Asin had felt the first labour pains on the third night, as the lights of the boat had turned off. It was at least four weeks early and a bad sign. She had a deep desire to give birth in the water but Dalia and the boatman had stopped her from jumping off into the sea. She was in pain the whole night and her screams broke the dark silence of the night, suppressing the sounds of the waves. But she had attracted a school of large fish to the boat. The boatman, scared of this unusual attention, wouldn’t turn on the lights. The fish’s shadows were hardly visible, as they turned around the boat in a shallow depth of the water. But as their bodies touched the boat, it caused horrendous shakes. The boatman so scared of Asin’s screams and the large fish that had surrounded them, had hid himself in a corner, shivering like a child. Dalia had to tie her mother’s hands again to stop her from drowning herself. She had tried to calm her down in any way she knew. As the sun came up, Dalia had finally taken in her nail-less hands the baby that had come out her mother’s womb.

The fish had gone away as soon as Asin’s last painful scream had ended. The boatman had passed out from fear. The newborn’s legs were conjoined. He had no fingers and wouldn’t cry: another stillborn baby. Asin had washed her baby in the sea and wrapped it in a bundle. The whole time she was twisting from pain to push the baby out, only one scene had come to her mind: a scene from a funeral from her homeland. It was farfetched and vague, a memory from her childhood. She was standing hand in hand with her mother on top of a hole in the ground. Some men were throwing dust over a dead body in the hole. The scene came and went in pieces. She could hear her toddler self asking about the burial and her mother’s answer that was trying to be as simple as possible, an answer that was hard for Asin to recall, especially with her altered memory as the result of living on the sea for so long. The only thing that she was sure of was that she had to bury her baby in a ground.

When the boatman woke up, he didn’t know where they were. They were lost. It had taken him an hour to locate their boat using a compass. They were nearly three hours away from the Saviour Island. He had thrown out Dalia and her mother into the waves. Asin had told her daughter not to worry and just follow her. She wouldn’t listen to Dalia. She had only one thing in her mind. She had to say goodbye to her baby in the way that the island people would do, otherwise the misshaped babies would keep coming back into her life, tormenting her. She had taken the baby’s bundle in her teeth and started swimming towards the land.