The Oxan market is crowded like all the other markets she had seen before. It’s like a beating heart pumping people in and out of its shops and stalls like blood rushing through the veins. The most important part of any island is the market where fishers layout their fished goods around the main square and wholesalers stand in their stalls dealing with their customers. The wholesalers buy and sell water, fuel, oxygen tanks and dived out goods like steel, plastic, soil and glass. Their storehouses are in the northern storage cabins of the island and they send their orders directly to the port. The Saviour Missioners also have a stand where missioners or healer-maids sit, giving council to people who have problems in their lives, explaining the Saviour Rules and attending to the sick and wounded. The Saviour donation box is by the stand and people usually throw coins in it as the cost of their treatment or as alms to the Saviour Ship. Lealy makes her way through the laid out fished goods to the Saviour stand, trying not to step on the dried fish, octopuses and prawns. She orders Dalia and Asin to put the sacks behind the stand and she sits in front of it. People line up by the stand before she gets a chance to take her breath. She starts looking into their throats, taking out the loose teeth of the children and attending to the wounds of the boatmen and harbour foremen. She keeps ordering Dalia to hand her different tools, bottles of medicine, ointment tins and the pre-prepared napkins from the leather sacks.

Asin is bored. She steps away from the Saviour stand and sits on a low stone bench in front of a dealer’s stall. The stall owner hasn’t arrived yet to send her off. She sees the long line of the Saviour stand from there. Lealy and Dalia are working very quickly. Lealy seems too busy now to worry about Tirad. Asin turns her head and looks around. She doesn’t feel like going for a walk. She doesn’t have any coins with her to shop and watching the fresh and dried fish or dived out objects from the drowned cities do not interest her. But she enjoys watching the hopeful, young women who are trying to get discount from the fishers and the children who gather around the divers’ counters looking at the wonderful deformed objects of the past. The Oxan market roof is not high, causing the air to be thickened by the saturated moist of the dry season and the exhale of so many sellers and buyers crowding the area. Asin takes a deep breath and looks at Dalia who tries to keep her head moist by pouring water onto her head from a small bottle. She knows this amount of water is not sufficient for her and she has to find more water very soon.

Finally, Master Tirad comes! He goes straight to Lealy and talks in her ears. He explains something to Dalia and seems to be in a hurry. Lealy stops him and asks him for something that he replies with his head, having understood the demand. He leaves. Asin wants to go to Dalia and see what Tirad has told her but she suddenly stops, surprised by what she hears, a special melody that she hasn’t heard for sixteen years: someone is playing the oud! The only instrument she had heard in the past years was the harmonica played by one of the divers when they were out on diving trips. But this tune, this melody… Asin can see from here with her eyes closed, the hands of a man squealing on the strings with a seagull feather plectrum, gently moving his fingers up and down the chords. There could only be one person plying like this: Narivan!