Bringing in the New Year - Uzbek Style

On the last day of the years, shops buzzed with frantic last minute buyers stocking up for the holiday weekend. Even the tiniest entrepreneurs, those who sit behind a small card table arrayed with cigarettes, matches and candy bars, had expanded their selections, sometimes offering things like oranges or cookies in addition to their usual wares. I walked past a bakery shop selling cake for $11 per kilogram. A line of customers covered the display cases, as the three bakers, men dressed in white aprons, handed over one cake after another.

I bought some bananas and oranges to give to the family, as well as Choco-Pies and candy bars to give as presents to the three boys in the household.

Me, Nigora and Shavrat, and their three sons, Faruh, Habib and Faruh, gathered around the table at 6:30. Nigora uses one of the rooms adjoining mine as the place to receive guests and to hold events. A sofa and several chairs line a low table and they had brought in the TV and stereo system. As part of the “summer” section of the house, it’s unheated. So they plugged in a portable heater, and prepared what they called a sandal – they put a small heater under the table, covered the table with a heavy blanket before putting on the tablecloth, and instructed us to put our feet under the blanket, which effectively trapped the heat.

“If your feet are warm, everything will be warm,” Shavrat said. “Back in the time when there was no heat and no electricity, this is how my grandparents stayed warm, using coal under the table.”

For the first time, I saw Nigora dressed in normal clothing and also for the first time, I saw her hair. Given that so many of her household tasks are outdoors – from cooking and washing dishes to sweeping the paths, doing laundry and lighting the stoves or banya, I had so far only seen her wrapped in layers of non-descript old clothes, a scarf around her head. On New Years eve, she wore a beige turtleneck, a beige and black long plaid jumper and a thick gold chain. Her wavy dark hair fell down to her shoulders. Later in the evening, she put it up in a ponytail, much like a schoolgirl. She suddenly looked years younger. She has a small, round baby face and a pretty smile, gold teeth on the upper left side of her mouth, square white teeth the rest of the way across.

She pointed out to me that she has two crowns on her head, one on the left side of her forehead and the other, like most people, at the back of her head.

“I guess I have two brains in there,” she said.

“Then you must be pretty smart,” I replied.

“My husband doesn’t think I’m smart.”

Habib, her 17-year-old son, a friendly and handsome young man with her bright smile, interjected. “My mother has a university education and my father only finished school. But he somehow thinks he’s smarter.”

“It’s not that I think I’m smarter,” Shavrat defended himself. “I just believe that the man should always be above the woman. That is how it should be.”

“But it doesn’t always happen, huh?” I asked, and the boys laughed.

“I’m content letting him be the head and I’ll be the shoulders,” Nigora said.

Nigora said that she didn’t prepare a special meal, since it was only the family gathering and if she prepared a lot, everything would just be left over. When I returned from work in the afternoon I immediately noticed that our turkey population was down to one. Shavrat had killed one that morning and she used it to make turkey and potato soup, followed by a selection of premade “salads” – beet salad, soy meat salad, some kind of meat with milk and water added to make it gelled, an unidentifiable meat salad, and Chinese rice and starch noodles with carrot salad. We also had fresh fruit, rolls, cake and chocolate.

Nigora poured small cups of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a gift she’d received from an English friend, while Shavrat drank Georgian cognac, a gift from a Russian friend. Shavrat gave the first toast, hoping that everyone could make a wish and work to make it come true in the coming year.

“I wish that my dad wouldn’t drink,” Lufulo said. Shavrat had just announced his plans to quit smoking and drinking starting with the new year, but no one seemed overly optimistic. Shavrat refused his wife’s offer of a $100 bet.

“He really hates it when his dad drinks,” Nigora said.

Shavrat told me how he stopped drinking for five years. But after a colleague who he really respected unexpectedly died in an avalanche while mountain-climbing, he began to drink to dull the pain. His friend’s body was never found and he dreams of joining an expedition to find and bury him.

This was my third New Years spent in the former Soviet Union and it was definitely the lowest key of the three. We just sat around, ate, talked and watched TV. Every so often, the boys would go outside to see what was happening on the streets. As the night progressed, we’d hear more firecrackers being ignited on Technicheskaya Street, just outside our window. It was also a nice opportunity for me to get to know the family a bit better. I had imagined we’d eat dinner together every night, but instead, Nigora brings me food into my quarters. I’ve never been in their section of the house and last night was the first time I’d seen all the boys together and was able to imprint their names and faces into my memory. Before then, I may have passed them on the street without recognizing them.

Shavrat told me that he has a long history with this street. He himself was born and raised in this house and most of the neighbors have also passed their houses along through the generations, so they know everyone near by. He stepped out to say hello to the man who lives across the street. He has a two-year contract working as a welder in South Korea and is now back on his annual one-month vacation. He earns $1,000 a month there and is able to live on $250 a month, sending the rest home to his wife and children. They’ve bought a Mercedes with the money and when he returns, he plans to revive and modernize the family tire repair business.

Shavrat and Nigora told me about their marriage. They had a funny beginning in that they were both 25 and neither of them wanted to get married. Shavrat’s grandparents were looking for a wife for Shavrat and they found Nigora and spoke to her grandparents. They arranged a meeting and Nigora said no, she wasn’t interested. She was a Communist party member working as an engineer in Tashkent and she was happy with her career and her apartment. She didn’t want a family, especially given the expectations that went with marriage among the Uzbeks – that she’d have to take almost full responsibility for cooking, the home and children.

“I couldn’t believe that she refused,” Shavrat said. “I told her that I’d come in the night and steal her. I was a very attractive guy then and there were at least 50 girls who wanted to marry me. Whenever they said they wanted to marry me, I said that was the end. I wasn’t interested.”

“Listen to him praise himself,” Nigora said, smiling. Their sons were also smiling, as though they’d heard all this before.

“I couldn’t believe that someone didn’t want to marry me and that made me want to marry her,” he continued, as though he hadn’t been interrupted.

“But Uzbeks don’t steal each other, do they?”

“No, that’s only the Kyrgyz,” Habib said.

“I refused,” Nigora explained. “But my mother was very tricky. She started to say that she was sick, and she did become seriously ill. She said that her blood pressure was really high and she was going to die. So I said OK, OK I’ll get married.”

She was a Communist pursuing a career. Shavrat hated the Communists and said that through his musician friends, he foresaw their demire.

“I told her in 1984 that the party was going to end and she didn’t believe me,” he said.

I asked her how it felt when it did come to an end.

“By that time, I was at home, raising children, cooking and doing laundry, so it didn’t affect me that much. Of course, it’s painful when you believe in something and it’s torn down. It’s even worse to find out that what you believed in was wrong. But if I’d been working at that time, it would have been really hard.”

While Shavrat isn’t highly educated himself, he seems to be fairly smart and is very concerned with his sons’ educations. He told me how his two eldest sons studied at the elementary school nearest their home.

“They would come home with all fives (As). Even in Russian, they had 5, 5, 5. And I knew that they didn’t speak Russian very well and they couldn’t have received 5s. But Nigora doesn’t speak Russian very well, so she didn’t notice. And at the school, all the teachers and all the students were Uzbek and Kyrgyz. There wasn’t a single Russian there. So how could they learn Russian? I realized that it was a bad school and I wanted my sons to transfer.

“We have rules here though that children are required to go to the school nearest their home. But I took them to another school, showed the administrators their reports and told them – “Look, you need good students like these, don’t you?” They said yes and they took my sons.”

Habib explained. “The first year, we received twos and threes (Ds and Cs) in almost everything, but by the time we were in fifth grade, we were getting fours (Bs) and even fives (As). Now everything is OK.”

Habib is in the eleventh grade and will be going to the university next year. Faruh is currently a first year university student in the finance and credit department. He was admitted to a Turkish university in Bishkek, but they couldn’t afford to send him there. They are thinking of allowing him to transfer after he’s completed a few years here.
Faruh, a thin 19-year-old with a darker, mouselike face, told me how he is currently having a problem because his Kyrgyz history teacher refuses to give good marks to anyone who doesn’t pay. Shavrat refuses to pay any bribes to teachers.

“I’ll pay the tuition and that’s it,” he said. “There are so many students now who just pay and don’t study at all and don’t learn anything. I want my son to have to learn these things.” That’s a rather bold move in a society with such prevalent corruption.

As we talked, they would occasionally burst out laughing at scenes from an American movie that was on TV, a movie they said was called Black Diamond. It was set in an inner city, many of the cast members were African American and it featured lots of criminal activity and fights.

“This is a movie that everyone has seen several times,” Nigora told me, after they all laughed. “This time they translated it into Uzbek, but they make jokes throughout it. They’ve given all the characters Uzbek names. Right now we know the characters were having a serious conversation, but they translated it as, “So how’s the weather?” and the other guy responding, “I think there is going to be snow.”

During the action scenes, they inserted traditional Uzbek music. One scene that even made me laugh had an African American pizza delivery man, with corkscrew curls, large teeth and an overflowing personality, come into an office building to deliver three pizzas. He was bouncing around the lobby with his three pizza boxes with a lot of energy. Nigora translated for me.

“He’s sayng ‘I have fresh lepushkas (round Uzbek bread) for sale. Fresh, delicious lepushkas, right out of the oven.” He approached a fat Caucasian security guard and tried to sell the lepushkas. “I’m sorry, but I’ve just had samsi (Uzbek meat, fat and onion-filled croissants).”

It was pretty funny to imagine the American characters talking about lepushkas and samsi.

Just before midnight, the lights went out and Faruh took advantage of the darkness to light sparklers in the house. We then went out onto Construction Street. A few minutes before midnight, the street was smoky with the residue of firecrackers being lit off from each household, whizzing and popping noises filled the air as residents, mostly young boys, lit off everything from bottle rockets, to giant colorful fireworks that could be seen from a large distance. I covered my ears and looked all around me, at the explosions occurring from different directions.

The street was full of people, but because it is lined with single-family homes, the people were spread out along the street, each group congregated in front of their home. When I spent New Years with friends in an apartment in Latvia, it was more festive since all the apartment residents went out and congregated together. Some neighbors came by to say hello to Nigora and Shavrat – the man back from Korea, a woman in a scarf and fuzzy wool Uzbek vest.

A man across the street brought out a stereo and set it on a chair in front of his home, then turned on American rock music. A group of children began to dance.

“Last year we had a huge disco,” Shavrat told me. “One of our neighbors has DJ equipment and he set everything up. The street was full of dancing several hours before midnight. This year is calmer. Perhaps he found work playing music this evening.”

We went in to more salads, more champagne, and more Russian and Uzbek festive TV programs. I lasted until about two, Shavrat and Nigora stayed up longer – Shavrat getting drunk with neighbors on his last day before giving up alcohol, Nigora sitting by the TV with her children.

into the mountains

I think that in comparison with Siberia, I considered Bishkek to be a tropical paradise and I tended to reject the idea that the beautiful late summer would ever end. The transition to fall has been gradual, moving so slowly as to be almost unnoticeable, yet persistent all the same. The ground is now covered with a carpet of dry yellow leaves. My image of an endless summer is gradually vanishing. While Bishkek is, on average, sunny 330 days a year, this morning I rode to work in the aftermath of a rainshower. I mistakenly didn’t listen to my former roommate when he advised me to get wheel guards, so as my hands froze in the chilly air, I was spattered with muddy water. It’s frequently been chilly in the morning, but always heats up in the afternoon. So I usually dress for the afternoon weather. But for the past two days, it stayed cold all day and I froze in my short-sleeve dress and sandals.

On a positive note, I had a pleasant surprise when I went into the bathroom to change. I’ve moved to another local office and this was my first morning there. This office is much better equipped than where I was last. When I opened the bathroom door, I was shocked to find a shiny tiled floor, a sit-down toilet, and even toilet paper and a mirror. I had become used to changing on a dirty floor next to a smelly open pit. And toilet paper and mirrors were things I thought could only be found in the luxury of headquarters.

I still owe you some news from last week. I’ll tell you about the highlight and write more about other interesting events later. On Sunday I paid my first visit to a local home. A coworker named Gulnara had shown special interest in me. She’s finishing up her studies in economics and is one of two people on the staff that speak English really well. She’s really excited by opportunities to learn about other countries and to practice her English and she seemed especially eager to get to know me. I spent a few days following her around, learning how she does her job. During that time, she told me that her parents live in a village outside Bishkek and that they can step outside their front door into the mountains. When I expressed interest, she promised to invite me home.

On Sunday, I met Gulnara, a middle-aged Indonesian friend of hers, currently visiting for work, and two local friends, classmates of hers at the university. We took a bus to the edge of the city, then got a taxi for the remainder of the 100 kilometer trip to Sosnovka village. Except for my one excursion to Lake Issyk-Kul, this was the furthest I’d gone outside of Bishkek.

Pretty clumps of yellow leaves hung from the trees lining the road. We passed the auto market, which was packed with buyers and sellers, and a busy village bazaar. We didn’t have to go far out of the city before beginning to pass lots of horse- and donkey-drawn carriages and people who seemed to carry the heavy weight of poverty. Then we entered a very rural part of Chui Region, characterized by large golden fields, old kolkhoz equipment, and occasional small villages.

We were driving straight into the mountains, and just as we were about to crash into them, we arrived at Gulnara’s house. As she’d described, her parents have a view of the mountains from their home and can literally walk out their door and into them.

Gulnara’s mother, a young and attractive Kazakh who looked like an older version of her daughter, met us outside their blue gate. Gulnara introduced us to her father, Ahat, her 18-year-old brother Erdan and a few cousins, then led us inside. We went into a spacious, airy, sparsely furnished home, with red-toned rugs covering the floors and walls. One room had two narrow twin beds for Gulnara and her brother, another had a sofa and two armchairs, the third was entirely empty, used only for gatherings. And the fourth contained a painted chest and a tall stack of homemade bedding, covered with a shimmering peach and gold sheet. Gulnara lifted a corner of the sheet to show us what was underneath.

“This is for my wedding,” she said. She said that her mother made it all over a period of a month.

“When you see this, does it make you feel that you must get married?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “My mother prepared it when I was 13, nine years ago.”

Gulnara had told me earlier that her parents were anxious for her to get married. A woman over 25 is considered overage for marriage and at 22, Gulnara is getting close. With shiny wavy black hair, a trim figure, stylish clothes, and an outgoing, friendly personality, she doesn’t lack for proposals. She’s had three already, including one from someone she’d dated for five years, a German, and a Turk, but her mother rejected them all. She is insistent that Gulnara marry a Kyrgyz, wanting her to stay near home.

Gulnara isn’t eager to get married. “I want to work and to travel,” she told me. But since parental permission seems to be essential for a wedding here, her mother’s conditions may limit her options.

She lifted a sheet covering some objects against the opposite wall and showed us a sewing machine, also waiting for her marriage. “It’s a tradition for mothers to give their daughters sewing machines on their wedding,” she said, laughing. “But I won’t use it because I don’t know how to operate one.”

We were led into the fifth room where baskets and bowls of fruits and cookies lined the center of a beautifully set table. As the guests, the Indonesian and I were seated at the head of the table and quite a bit of ceremony was made by them scooping a tomato and cucumber salad onto our plates and urging us to eat. There were apples, green and purple grapes, homemade strawberry jam, borso (the Kyrgyz national bread), chak-chak (fried bits of flour covered with honey) and watermelon.

Gulnara poured us glasses of Shoro. She’d stopped to buy two bottles on our way to Sosnovka, after I’d asked what the women were selling out of the blue and white dispensers I frequently saw along downtown sidewalks. The Indonesian’s face looked as mine probably did when she took her first sip of the sour, grainy brown liquid that tasted like sand poured into old yogurt. Gulnara’s mother poured tea, and just as we’d completely stuffed ourselves, she brought in homemade galupsi (cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice) and stuffed red peppers, which Gulnara had told her were my favorite. I couldn’t take more than a bite of either.

“I wasn’t expecting more food,” I said.

“Didn’t I tell you? We drink tea before we eat,” Gulnara said.

All this was at 10:30 in the morning.

Gulnara and her family went to prepare our picnic lunch, leaving us to stare out at the piles of food that remained while the smell of frying chicken wafted over to us. When Gulnara returned, she showed us the grounds, pointing out the banya where they wash once a week, their chickens and their stylish outhouse, with a concrete floor and toilet paper. Her parents live in a three-room house across from the house we’d been in. Gulnara pointed out the wood and coal stove that heats her parent’s house during the winter and her mother’s rose garden that separates the two homes.

We also visited her mother’s store, located just outside their front gate. She started her business as a kiosk, a small enclosed stand with sales conducted through a window, shortly after the fall of Communism. She moved up to a pavilion (a bit bigger than a kiosk, with a door so that customers can see the products), and then to a full-size store. From the age of 11, Gulnara helped her mother by working in the store.

Her mother now has three salesclerks working for her. The shelves were mostly full of alcohol and grains such as macaroni and rice. A small room off to the side offered a place for customers to sit and enjoy their purchases (drinks, I would guess). I commented that it looked like a café.

“No,” Gulnara said. “A café wouldn’t be profitable in a village because everyone wants everything to be really cheap.”

Together with Gulnara, her friends and two young cousins, we piled into her parents two beige Ladas. Her brother drove one and his friend the other. Just outside the village we went through a toll booth for the recently refinished road to Osh, then immediately entered the mountains. As mountains rose on either side of us, the rushing white Kara-Balta river skipped alongside us, first to the right, then the left. Erdan stopped several times along the way to allow us to take photos.

We parked at a roadside waterfall and walked to the top. After a perilous crossing of the waterfall, which freaked me out enough that I preferred to stick my feet in the water and get wet, we finally found a good trail on the other side of the falls and followed it into a valley. All around us rose stark, tall mountains with grey and purple slate-like rocks clanging against each other as we stepped over the pieces. Lime green lichen grew on the rocks at the base of the mountain, forming patterns that looked like ancient symbols. A cool breeze ran through the valley and it was a perfect fall day, sunny, a golden tinge to the landscape, and we were alone, surrounded by mountains on all sides.

I became really excited about the possibility of long treks in Kyrgyzstan. But for the moment, I had to turn back. My companions weren’t trekkers and they wanted the food we’d left in the car.

When we returned, the others had already set out felt mats and the backseat from one car around a tablecloth. They were cutting the tomatoes, cucumbers, and oranges and setting out the bread and chicken. When Gulnara cut into the chicken, blood ran out. It was clearly underdone. I thought we’d just do without it, but she sent her brother home to have it cooked. By the time he returned, Gulnara’s friends were huddled in the car, shivering, and the two children were sliding down the mountain, creating avalanches of small rocks as they went. The chicken was fantastic. Fried in mayonnaise and garlic, juices ran all the way through each piece.

On the way home, we stopped by one more waterfall. There were several groups of people there and the signs of civilization detracted from the beauty. Gulnara and I scampered to the top while the Indonesian woman gathered crab apples from a tree.

We weren’t allowed to go home before eating yet one more time.

Over lunch earlier in the week, a Kazakh coworker in her early 20s had explained the importance of feeding guests well to me. “There must be an endless supply of food,” she said. “If I go as a guest and I’m not received well, I won’t want to have any further contact with that person. It will end the relationship. But if I’m treated well, then there will be return invitations.”

We were given a few minutes to relax and try to work up an appetite, then were led back to the table for Kyrgyz soup, made with meat that had been boiled for two hours and potatoes. For such a simple soup, it had a surprisingly rich taste. Gulnara had warned me that they drank tea before they ate, and the tea hadn’t appeared yet. I waited apprehensively for a giant entrée to appear. When Gulnara poured tea and it didn’t seem as though anything else was coming, I asked, “I thought you said you drink tea before you eat.”

Gulnara laughed, “I guess we didn’t this time.”

Gulnara’s dad drove us to the city, an hour and a half trip. On the way, we dropped off one of Gulnara’s friends. Her mother was standing outside the gate, knitting, waiting for her.

“It’s getting late and she’s worried her daughter could be stolen,” Gulnara’s dad joked.

That of course led us into the subject of wife stealing. Gulnara’s father claimed that it never happened between people who don’t know each other. “Usually, the situation is that a man and a woman are dating and love each other. Maybe the man wants to get married, but the woman isn’t ready yet. So he’ll steal her. It speeds the process along.”

I asked how he’d react if his daughter was stolen. He said he didn’t know, then was silent. “If someone took her, they’d have to send a representative to us and let us contact her. I’d ask her if she was happy with this person. If so, it would be OK. If not, we’d take her back home and complain to the police.”

“Would the police do anything?”

“If the woman and her parents complain, maybe. But a tradition is a tradition and what can you do about it?”

When I told him about my colleague’s staff member who was stolen by an unknown man in a southern region, he replied, “Naryn, Osh and Jalal-Abad are the three regions that have really held onto tradition and things are different there. But in Talas, Issyk-Kul and Chui (where he has spent his whole life) it’s different.”

“More modern?”

“Yes.”

I’ll soon be heading to Osh for a month. I’m looking forward to seeing the differences.

As we approached Bishkek, the road remained black, no streetlights anywhere. People crossing the road looked like shadows. It wasn’t just in my residential area that people struggled through the blackness. I think Bishkek is the darkest capital city I’ve ever seen.

“Is it difficult to drive without streetlights?” I asked Ahat, who as an employee of a road construction company in Bishkek, spends a lot of time on the roads.

“If you don’t have them, what can you do?” he replied practically. With a smile and an offer to serve as my surrogate parent in case I’m ever stolen (promising to contact the police), he dropped me off at home.