Narivan was dressed in a peculiar way, unlike the men of the sea or the island people she has seen so far, covering his body from neck to toe. He had pulled his braids up his head like the Saviour women and covered them with a scarf. His behaviour was not like the sea people either. People of the sea have no past, nothing to hide, gain or lose. They just live in the moment and this short reliance on life has made them much simpler than the men of the lands. Still Dalia doesn’t fully understand the men of the islands. They seem cruel and ignorant with a suppressed anger and peculiar agendas. They seem to be living in ancient times and at the same time in the far future. They keep missing the ‘present’. The only exception so far has been Tirad. But he has his own problems. Tirad seems lost in the complexities of his people but Narivan is not like that. Even though he spoke of his wandering on the ships and islands, he doesn’t seem lost. He knows what he wants and what to avoid. He had wanted Asin all these years and is happy to have found her. Dalia had never seen someone look at another person with such love and adoration as Narivan looked at Asin, even though Asin’s body and face are still bruised from her beating in the Saviour Ship.

Dalia’s father had no family on the Avij ship, the whole ship was considered as his family. Yet as soon as he disappeared, they had forgotten him. His father had never spoken to her or anyone else. Their communication was a silent agreement. They would go diving together. Whenever she thinks of her father, she hears the roaring of the waves and the still silence of the underwater world, breathing under the oxygen mask. Her father reminds him of the solitude of the sea, the moments so close to dying. Anything can happen under the water and the smallest incidents may lead to death. Time stretches under water and changes modality and one has to be very careful to track it correctly, not to stay under more than appointed. They have to keep track of the depth they have dived and keep adequate time to return to the surface, all need to be calculated carefully. Her father is the symbol of the stretched time under the waves and continuous calculations, and going to Narivan’s island would mean forgetting her father. What if her father had lost track of time or miscalculated the time he was away and returns to Avij very soon? Even though his long absence means that an accident may have happened and incidents on the sea are as dangerous as the one’s under. She has no other way. Asin has already made up her mind, having found her way home to her family after sixteen years. She can’t leave her mother, relying on a thin hope of reuniting with her father on Avij. She can’t tell her mother about Tirad’s proposal anymore. What Asin has told her about her past is so distant from the ways of the Saviour that even mentioning the idea seems absurd. Of course, Asin would prefer playing music on her own island than do janitorial work on the Saviour Ship!