The Literature of Soviet Uzbekistan - Gafur Gulam's Mischievous Boy
Uzbek culture is poorly represented globally. To remedy that we share the opening chapters of the Uzbek semi-autobiographical comedic novel Shum Bola (Mischievous Boy).
Even within the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan was poorly understood. On the positive side, people knew about its culinary culture, especially its iconic plov (which makes an appearance in the following excerpt) as well as the vibrant swirl-patterned clothing of its inhabitants. On the flip side, Uzbekistan was renowned as the supposed hot-bed of corruption in the Soviet Union. In both cases, these impressions are largely based in stereotypes, and betray a very surface level understanding of the country. The region was the site of some dozen civilizations (The BMAC being the oldest). Sogdians, Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Gokturks, the Kushan, and many more have come into this region and left their mark. The Russians were the latest of these.
Unlike other lands which Russia subdued in the course of acquiring sovereignty many centuries beforehand, the territory that is now Uzbekistan was only captured by Russia in the 1870s. The conquests were made in the course of what was dubbed by Rudyard Kipling “The Great Game”, the contest between Britain and the Russian Empire over large chunks of the Asian continent, stretching from Tabriz to Tibet. The British believed that the Russians were conspiring to march into India by land, while the Russians, sometimes acting in reaction to British so-called preemptive strikes, other times themselves leading provocations, decided to conquer large chunks of land for the empire. At first they prioritized the northern areas of what is today Kazakhstan, which had already become home to many Russian-speaking peasants and Cossacks over the preceding decades. Eventually the Russian Empire would claim sovereignty over what is today called Central Asia (some scholars prefer Inner Asia as Central Asia carries with it a Cold War understanding of the region) and a sphere of influence over the northern parts of Afghanistan and Persia (the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara became protectorates even as real power fell into Russian hands, with the traditional leaders of these polities retained as figureheads.) Thus Russian sovereignty came into the region, paving its way forth despite the rivers of blood.
Uzbekistan had great agricultural land and an underpopulated landscape, making it a magnet for Russian settlement just like other lands further north. But fortunately for the Uzbek people, Russian settlers were not able to gain numerical primacy in the country, thanks in large part to the Soviet government’s efforts to clamp down on their ability to proceed, which unfortunately had much to do with racist practices. This was not entirely out of the blue, Central Asia (then called Turkestan) had been the site of the 1916 Revolt when the people of the region rebelled against Russian power on account of the difficulties imposed by the First World War. Historian Jonathan Smele considers it to be the first of the “Russian Civil Wars” which reverberated throughout the country from 1916 to 1926. The Revolt was brutally put down, leaving bitter feelings particularly against Russian settlers.
In a region so recently rocked by brutal repression, the Bolsheviks found a ready audience in much of the area. There was also the small matter of the so-called Basmachi (anti-communist fighters in Central Asia, this is a derogatory term literally meaning bandits) competing for power. The Soviets were able to win the favor of the population in large part because they promised to implement a policy of korenizatsiya, or indigenization, which allowed the people of Uzbekistan would be able to govern themselves within the framework of the Soviet Union. Also on the menu, class politics against Russian settlers, who often acquired land and dispossessing the inhabitants through unscrupulous means. In countries like Uzbekistan and neighboring Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan it is easy to see why Soviet power was so popular. Unfortunately the region would see its fair share of injustices during the Soviet period, but it would be a time of many victories as well. Nor would Uzbeks only play the role of victims in these events, as the Tajik minority in Uzbekistan was long the target of animosity.
Soviet national politics in the 1920s meant that the country was interested in cultivating intellectuals from national republics whose work would imbibe their compatriots with socialist ideas presented in a form that was familiar to them. Unfortunately many of these intellectuals would meet a grisly end in the 1930s, when Stalinist politics reoriented the nationalities policy of the Soviet Union towards different ends and made a previously encouraged type of national politics suspect. These people, who had adopted a pro-Soviet orientation in the 1920s but many of whom had been politically and culturally engaged since before the Russian Revolution, would be succeeded by the younger generation which became politically conscious under Soviet rule. People like Gafur Gulam.
Born in 1903 to a poor family, there was little telling that Gulam would become one of the most celebrated figures in Uzbek national literature. He was born and raised in Tashkent, which was both then and now the capital of Uzbekistan, and the city is the site of much of the novel. He began to be published at the age of 20 in 1923 and he would continue to do so for the rest of his life. Shum Bola or Mischievous Boy was first published in 1936 and then revised in 1962. The novel is interesting not just because it’s funny (and it’s very funny) but because the story conveys in a very lively manner ethnographic details about life in the city at the turn of the 20th century. We can begin to have a sense for how Tashkent and the lives of its people would have appeared to a young boy who had barely turned 13. But this is no ordinary young boy, this is Dennis the Menace on speed. We hope you will enjoy reading about his exploits.
Shum Bola was made into a rather good movie in 1977. If you would like to watch it, you may find it on Youtube in either Russian or Uzbek. No subtitles, unfortunately. But do let us know if you would like to hear more about this eponymous mischievous boy.
A Samarkand chaikhane photographed by Sergei Prokudin Gorskiy.
Part One
The Children of the Old Mahalla[1]
The aisles of the bazaar are packed with people. Standing on the corner of the dairy section of the Mahkama Mahalla is Ilham’s chaikhane[2]. A gramophone incessantly plays old songs performed by Tuychi Hafiz, Hamrakul Kora, Hoji Abdulaziz and various singers from Fergana. There’s never enough space in the chaikhane, as this is where the sons of trader beys spend their free time.
They gather around a dastarkhan[3] in the middle of which was a large copper tray arranged with sugar, almonds, pistachios, and various sweets. Jam jars abound, and often they flaunt a bottle of cognac in a wicker basket adorned with the picture of a swallow. As they sit down, they gleefully croak and tell jokes which are greeted with thunderous laughter. Peasants[4], poor artisans, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, who have come to market from afar, need not come here.
The chaikhane attendant, a gaunt fellow nicknamed Asra the Bald, dressed in a light robe and a blue silk scarf, eagerly scurries among the customers. He wears a polka-dotted shawl over his shoulder and kavushi[5] on his feet. The moment a guest calls out “Asra!” or “Baldie!” he jumps over.
“What would you like mullah-agha? Tea? Pipe?” Before you can even glance around he returns with a small teapot in one hand and two Chinese bowls in the other, or he fills a gleaming copper pipe with tobacco and noisily gets the fire going before bowing and handing it to the customer: “Mullah-agha, please.”
Many incredible things can be seen in the chaikhane, but none moreso than the large gilded cage hanging from the ceiling by the entrance, decorated with amulets to protect against the evil eye and miscellaneous flags. That cage is home to a parrot, a real live parrot! His feathers shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow, like silk threads in an embroidered box. Dark blue, red, light blue, yellow, white, pink, brown, dark cherry, pistachio, just think, all the colors that exist in the world! But most importantly, he talks! To think, the way he chattered so briskly. I can still hear his voice, sonorous and raspy like a three-year-old girl who had just learned to speak: “Asra! Asra! Please serve the guest! One tea, one pipe, mullah-agha please, bawk!”
We boys wander around the bazaar, a barefooted scruffy flock in rough goat-hair shirts and pants. We scurry everywhere, but we are always drawn to the entrance of the chaikhane. “Hey buttheads!” Asra the Bald lunges at us with a ferocious grimace. Whoever he catches is going to get a good slap in the face. The parrot joins in to give a heated scolding: “…your grandma!”
To get to the point, our favorite entertainment in the bazaar are the jinni, the holy fools. How many of them there are in Tashkent? If you try to list them all you’ll lose count! Karim-jinni, Redhead, Pair of Doves, and then there’s Mairamkhan, the holiest of the fools. The Ishaan’s[6] Wife, Hal-Parang, Tajikhan, Alim, Avaz… Each of them is mad in their own way and rave in their own way, we know them all very well. Pair of Doves for example is obsessed with the authorities, Tsar Nicholas, Kaufman, Mochalov and the police guardsman nicknamed Nabi-thief, all of them. He would assemble a crowd and start ranting and raving, the previously unexposed are even afraid to listen. Karim-jinni also curses like there’s no tomorrow. The target makes no difference to him, Allah, The Prophet, the Khoja, the ishaan, the qadi, he would curse them all for seven generations. He was once a weaver until the market was flooded with mass-produced fabrics. Karim could no longer feed his family and finally he went insane. Roughly the same thing happened to Hal-Parang, he was from Kokand and wove velvet. Judging by his nickname he was once a skilled craftsman. He went mad after his workshop burned down. And Mairamkhan? Oh, he was the most famous jinni! His real name is Mamatraim, and he was a locksmith. And what a locksmith! He had such a light hand that it was thought that that good fortune would come to anyone whom he visited. It is said that Mairamkhan never ate with his own hands, so many devotees were ready to feed him plov as a guest of honor! Countless craftsmen considered it a blessing, hence his nickname was Mairamkhan! He went around the streets and bazaars, dragging behind him a piece of scrap metal attached to a wire, cracking jokes and showing his radiant smile. He burnt out when factory goods hit the market, and little by little he was no longer needed and he lost his mind from poverty and melancholy.
The jinni called Ishaan’s Wife was a graceful swarthy woman of around 45 with thin black eyebrows. She had indeed been the wife of Ishaan Mittikhan once, the turam of Kalandarkhane! One day she caught her husband with her younger sister and went mad.
Of this bunch perhaps only Avaz wasn’t really crazy, he only pretended to be as he did not want to work.
We knew all of the stories about these unfortunates, we heard them all from adults who loved to tell them. But us boys, we had no time for pity, We had few spectacles to behold, so we would make them up. With the jinni we could put on an entire show, even though it was better not to! Sometimes we prodded them into singing and dancing, but more often than not we just teased them mercilessly. And when we really got them into a frenzy, that was when the fun began. They would charge after us and we would evade them, not always successfully, and when we couldn’t they’d give us a good beating, a well-deserved punishment. In short, we had no shortage of excitement and laughter, especially when two or three jinni would get together. One day the one called Tajikhan started chasing passersby on the street waving a hoe handle and demanding that everybody walk in the same direction. “Don’t scatter!” He yelled. “I demand order! Order!”
Nobody could do anything about it until Alim-jinni showed up. “Hey jinni! What are you blathering about?” He shouted.
“Why aren’t they going in one direction?” Tajikhan said. “Under Tsar Nicholas there must be order! Order!”
“What a fool you are Taji,” said Alim-jinni. “What a fool! Do you know what our land is like? It’s like a scale! If everyone went in one direction you know what would happen? It’ll tilt over like a tray and we’ll all drown in the Kurdumdarya!”
Tajikhan stopped and stood for a while with his jaw agape, then shook his head and walked away. It would seem that only a crazier idea could dislodge a crazy idea from his head, like a needle dislodges a splinter.
This is how we spent our days, we would have so much fun that we’d hardly notice when the evening came. We ran home right after the third prayer, just before sunset, and then we’d have a quick meal of soup, usually of flour, or mung bean soup with pumpkin or rice, or noodle soup, whatever happened to be at home. When we finished we’d run back out into the street where we could see the lovely summer stars.
Our mahalla is bordered by Tikanli-Mazar on one side and Kurgantagi on the other. We would crowd in the cul-de-sacs to the left of the main street and play late into the night. We play the best games at night, especially on moonlit nights. During summer, spring, and autumn our streets are dusty and soft, pure delight. But during the winter the dust turns to mud and some of us are knee-deep in it, while others are waist-deep, so we have to move our games into the square or in the covered passages from courtyards into the street. Seven-line kerosene lamps burn in the dim lanterns installed by the city government. Every evening a lantern man walks around with a ladder to pour in kerosene, trim the wicks, and clean the glass, and in the morning he walks around again to put them out. At night when you walk just a few steps away, they flicker in the darkness exactly like a cat’s eye. The reddish flames don’t illuminate the street as much as they remind passersby walking along the narrow sidewalk, “Hey, don’t bump into me! I’m here…”
Well, what can you even do in the light of such a lantern? Even talking isn’t convenient! The adult, barely having finished their final evening prayer, walk home. The streets are deserted. Not even a raven would fly by. We’re the only ones left. Now is the perfect time for a game of hide and seek.
We have many other games too, like wrestling, “Batman-Batman” is another kind of wrestling: the players stand with their backs to each other, join hands, and take turns lifting a partner onto their backs. We also have a game called “white poplar, green poplar” where the boys are divided into two groups, each of which chooses a leader and the other team must guess who he is. The incorrectly guessed sit on the backs of their opponents and ride them to an agreed-upon location. What else..? Ah, there’s also “mindy-mindy” or “the thief has come,” or “my bird’s head.”
To tell you the truth, all of these games resemble each other. Why is it so appealing to sit on your opponent? To play “my bird’s head” the guys split into two equal teams, each one choosing a “queen bee” the ringleader. The queen bees take a rag, tie it into a knot, and try to give it the shape of a bird. And then they try to guess the bird in hushed tones: goatcatcher, gull, tit, turtledove, hawk, kestrel. Both teams patiently wait until the queen bees finally come to an agreement, and showing the ragdoll begin the questioning.
“My bird’s head looks like this and its body looks like this, guess what kind of bird it is.”
“A vulture!” screams the team.
“Nope, wrong!”
“Chicken!”
“Wrong!”
“Oriole”
“Wrong answer!”
“Owl!”
The queen bees give up. “You got it!”
The guys from the guesser’s team then sit on their opponents while shouting in unison, “Forward my donkey!” and ride to where they’re supposed to go. Then somebody asks the queen bee: “on horseback or on foot?” If the queen bee says, “what’s down is up,” the donkey and the rider switch places. As we ride around we sing songs, we just can’t get enough of this one.
“Hum hum, if only we had power
To drink, to eat to our heart’s content
Khan, khan, Umarali,
Bek, bek, Madali,
We will, we will have your power,
We’ll drink and sing to our heart’s content!”
We rush around singing and shouting until we get on the nerves of some old lady, “May you children of Shaytan go to hell!”
Oh well, there’s also “naked racing!” It’s quite simple, we take two skullcaps and tie them to our temples so they become like horse ears. We tie the hems behind us in the shape of a tail and run to different locations. Usually our routes pass through Tikanli-Mazar, Karatash, Yalapkari, Almazar, Diwan-Begi, and back to Tikanli-Mazar, it’s a circle of about three versts.[7] The first to complete the track is met with applause, shouts of adoration and all sorts of honorable expressions. The main thing is that until the next race he is considered to be the strongest.
In addition to strongmen we also have “moneybags” but our wealth is of a different kind. The most valuable things we possess are ashyk[8], painted and filled with lead, or a bat made of bone sharpened for us by the spindle masters, or the lid from some old clock. These valuables are used mostly during the day, when the summer sun burns too hot to run around the bazaar, or when it’s too muddy in the winter. Then they are used for their own form of entertainment, we tinker with the ashyk or nuts, play ball or tip-cat. We also have archery and “horse snatchers”.
And during the month of fasting, this is supplemented by many other interesting things. At night we walk around the mahalla and “sing Ramadan”. After sunset, with the onset of namazsham, the fourth prayer, and until the midnight meal, which is called “sakharlik”, we wander from mosque to mosque and listen to the qori swaying and reciting the Qur’an from memory.
We have plenty of free time, the schools don’t keep us long, and as for affairs… what kinds of affairs could we possibly have? Our parents themselves can barely find any work, let alone jobs for us boys!
A mahalla like ours is usually inhabited by petty craftsmen, such as tanners who cover kettledrums and tambourines with leather or make saddle blankets, rope makers, artisans who repair porcelain or glassware with metal clips, water carriers, porters, stablemen, watchmen, masseurs, the petty servants of neighborhood mosques… Truth be told our mahalla is mostly inhabited by workers of the printing house or the confectionary factory. But still, we’ve got everyone! These are the parents of my comrades, and I remember them well.
Aman’s father is Tursunbey-Agha, he made pocket blades. He was a widower, his wife died young, and Aman was left as an only son. Abid’s father, we had two Abids, we had different nicknames for them, one was called “It” (dog) and the other one “Bit” (louse), so anyway, It-Abid’s father was Zahid-Agha, a ragman, and Bit-Abid’s father was a sheath sewer. Khusnbey’s father, Amanbey, was also a leatherworker who made horse collars.
Salih’s father Yunus-Agha is a hafiz and singer. Rasulmat-Agha, Turabey’s father sells guza, and Abdullah’s father Aziz-Agha sells kerosene. He drove around a cart with an enormous barrel and sold kerosene on the streets. Of course, he didn’t own either the cart, nor the barrel, nor the horse, and not the kerosene either for that matter. He worked for the Nobel Company.
Pulat-Khoja’s father is something like a traveling salesman, he would travel to different towns on both sides of the border, and sometimes he would disappear for long stretches. It is said that when Pulat-Khoja was a six-month-old fetus he got stuck inside his mother’s womb while his father roamed around Kashgar for maybe five or six years. He was born three months after his father’s return.
We would congregate in Yuldash’s house, he lived alone. His mother died long ago, and later his father Buwa-Agha, a shoemaker, fell ill and died.
By the way, Miraziz-Agha was the neighborhood cobbler, I was even sent to him as an apprentice. He came from a remarkable family. When he moved to our mahalla, his father Salimbey fed his family by bringing home bones from the slaughterhouse and boiling the fat out of them. But he had once been a fighter with Yakub-Beg[9]. During the Kashgar Rebellion he snatched a Chinese lady as a trophy and brought her back home on a saddle, forced her to convert to Islam, and then he married her. He made her abandon her Chinese name and named her Bakhtibuvi. Miraziz-Agha was the youngest of Bakhtibuvi’s three sons.
Are those all of my neighbors? Oh, I almost forgot the most important birds! How times have changed! Back then they were the real moneybags, there was the shopkeeper Karim-Qori, Yakub-Pumpkin the wax merchant, and the paint vendor Abdullah-Khoji. They stood in front of everyone in the mosque, I just don’t remember who went to which mosque anymore, we had two nearby. One was in Tikanli-Mazar and the other in Kurgantagi and there was a school in each of them. The imams were also teachers: Shamsi-Domla was at Tikanli-Mazar and Hasan-Bey was at Kurgantagi. I went to the second one, who taught not through “Haftiyak”[10] but with “Ustod-i-Avval”[11] and consequently taught literacy much faster.
Plov Potluck
This whole unfortunate business began with Yuldash. We were playing with our ashyk under the canopy by the main entrance to the Lailik Mosque, and I was unusually lucky on that day. My pockets and sleeves were stuffed full of the ashyk that I had won. I reveled at my victory and hiding my winnings into my pocket I cried joyously: “Aha, you blew it! The ashyk are mine!
My luck had no end in sight. That’s when Yuldash showed up. He came up to me, wiping his nose with his greasy robe, looked at the game and said, begrudgingly: “What do you guys say? Let’s have a plov potlock!”
We all turned to him instantly. “Let’s do it! Let’s do it!” Clearly my lucky streak had soured everybody else’s mood.
Yuldash narrowed his eyes: “Where?”
“Wherever you want! We could do it as Rizqi-Halfi’s former yard!” Rizqi-Halfi was the teacher’s assistant.
“Sounds good,” Yuldash said, and he began assigning everyone an ingredient. Khusnbey was chosen as the cook, he was to provide the pot, the skewer, water, and salt and pepper. Yuldash took the rice and carrots upon himself. A sucker named Abdullah was to bring the meat, and I promised to get lard and everything else (there wasn’t much else) was assigned to the wily Pulatkhoja. We all parted ways and I, weighed down by my winnings, went home to get some lard.
My mother was in the kitchen. She fired up the tandoor to make pumpkin samsa.[12] I poured my ashyk into a corner and went to get the supplies, which were kept in the storeroom behind our little old house. On the way there was the iwan[13], where my middle sister babysat the youngest. If I walked past her, even looking nonchalant she would’ve immediately asked me where I was going, she would’ve barked up a storm like a guard dog. I had to resort to trickery.
“Shapag,” I asked her, “where’s your big ball?”
“It’s by my dolls. Why?”
“It’s not there!”
“Go to hell! You must’ve taken it, give it back right now!”
I stood there, smirking wickedly. She put my little sister down ran to her dolls while hissing at me. I rushed to the storeroom and swiped some lard from the jug, wrapping it in the scrap of paper that covered the jar, and shoved the loot into my belt. The main deed was done. I calmly walked into the shack where we kept our firewood. It turned out that the gray hen was nesting an egg, now I had a chance to really distinguish myself. In addition to the lard I would bring the egg, even though it wasn’t assigned to me! I pushed the hen off to the side, she clucked and ran away. I hid the egg under my hat. There was only one danger left: I would have to get past the kitchen. I walked to the fence, acting as if I were just strolling by. I was hoping that my mother was busy with the tandoor, but alas! She was standing by the door and waving her hand to push away the smoke. She had a pained look and teary eyes.
“May you die!” she screamed. “Going out again?”
I meekly halted.
“All you know how to do is run around, you bloody wretch!” she shouted. “Come here, help me with the fire. There’s so much smoke, I’m nearly blind!”
I had nothing else to do so I went over to the tandoor to fan the flames. The smoke was gnawing at my eyes, and the egg was rolling quietly under my hat, as if the chick were waiting for a chance to roll out and hatch. It was really hot in the kitchen. When the fire started to burn really hot I felt something leaking down my stomach and leg. The heat melted the lard! The trickle of fat intensified, pouring out like a ditch during a flood. I was seized with irritation and fear. My pant leg was moist and the melted fat began dripping onto the ground. I was just about to turn to see if my mother had noticed when I felt a blow to the head.
“May you die!” my mother screamed, waving a rolling pin, “You’re such an oaf, you could have children yourself if you married and here you are wetting yourself, in the sacred place where Fatima and Zuhra’s belongings are kept! Oh, may you…”
She paused and stared at me. The egg under my hat had cracked, the yolk and egg white was running down my face and my right cheek! My mother had heard a slight crunch when she hit me, now she must’ve thought that she had bashed my head open and my brains were leaking out. This was no reason to hang around. I slipped past her to the exit as I rushed out to the yard. My mother screamed something, and my little sister joined in with her own angry screeching. I had no time for them. In a few moments I was already far away on the street.
After rounding the third corner, I stopped to consider my situation. This was as bad as it got. I had nothing to bring to the guys, and I couldn’t go back either as my mother would realize that a good third of the lard was missing, and then I’d be in real trouble. Where should I go. I suddenly felt a deep loneliness and melancholy. I have no place of refuge!
I stood there picking at the adobe fence of the house I had stopped by. Behind the fence in the courtyard life went on as normal, calm voices could be heard. Suddenly a girl called out, “Auntie!”
And that’s when it hit me: my aunt in Sagban! Why didn’t I think of that?
In fact, on Sagban Street lived my childless aunt, my father’s sister, with her furrier husband. I rarely came by, but they just adored me. They had no children of their own and the house was always quiet, everything was neat and tidy, so much so that it can even be boring. I don’t even know the boys of the neighborhood. But this house was stocked like a store, what didn’t they have? They had almost everything in the world!
Three powerful hunting birds: goshawk, quail hawk, kestrel. A fighting rooster. A turkey. An ordinary rooster but so enormous and fat that you could even ride him. He had a purple-green back, with black sides and a crimson crest that looked like the tip of a flame. In a willow-twig cage lived a grouse. In a net with a gourd bottom there was a quail. They had songbirds too, among them were a nightingale, a whitethroat, a starling, a turtledove…
They also kept three dogs in the house: a hunting dog (they kept it as a status symbol, my uncle never hunted with it), a little lapdog which couldn’t stand me, and a mutt living in an old kennel by the gate. They all got along splendidly with a lush Bukhara cat. The last time I went over the cat had five or six kittens, they probably kept those too.
And they had such a magnificent flower garden in the yard! Portulacus, rose hips, iris, roses, asters, rhinestones, nightshade, dahlias, oleander, marigolds - it's hard to remember them all. My uncle and aunt treated every bush like an apple of their eyes, but I never could figure out how they were able to keep the animals from the garden.
And they had such excellent treats! My mouth began to water with anticipation as I remembered all of this. What a pleasurable life was about to replace my sad state of exile! I washed my face in a nearby ditch and made my way over to Sagban, stopping along to way to look at all of the intriguing curiosity I came across while I imagined the beginning of the beautiful new life that awaited me.
As I expected, my aunt and uncle greeted my joyously. My aunt immediately began fussing and gushing: “Oh my little dove, come on in! What breeze blew you in! It’s as if my brother has risen from the dead and come to us! It’s no wonder my eye twitched today!”[14]
I shrugged it all off modestly, saying that I missed them very much and I had come to stay for a few days. My aunt lit up upon hearing these words, and my uncle was overjoyed.
“Good boy!” he said to me affectionately while stroking my head, “what a good boy! He remembered us! It’s no wonder that a yulpasha[15] circled the room today, and I was wondering who the guest might be. As it turns out, it’s you! It was a good portent, such a good portent. Good boy!”
They showered me with words of affection and led me into the house, and I was so taken by all of this that I myself came to believe the explanation for my arrival.
And so began my life in paradise. Many people have already been convinced that life in paradise could get a bit boring. This realization dawned on my in the middle of the second day after I had made contact with all of the animals, having twice incurred the wrath of the rabid lapdog, overfeeding the mutt, and depriving the enormous rooster of his most beautiful feathers while trying to ride it around the flower bed, letting the two cats mother and daughter know their place in the pecking order, and smelling the flowers so much that I lost a good half of my sense of smell.
I begged them to go outside. My uncle gave me three kopecks for small expenses (and he promised that I get such an allowance every day if I try not to get hit by a cart) and so I set out to make new acquaintances.
This mahalla was not quite as crowded as ours, but there were still plenty of boys, and they did pretty much all the same things we did so I had no trouble joining their games. For two days we played war, then we shot arrows and played with ashyk, but this time my luck had expired. On the morning of the third day we decided pit dogs against each other. Of the two strays we caught, one turned out to be so faint-hearted that he made a run for it the first chance he got. Then I decided to show off my uncle’s mutt and to sneak her out of the yard. At first she felt my support and bravely put herself on the attack, but recent stomach troubles had sapped her strength and self-confidence. She was defeated and returned home from the battlefield with a chewed-up leg. She would limp for the rest of her life.
I felt bad for her, I never expected this outcome. Now I would have to figure out how to hide this tragedy from my uncle. But then my luck returned! My uncle was invited out to the countryside to eat melons fresh from the patch. He also decided that he would visit some relatives to celebrate Hait[16], so he would be out of town for a few days. He took with him the greyhound and the quail hawk, as well as a net with a long handle to catch birds. He didn’t notice the mutt’s wound, the poor dog was huddled in the back of the kennel, and I thoroughly blocked the entrance with my back. Just before he left my uncle gave my three Bukhara tengas[17]: “please feed the birds, make sure they don’t go hungry. Here, buy them more feed if I am delayed.”
I was filled with pride. I’m already an adult, I’ll be 14 soon and they’re trusting me with an important job. And these weren’t just any birds, these were birds of prey like hawks and kestrels! I went over to the bird coop. A hawk and a kestrel sat on roosts in different corners, digging their heads into their backs. I didn’t know what my uncle fed them, but a thought crossed my mind. Their droppings were completely white. White as milk. They must need dairy! Of course, fresh milk wouldn’t be any good, it’s too liquidy, but buttermilk? That must be it! I must try it. No, it’s definitely the right food for them, otherwise their droppings wouldn’t be so white. How come nobody’s ever figured this out?
I sneaked a pot from the kitchen which is used to ferment milk and I went to the market. For two kopecks they filled it to the brim. At home I poured the sour milk into cups and gave one to each bird. They cast an indifferent glance at the food before immediately turning away. Makes sense, these are pedigreed birds, they’re very proud, these aren’t just minnows! Hungry as they were, they wouldn’t dare to seem like beggars. If they were chickens they would immediately reveal their bad character by pouncing on the food. But these ones wouldn’t stoop so low.
I exited the bird coop and returned some two hours later. The proud birds still just sat there, turning away from the food and not leaving the perch. I got real angry. They had souls like sparrows and yet they still showed off. Wow, look at these predators! I did show them my full respect, I even went out because I thought they preferred to lunch without intruders. But here they are, not a single touch!
Outside the bird coop on a stake were my uncle’s mitts, he wore them to perch the birds. I put them on, picked up a kestrel, and holding it between my knees I fed it buttermilk from a silver spoon. When I thought that the kestrel had enough, I put it back on the perch and moved on to the hawk. The hawk also ate decently. “It’s alright now,” I said to them as I left, “you know how fatigued a man gets if he sits still in one place? Now that you’ve had enough to eat, you have enough energy to sit still. Now enjoy your sit, you are full and there’s no trouble at all.”
And so I fed them like that for two days, keeping it a secret from my aunt. I was especially fond of the kestrel, I gave her the thick top layer of the buttermilk. I had a lot of responsibilities now, I hardly ever went outside. My aunt silently felt joy when she looked at me, but I pretended not to notice how her kind smile shined.
“Well done!” I said. “You shouldn’t spend your entire life on a roost, it gets boring.”
The birds ate buttermilk for breakfast again. At noon I decided to give them syuzma[18] since they were now living on a lean diet and must’ve missed greasy food. When I went into the barn in the evening, I couldn’t believe my eyes! The kestrel lay dead, with its wing folded under its body and legs stretched out. The hawk was in the same pose, it was still breathing but it didn’t last long. I was gripped with horror: what would I tell my uncle? He loved these birds so much! Why’d they have to die? Was it the buttermilk? So what, I love meat too and how many days did I survive on milk alone, and not enough of it mind you! What a catastrophe! What am I going to tell my uncle? And then I understood that I had nothing to say to him. My life in this city is over. It’s over. I must leave before it’s too late. I’ll go where ever my eyes take me, like the heroes in the old fairy tales that my mother used to tell me when I was little. I guess that wasn’t such a bad time after all. I once again felt myself so utterly alone and miserable, I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t do that, my aunt might notice.
I still had five kopecks left over from the money my uncle left for food. I hid them inside my belt and went to the gate. In the covered passage hung a cage of doves whom I loved so much. I looked at them with regret, thought for a bit, and suddenly made up my mind: I quietly took the cage off the hook, put it on my head, and walked out. The street was almost empty. I walked briskly to get away from the house as quickly as possible. I imagined my aunt, when I was leaving she was knitting a shawl for the cats. What will she do when she misses me? She’ll probably cry. I slapped myself on the back to make these thoughts go away. Money in my belt, my robe tucked, a cage of doves on my head, I went forward like a hero of these fairy tales, keeping my path steady as I walked out of town.
I will go down this lonely road weeping,
You will stay behind, weeping in a sad garden.
We are two little doves, two weak nestlings
And the separation between us, like a path without end.
Oh my sorrow, the dust and the midday heat
How it feels to be me, the mosquito on the road will tell me.
I’ll write a song about my melancholy and the heat
How it feels to be the mosquito on the road.
Oh, don’t ask me, ask the wise man,
What it’s like for us wanderers on this road without end.
[1] Neighborhood
[2] Teahouse
[3] Traditionally Central Asians would eat not from a table but seated on a tablecloth on the floor
[4] Dehkan is the original word. Peasants
[5] Shoes with an elevated heel and pointed toes
[6] Ishaan is a title given to a leader of a Sufi lodge, especially in Central Asia
[7] A verst is about a kilometer
[8] While ashyk could also be used for divination, in this case they are used to play a game similar to marbles. They are made of hollowed out cow or goat bones.
[9] Muhammad Yakub Beg led an uprising against Chinese rule on the territory of what is today Xinjiang which would last for over a decade until 1877.
[10] A textbook that was used to teach young pupils to memorize the Qur’an.
[11] Ustod-i-Avval on the other hand seems to have been focused on teaching the pupil to compose their own writing.
[12] Very similar to Indian samosas except baked rather than deep-fried.
[13] A rectangular space covered by walls on three sides.
[14] A twitching eye is an omen that you will have a visitor.
[15] A type of big fly.
[16] Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.
[17] The tenga was the main silver coin of the Bukharan Emirate. They would stop being struck around the time when the events of the novel take place.
[18] A fermented dairy product with a tofu-like consistency.