A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road Read Free Page B

Pakhlavan Mahmud mausoleum glinted, and behind it was the shapely, tapered minaret of the Islom Hoja madrassah. This was the second-largest minaret in Central Asia and, with its bands of dazzling tiles, it made a fine desert beacon for weary travellers to fix their eyes upon. Sunlight flashedoff the distinctive blue, white and turquoise tiles adorning the portals of each madrassah. Beyond a central group of larger buildings were flat-roofed mud-brick houses clustered like a Christmas-card Bethlehem, and in the distance I could just make out the first dunes of the desert. The only thing missing was a flying carpet or two.
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    I stayed with Lukas and Jeanette in theirtiny spare room upstairs, next to the larger room we used as our office. Over the next few weeks our guidebook team established a routine. Lukas still had his other responsibilities at the blind-school but would meet us in the morning for planning and researching the guidebook. I valiantly waded through a few Soviet guidebooks that had been translated – nominally – into English. In the afternoon Catrionaand I would visit each site of interest to learn as much as we could about it from local guides and museum attendants.
    Lukas encouraged us to view all opportunities to speak Uzbek as ‘work’ and good language practice and to seek them out as much as possible. Most of the museums were housed in madrassahs and presided over by women bundled in layers of acrylic cardigans with angora headscarves,knitting colourful socks and slippers to sell to tourists. These museum ‘wifies’, as Catriona referred to them, became our first friends. They assumed that we were married to each other, but – after our vehement protests – concluded that we were merely conducting an affair. We quickly learnt that there was much more segregation between men and women in Khiva than in Tashkent.
    Khiva’s madrassahsvaried in size. Most were now museums but some had been converted into hotels, woodwork shops, even a bar. Originally they were residential colleges for learning the Koran, each following the same basic design: an elaborate front portal leading into a courtyard, with a tree for shade and a well for water. Radiating from the courtyard were cells in which students studied and slept. Some hada mosque and minaret attached and some didn’t.
    Sitting inside the madrassah cells, making conversation with the museum wifies, we realised just how different the dialect in Khiva was. They smiled at our stilted, textbook Uzbek, explaining how they would say the same thing completely differently in Khorezmcha, their own dialect.
    We weren’t the only ones struggling with pronunciation.The wifies warmed to Catriona’s name, adapting it to the Russian ‘Ekaterina’, but ‘Chris’ proved more tricky – particularly with the English ‘r’. After attempts at ‘Cliss’, ‘Cwiss’, and even the occasional ‘Christ’, I presented my middle name, Aslan, as an alternative.
    ‘But that’s not your real name,’ declared one of the ladies. ‘Aslan is an Uzbek name.’
    I was born in Turkey, I explained,and my parents had given me a Turkish middle name, much to the delight of their Turkish friends.
    ‘And this is also in your passport?’
    I nodded and from that point on everyone in Khiva referred to me as Aslan.
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    I felt claustrophobic living and working in the same place. The house felt too small for Lukas and Jeanette and their three small children without their havingto give up a bedroom for me, so I started looking for a place of my own to live. I was glad to have tasted life with an Uzbek family in Tashkent, but had no wish to repeat the experience. There were no newspapers to advertise accommodation for rent, so I placed posters around town. I watched expectantly as an old Uzbek man in a long, quilted robe tore off a phone number from the poster, certainthat a deluge of housing options would soon come my way. Unfortunately, my poster-placing spree coincided