Tirad’s first teacher was Akhgar, an impatient and bad-tempered man. Tirad would take the stick in his hand and try to draw the shape of the words on the sand board. But he would only draw them as he would copy the pictures from his treasured papers. He couldn’t understand the meaning of the letters that made up a word and couldn’t read from the words he had drawn. The classes seemed too long and too boring to him. The only classes that he enjoyed were the history courses where Saviour’s life story was narrated for the children. After a year, Akhgar had hopelessly told the Circle that Tirad was slow witted and couldn’t learn anything and it was better if they would return him to his father. Hurmaz had asked the Circle to give him a chance at trying to teach the boy. His private lessons with Tirad were not something that people were used to on the ship, nor something they would approve of. But Hurmaz had continued with patience and care and he had finally taught him to read through Tirad’s own learning method. Hurmaz never said anything about letters and words and how words were constructed by letters. He treated each word as a shape and had made Tirad memorised the shape of each word and to say the name of the shapes aloud as he saw them. In this way, Tirad was able to read the sentences made up of the shapes he had already knew by heart. Hurmaz had made him practice a lot, especially for Tirad’s ‘read and write exam’ and he had demonstrated his victory and Tirad’s reading ability in Akhgar’s presence. Tirad was only saved from being expelled from the Ship but he still had to learn how to read and write like others. Hurmaz began explaining the letters to him, and it took Tirad two years to finally learn to read and write properly. But through these years, his hand was quick on the paper and before he had turned seven, he could easily draw anything that he saw. If it wasn’t for Tirad’s extraordinary ability to draw – something that no one on the Saviour Ship could do – Hurmaz would have had to return Tirad to his father. Not just because of Akhgar’s disapproval of Tirad but to keep the boy safe from being bullied by other children.

The first two years at the Saviour Ship were hard times for Tirad. But at last, the reading spell had taken over his sadness and pain both from missing his father and students bullying him. Tirad was allowed to go to students’ library and read the books over and over again. He read anything he could find, from Saviour Narratives to the few fiction books left from pre-rain era; stories that took place on land, on towns, crowded places called cities and strange places called jungles, mountains and moors. He would travel to new places in different times by every book he read and devoured every stone, leaf, colour, shape and living creatures of pre-rain times that he read about. He had discovered a joy that was not comparable with any other, and this newfound happiness had helped him deal with his father’s absence and the abuses of the Saviour Ship residents. As he grew, he was allowed more access to the fiction books and the more he read, the more he would distance himself from his fellow students. How could he care about the trivial conversations of the boys or laugh at Mart’s boring jokes when the wonderful world of pre-rain was revealed to him through words, sentences and paragraphs of the old books.