Healy comes in with two dishes of raw fish and puts them in front of Dalia. Lealy and Dalia carefully help Asin to sit down. Ignorant of her mother or Lealy’s presence, Dalia starts teething the fish. She eats from the head to the tail, swallowing even the fish’s bone. Lealy turns her head away, disgusted by the way she eats the fish-like a peculiar animal. She doesn’t want to watch Asin eat as well. She faces the cabin window. Dalia knows she has to start talking as soon as she finishes her food. But she is too hungry to be able to control her eating pace and postpone her explanations a little longer.

Chapter 8

Asin was found by the Avij Ship divers over the drowned city of Karaj. It was a rich but dangerous diving area and both divers from Oxan and Atlan would dive out concrete blocks, brigs and metals from the ruins of the underwater city. Asin was passed out on a dugout. If they had found her a little later, she would have drowned by the waves. She had nothing with her – no food or water. It wasn’t clear how long she had been on the water, but the divers had thought she had been abandoned to be punished by the sea. A year before Dalia was born, Asin was brought back by the divers to Avij ship. She couldn’t speak their language and explain what had happened to her. Later on, when Dalia was her only translator and they could finally ask her about her past, no one cared to know anymore. A long time had passed and the ship residents had forgotten all about it.

Dalia’s father was both deaf and mute, but a very competent diver. He didn’t mind that Asin couldn’t talk to him in their language. Asin had learnt to understand the Oxan language but couldn’t speak it, but as time passed, people had gotten used to knowing Asin as deaf and mute like her husband. After Dalia was born, their marriage had become official. Dalia had no hair or nails. They had to keep her skin moist at all times otherwise her skin would crack and the capillaries beneath her skin would bleed. But Asin was fine with all that, she was happy that her child was not born with conjoined fingers and toes. It was not a hard job to keep someone’s skin moist, especially when you live on a ship. And having no nails couldn’t make her child’s life miserable. But she couldn’t say this to her husband and the residents of the Avij ship who thought that the baby was deformed. The women of the ship wanted to throw the baby into the water to avoid the future misfortunes that the ominous baby would bring with her. They had taken their request to the ship’s chief, Ardaz. He had looked at the baby and her hands and had said this is not a major deformity and that her nails may grow when her teeth came out. This was enough to postpone the life threat of Asin’s child, and she knew that the women would forget all about her as time passed.