Script: “Houra” (nymph) Airport, daytime: A plane lands. Teenage dark-skinned porters holding their carts, wait to rush towards passengers stepping out of the plane. Among them, a weary old woman called Houra comes down the stairs. A flight attendant holds her arm, helping her down. Shanbeh, one of the teenage porters, spots Houra and goes toward her. On the streets, daytime: Houra sits on Shanbeh’s cart, wearing a ring of thread on each finger. Each thread acts as a reminder to buy something. Houra asks Shanbeh to take her to the bazaar, so she can buy herself the furniture she needs. Shanbeh asks her what she wants to buy. After consulting the threads on her hand, the old woman says, “A refrigerator”. Shanbeh turns the cart around and says, “Then, we should go in the other direction.”. Houra adds that she needs a washing machine as well. Shanbeh changes direction one more time and explains that they need to go to different places for each item she intends to buy. He asks to know what else Houra wants to buy, and after a thorough examination of the threads on her finger, Houra replies “A bed, a dressing table, …”, but then tells Shanbeh how she’d prefer to have a cup of tea first. She takes out a teapot from her things, hands it over to Shanbeh telling him what a good time they’d have were he to light a fire so they could have some tea. Shanbeh makes a small pile of wood, fills the teapot with water, and puts on the fire he makes. He asks the old woman who all that furniture is for, and she tells him that it’s for herself. Shanbeh asks her why she wants all that stuff at this stage in her life, while she might not have long left. Houra recounts how she always wished to buy them buy never had the money, and in answer to Shanbeh’s question of “Where she got it from” tells him of the inheritance she received. She then remembers she has forgot to leave food and water for her rooster at home and that the rooster could well die were she not to hurry back home. She suggests leaving the tea to later and going after the furniture before it’s late. Bazaars, continued: Houra looks around in the bazaars while on Shanbeh’s cart. The camera follows Houra, Shanbeh and his cart, while filming from Houra’s view how she gazes at the female mannequins in the store windows, and then passes by. Women wearing black veils pass by where the mannequins are standing. Houra takes travel checks out of her socks (or the corner of her kerchief). [This shot and the next one are edited to be shown several times, parallel to one another] On the streets, continued: Houra goes from one street to the other on Shanbeh’s cart. A few teenage porters follow them, bringing her furniture on their carts. [This shot and the last one are edited to be shown several times, parallel to one another]  The beach, continued: Houra asks the boys to take everything out of the boxes and to set them up as one would in one’s home, so she can tell if there is anything missing, and notice any possible defects. She then asks Shanbeh to take out the tea pot she just bought and to make tea in it. Shanbeh starts making tea in the glass teapot while the other boys take the merchandise out of the boxes. They arrange the furniture on the beach as if they were doing so in a home, making a scene of a house with no walls, with the sea acting as its big swimming pool in the back yard. Houra looks at the boiling tea in the glass teapot with amazement, she is upset with how bare and unabashed the teapot is, and asks Shanbeh to take her back to the bazaar to get another teapot. Houra and Shanbeh go… The beach, continued: Being left alone, the teenagers transform into entirely different beings. One tries turning the stereo on; upon failure, he takes a wooden stick and starts his own music by beating on the tins left around the beach. Another one succeeds in turning on the stereo and others join him in dance. One takes off the guys’ tee-shirts, throwing them into the washing machine to be cleaned. One puts on the bride’s dress while another puts on makeup in front of the mirror. One of them starts to wrestle with the bride. The boy who did the laundry, squeezes the water out of the tee-shirts and hangs them on the rope of a boat parked in the sea. One teenager catches two fishes, which he throws into the glass teapot and the teakettle while another boy turns the vacuum cleaner on, and sweeps in the sand.  On the streets, continued: Houra is on Shanbeh’s cart. They have not found any suitable teapots. Houra says she prefers to use her old teapot, as it reminds her of a man she was once in love with. They loved each other, but couldn’t be together. Shanbeh asks why they couldn’t be together and Houra explains how that man was a servant in the same house where she worked as a maid, and how the owner of the house fired the man as soon as he found out that they cared for each other. Had he not done that, they would have married and had a black son as the man was a southerner. Houra now wanted a son of her own, so she asks Shanbeh if he would be her son now that she is rich. Shanbeh turns her down, explaining that he already has a mother and that one mother is all he needs.  The beach, continued: Houra, Shanbeh and his cart reach the beach. The teenagers try to conceal their wrongdoings from Houra. A few of them who had placed the bathtub in the sea and were taking bath in it, slowly return the sub to the shore. The old woman tells Shanbeh of her two problems. One is that she is already late and fears her rooster would starve to death; the second is one thread remaining on her hand while as hard as she thinks, she has no idea what else she planned to buy. Shanbeh walks away to get a few small boats in order to take the cargo to a bigger boat standing in the sea. Houra asks one of the boys to turn the stove on, she wants to use her new teakettle to make some tea; she has a headache and really needs the tea. She then asks an afghan boy if he wants to be her son and go to Tehran with her. The boy does not accept and Houra goes on to recount the days when she was a maid in a house where an Afghan dug wells, how they were in love but the lady of the house had fired the Afghan upon finding out of their feelings for each other. Otherwise, she said, she would have now had an Afghan boy just like him. At this time, two girls wearing black manteaux (or chadors) show up on bicycles. They are intrigued by the furniture lying on the beach and ride into the water; they put their feet down in the water to cool off, lean on their bikes, and ask the old woman if all that furniture is for her son or her grandson’s wedding. She answers by telling them that it is not so and that she actually bought everything for her own self. The girls ask what good the furniture would do the old woman now, and wish it was their own so they could marry someone. The old woman tells them that it is not her problem that they don’t have things like that as no one ever cared when she didn’t have anything. She then invites them to sit down and drink some tea. She asks the girls where they come from. They reply: “We were in a cycling competition when something funny happened. Some girl was winning the race when her brothers showed up, took her bike and went away with it.”. The old woman asks what happened next, and whether they won the race once that girl was gone. One of the girls says: “No, she took a bike from some other girl who was too tired to continue the race, pedaled hard, and won the race.”. The other girl says: “No, someone else won the race. That girl was taken away by her brothers.”. Houra says she does not care who won the race and that there is only one thing she knows not about. She still has a thread on one hand and has thus forgot to buy something, she will surely remember as soon as she’s home, that’s how it’s always been! At this time, Shanbeh and tens of other boys with small sailboats come. Each is pulling one sailboat behind him. Every boat is formed of oil barrels and black cloth acting as its sail. The teenagers put the furniture on the sailboats and swim along with them, as if pulling them forward. The sea is filled with small sailboats and on each a piece of furniture stands out. The teenagers help the old woman on a bigger sailboat that resembles a king’s litter, and Shanbeh swims her toward the heart of the sea. [Holding her mother’s hand while wearing a chador, Hava walks by the sea; intrigued, she stops and gazes into the sea.] As the boats move farther from the shore, the two girls leaning on their bikes are still talking to the old woman. They ask her if what she forgot to buy was a fryer or a air conditioner or a necklace or… But the answer to every single question is “no” and once she’s far away from the shore, she says to herself: “there is nothing worse for someone than to forget that very important thing he wanted.”