures. The consul’s decision to “cancel until further notice all adoption proceedings” backfires spectacularly (70), intensifying the crowd’s desire and transforming individual pleas into a collective demand for mass deliverance. This narrative turn has an ideological function: to demonstrate that bureaucratic or humanitarian responses to the problems of what the novel calls the “East” are ineffective and only accelerate the West’s demise. The consul himself voices this theme when he accuses the Western activists of having “created from scratch a racial problem in the heart of our white world” with their misguided charity (74). In this way, Belgium’s presence in India stands for a weak, guilt-ridden West whose attempts to atone for its colonial past only succeed in engineering its own destruction.