Each Zoroastrian watch honours a region of the good creation, and the afternoon belongs to water. The Uzerin Gah invokes Apam Napat, the child or scion of the waters, one of the most ancient and enigmatic figures in the Indo-Iranian inheritance: a lofty lord of the liquid element who appears already in the Rig Veda under the same name, which makes him older than the split between the Indian and Iranian religions and one of the deepest continuities either tradition preserves. In Zoroastrian devotion the practical face of the watch was the waterside.
The tradition's piety toward water is famous, no pollutant may touch it, and the afternoon was the customary hour for bringing offerings to rivers and springs, for the ab-zohr, the libation to the waters that completes the Yasna, and for the personal prayers of women and men at wells and streams, usages Mary Boyce documented still alive in the Zoroastrian villages of Iran in the twentieth century. The watch's position in the day carries its own quiet symbolism: as the sun declines from Rapithwin's ideal noon, the liturgy turns from fire, the element of the zenith, to water, the element that receives and refreshes, so that the day's devotional arc moves through the two great ritual elements of the religion in their natural order. The believer's obligation remains the simple one common to all the gahs, the kusti rite and the watch's Avestan prayer, but the afternoon's texts face the flowing world.