A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (20 page)

The imminent arrival of Ramazan was heralded each evening by gangs of small boys who roamed the streets knocking on doors, expecting payment in coins or sweets, shouting a traditional poem that announced the month of fasting. By the third evening of incessant knocking, rewards were usually replaced with scolding, the boys running away jeering and undeterred to the next house. In
Khiva few people actually fasted, but it was still considered the done thing. Invariably, whenever I asked someone if they would do the fast this year, their faces assumed pained expressions followed by explanations that, if only their kidneys, or heart, or some other body part were functioning properly, they would gladly, with God’s help, observe Ramazan.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Abdullah,
Koranbeg’s wayward brother, had decided to fast this year. Koranbeg, in solidarity, opted to join him. They spent the first day miserably in front of the television, switching channels whenever vodka or Maggi instant noodles were advertised. That evening, our family hosted a special banquet for the faithful to break their fast in style. On television, a mullah announced when nightfall was
official (when it was too dark to distinguish between a white and black piece of string) and cupped his hands in prayer.

Koranbeg’s mother prayed for our own gathering in a pained whisper that left us guessing when it was time to echo the ‘Amin’ and wash our cupped hands over our faces in blessing. The prayer over, Koranbeg and Abdullah immediately slung back bowls of cold tea and pounced
on the bread, scooping up trailing white strands of gooey
nashallah
and bolting the whole lot down. This treacle-like mixture made with beaten egg-whites and sugar appeared only during the month of fasting, as did boxes of dates from Iran. Bowls of thick laghman noodle broth were brought through by Malika, who was also fasting but still expected to serve. These were followed by large platters
of plov. Koranbeg’s friends, having heard about his fast, came by for a free meal and were soon lolling on the corpuches, replete but keen to keep eating. A bottle of vodka appeared and was opened, but Koranbeg and Abdullah piously declined – a first as far as I could remember.

The following day they continued to fast, waiting impatiently for the announcement of nightfall before attacking
the evening banquet. Koranbeg’s friends returned for another free meal and again a bottle of vodka made its way to the table. The novelty of piety was wearing thin, and this time both Koranbeg and Abdullah were soon knocking back shots, breaking the fast Uzbek-style. Koranbeg surfaced the following day at the breakfast table unshaven and hungover.

‘I thought you were fasting,’ I said, as
he poured a bowl of green tea for himself.

‘How can I fast now after getting drunk last night?’ he asked ruefully. ‘Maybe next year, if God wills.’

While the men in our household had fasted ostentatiously, Shirin – the only weaver fasting at the workshop – displayed none of Koranbeg or Abdullah’s theatrics. Although the biting cold dampened her thirst, the lack of food or hot drinks
made staying warm even harder for her. Another friend working in the Mayor’s office also kept quiet about his own piety. A devout Muslim, he’d stopped attending the one working mosque and prayed only at home. He was still thought to be a little too religious and lost his job soon after – the state wary of devotion to anything other than the Motherland.

* * *

Khiva may have been ‘the
most homogeneous example of Islamic architecture in the world’, but it now had a curious ‘pick and mix’ approach towards Islam. Once the Khan had ruled that all drinkers of alcohol – along with smokers – were to have their mouths slit from ear to ear, which proved particularly unfortunate for Captain Muraviev who had brought the Khan an embellished hookah pipe as a gift. Hearing of the Khan’s edict,
he hurriedly explained that it was, in fact, a vinegar bottle. Much had changed after 70 years of Communism, and today the faithful in Khiva weren’t averse to breaking fast with a round of pork shashlik and a tipple of vodka.

Before the Bolsheviks, madrassahs built by the wealthy and the pious attracted students from as far away as Kashgar in China. They came to study the Koran, some memorising
it entirely, spending their days in the shade of a black elm debating the finer points of their religion. Sufi pilgrims heavily influenced the Sunni Islam of Khiva, curing the sick with holy breath or with dust from Mecca and collecting alms in return. Sufism proved popular with Khivans; a more spiritual approach to Islam, it was redolent of their pre-Islamic Nestorian Christian and Zoroastrian
roots. Khorezm had been populated by Nestorian Christians up until the arrival of Amir Timur, who wiped out all but a few isolated communities. Their religion was propagated by itinerant monks whose woollen robes and deep spirituality gave rise to the term
suf
, which means wool in Arabic and was a slang word to describe Muslims wanting to emulate the spirituality they saw in Nestorians. Khorezm
was also once a centre for the Zoroastrian faith. Popular Sufism, or folk Islam, was influenced by these earlier faiths, and focused on traditional folk beliefs coated lightly with Muslim rhetoric.

Under Soviet rule, popular Sufism proved far more resilient than orthodox Islam. Mosques and madrassahs could be closed, and the faithful forced to fast in secret in order to keep their jobs;
but home life was harder to control, and in this women’s domain popular Sufism thrived. As I’d witnessed, babies and cradles were covered in stuffed triangular amulets with verses from the Koran placed inside them. Bracelets of ‘eye beads’ fooled the evil eye into believing it already possessed the wearer, and strings of dried chilli peppers and bundles of the dried isfan
herb hung outside, protecting
houses from spiritual attack.

Zafar exhibited some of the seemingly contradictory ideas that many Khivans believed in. He was an atheist, he said, clearly evolved from a monkey. I asked him why, if this was the case, he still cupped his hands in prayer at the end of each meal. He paused for thought, explaining that he did believe in some kind of God but wasn’t interested in going to the
mosque, fasting or praying. His belief in the evil eye, however, was unwavering.

‘Did you know that my wife had a twin sister?’ he asked me once. ‘She was a healthy and happy baby, while my wife was sickly. One day her parents were invited to their neighbours’ and an old woman there kept playing with her and giving her compliments. The baby became sick an hour after they returned home, and
they knew that the evil eye had struck. They took her to the hospital, but everyone knew that she would die and, of course, she did.’

Old women – often with the best intentions – were particularly capable of inflicting the evil eye if they’d never had children of their own. Babies were especially vulnerable and complimenting them was a dangerous provocation, unleashing the evil eye’s jealousy.
Instead, if any compliments were given, they were either exaggeratedly inverted – ‘Never have I seen such an ugly baby’ – and stated loudly for the eye to hear, or were followed with two spits and the incantation: ‘May the eye not strike!’

During a power cut, as the weavers squatted outside, I asked some of them what they thought of fasting. Dark Nazokat, hoping to shock, declared that she
didn’t believe in fasting or Islam. ‘Father Lenin will save us!’ she declared jokingly. The majority of the weavers took a more pragmatic approach towards religion – more interested in what God could do for them than in what they could do for God. If they needed something badly, then they would pray or, better still, cook offerings of borsok, fried diamonds of dough, taking them to the tomb of
a saint who might intercede for them.

The most important saint in Khiva was Pakhlavan Mahmud. Some of the weavers told me that he had come to them in dreams, demanding their allegiance and promising good fortune in return. Barren women, often from far away, made pilgrimages to his tomb, weeping as they touched the exquisite elm door inlaid with coral, ivory and pearl, and then transferring
blessing from the lintel over their faces. Bridal couples came to the mausoleum on their wedding day, the groom drawing water from the courtyard well and offering it to his bride in the hope of ensuring many children. Removing shoes, the bridal entourage entered the interior, cool in summer and icy in winter. A mullah sat on corpuches next to an electric radiator, intoning prayers in sing-song
Arabic, while the bridal couple offered fresh bread, money and borsok,
watched with distinct lack of interest by an enormous white cat who lived there.

Another popular pilgrimage site was Sultan’s Garden, an inaptly named wilderness of rocky hills littered with tombs, located halfway to Nukus. A trip to Sultan’s Garden, about 30 miles away, was the furthest most of the weavers had ever travelled
in their lives, and it was one of the few places permissible for groups of women to visit. Red and white votive rags were attached to the few bushes that clung to the hillsides near carefully piled stones, symbolising wishes, placed next to the tombs of saints.

Where saints failed to respond,
tabibs
could be consulted. Some of these traditional healers were herbalists, but most were akin
to shamans, administering curses and love-potions, consulting mystical books in Arabic and writing out talismans. Zamireh told me she had once approached a local tabib when her wayward fiancé was led astray by another girl.

‘He was entranced by her,’ Zamireh explained, ‘and I realised that she’d given him a love potion or pinned a love amulet on him. I knew this spell needed to be broken,
so I went to the
tabib who wrote something in Arabic on old paper and then burnt it. After that my fiancé was fine and stopped seeing that other girl.’

It seemed a convenient way of avoiding personal responsibility to me. Safargul the usta told me about her visit to a
palmin
, a local fortune-teller, who had read her palm and her tea-leaves. Safargul wasn’t sure if she believed it all, but
had been curious. Most of the weavers, while not particularly religious, maintained a wary respect for the evil eye. As well as black and white eye-beads, or chilli amulets, they wore wisps of camel wool – a powerful talisman – wrapped around the buttons of their long cardigans to keep the eye at bay. Most of the looms now had triangular amulets hanging beside stickers of Bollywood film stars, providing
spiritual protection. One of the younger weavers had removed an amulet from her loom and the heavy wooden crossbeam snapped a few days later. This had caused all to spit on their hearts twice and intone ‘May the eye not strike’ on hearing the news, and the amulet was hurriedly returned.

* * *

By December, plastic green New Year trees, sparsely covered strings of tinsel and bright turquoise
baubles were on sale at the bazaar. The Soviets, compromising on Christmas, had taken its non-religious imagery and tacked it onto New Year celebrations. There was also Grandfather Snow – a generic Santa – and a snow bunny who had, perhaps, hopped in from the Easter narrative. With just a few weeks to go, I was looking forward to a Christmas back home in Cambridge and three months staying
at my parents’ house. It was the end of my fourth year in Khiva.

Before that, however, I was keen to prepare for workshop expansion, planning to invite more weavers to join us on my return. With new looms in mind, Madrim introduced me to the metal bazaar in Urgench. Situated on the edge of the city and battered by relentless winds, the metal bazaar was a graveyard for products of Soviet
industry. Derelict factories, stripped of anything metal, kept the bazaar in business. We found thick, hollow steel pipes for the crossbeams of each loom and iron girders for the sides, but needed a welder to assemble them.

Welders in Khiva proved a fearless bunch, happy to weld in sewers up to their knees in water, oblivious to the risk of electrocution. One welder, in response to my concerns
for his safety, proudly revealed a pronounced scar on one buttock where a huge electrical charge had exited. Foolishly we hired Hoshnaut the dyer’s father, who made a terrible job of the new looms, which later required re-welding by someone more competent.

The first beneficiaries of a new loom were to be the two weaving ustas. Ulugbibi, in particular, had become quite lazy, shouting at the
weavers to work faster while doing very little herself. But my plans for new equipment were put on hold after a phone call from Barry in Tashkent informing us of Hatice’s imminent arrival. Hatice, pronounced ‘Hatijey’, was a Turk from Ankara and a carpet specialist whom Barry had invited to provide us with some much-needed advice. We were particularly hoping for more help with the dyeing, as Fatoulah
had taught us virtually nothing of use. Unfortunately, Hatice’s timing couldn’t have been worse. I was leaving for the UK halfway through her proposed visit and we had no gas in the workshop, making any dyeing extremely time-consuming as the boys spent half their time chopping wood.

Barry was outraged when I explained the situation.

‘But why don’t you have gas? How can the whole of
Khiva be without gas in the middle of winter, and how is this woman meant to teach you anything if there’s no gas?! I shall speak to the Mayor about this immediately!’

Barry’s wrath provoked a swift response, and a few hours later three men from the Mayor’s office appeared. I asked them angrily why – if Uzbekistan was able to export gas to Russia – there was not enough for its own people?
They looked uneasy, assuring me that the Mayor would personally provide us with gas canisters, enough to warm each cell and fuel the cauldrons.

‘And would these canisters be available all winter?’ I asked, to which the answer was, of course, no. Unfortunately they could provide them only for the duration of our guest’s visit.