Superstitions

Apparently while I was gone there was an “Allah” in the sky – “a what?” I asked. (We had heard rumors of their being a UFO sighting, but I guess we were mixed up). What “actually” happened according to Farzona is that there was 3 days of raining and storming (clear in the morning, and then afternoon storms clouds and wind and a little bit of rain) and on the third day, there were dark dark clouds gathered and in white clouds the word “Allah” was written in Arabic script. It stayed there for a few minutes, then dark clouds came and covered it up. Crazy, eh? My family didn’t see it, they figure they were busy eating or something, but one of their old neighbors did, and a lot of other people, a girl at the dentist office showed Farzona the photo she took. I feel kind of strange about it, and also like it explains the country a little bit.



Farzona told me a little about sglaz the other day, “the evil eye”. Matin had diarrhea and when it was still bad on the 4th day or so, Jamilya took a piece of bread and walked around the courtyard with Matin, touching the bread to his forehead and lips, and chanting some Tajik charm/incantation/recitation. It was in case he had been given the evil eye and thus cursed with diarrhea, it was to try to rid him of it.
I asked her to explain it to me, which she did with much frustration at the fact that it was impossible to explain.
“Sometimes someone looks at your baby, and can give them the eye. Or they might be gushing over them and complimenting them and it “eyes” them. Don’t you have the eye in America?”
“Nope”.
“You do, you just don’t know it. Like haven’t you ever seen someone on the street and were envying their dress, and all of a sudden they tripped? That’s the eye.”
“Can anyone do it, or do certain people “have” the eye?”
“Anyone can. It’s… I can’t expain it.”
“So should I not gush over babies in case people think I’m giving them the eye?”
“No, you can. It’s…It’s hard to explain.”
It was interesting hearing such a superstitious thing from a fairly ‘forward-thinking’ middle-class Tajik.

And here's a picture of Farzona and her kids, for good measure.

Two Weddings and..

..that's all, just two weddings. :) Here are the journal excerpts:

That afternoon we went to a wedding celebration, we being my mother and all of our girl neighbors, Ailey included. Apparently it was a celebration just for women, taking place (I believe) after the wedding itself. I wore Farangiz’s blue flowery and gold-sequined traditional style dress, and looked just in place as I walked in to the court-yard and saw about one hundred or more Tajik ladies, all in traditional, dressy, long dresses. We made our way past the ultra-loud live music (a synthesizer, a drum, a clarinet?, and a singer) and past the long tables filled with women to one of the few open spaces left, a pavilion with pillows all laid out alongside the long, low table spread. We took our places, I sat next to Ailey and Hekayat, my favorite neighbor! She is the one with all gold teeth and severe looking eyebrows, but a heart of gold, I really love her. We were all rather hot and the music was so loud that mostly we all just sat there looking around at anyone that happened to be dancing, or the bride when she made her appearance from outside of the house, dressed in a different outfit each time and bowing low and silently. It’s called the ‘kelin salom’ and is basically what the bride does in order to show her thanks for the gifts and generosity of those around her. We went into the house later, dragged by Hekayat, to see the row of about a dozen different outfits hanging up on the wall, that she changed in to one by one and came out to bow to the crowd. Dishes of food, in addition to the raisins, almonds, watermelon, melon, apricots, grapes, chuk-chuk, cakes, salads, bread, juice, soda, and other niceties already on the table, were passed around – mantu, pieces of meat, and finally the plov. A lot of them got piled up on my and Ailey’s spot, as the token foreigners, and I nodded and took little bites whenever the neighbors urged, or whenever Gulsara Apa made vehement and at once threatening eating motions in our direction with a meaningful stare. People got up spontaneously to dance to the loud music playing, and Ailey and I were eventually pulled up as well to dance, which I did, attempting the local hand movements.
My mom took off pretty early on, saying she needed to get a haircut (which was a true reason, not just an excuse to leave) but I stuck around. Eventually I tried to leave with Hekayat, but was physically restrained by Gulsara Apa. We left a few minutes later with Ailey, and walked home with the neighbors. I love Tajik women quite a bit, they are so spunky and self-confident and humble and nurturing and motherly and feminine, all at once.

Yesterday I went to a really neat wedding. It started out pretty standard for Central Asia – Farangiz, Jamilya and I loaded up in a marshrutka and went to the Sogdian Restaurant. What with the new 150 person limit on weddings, we got there early to ensure getting a seat. We were greeted by some women (mothers of the brides and grooms, supposedly?) and then went inside. Despite the fact that we arrived late, the room was only partially full and things were still getting set up. Then the evening proceeded as follows: a lot of food at a large table (salads, breads, fruits – the usual spread), very loud music that we could barely hear each other over, impromptu dancing, our seats getting taken when we went to go dance, sharing seats with other people, more dancing, more food, more sweat because it got very very hot in the room (so hot that going outside was actually refreshing), Jonathan joining our table of women, Jonathan taking a suspicious amount of photos of Farangiz, Jonathan taking a satisfactory amount of photos of me at my demand, drunk men thinking they could dance with the American girl too because Jonathan was, little did they realize we are FRIENDS and there is a difference, Olim (a married, very drunk uncle of Farangiz’s) hitting on me and taking his picture with me, Olim winking at me from across the dance floor all evening, everybody getting into the dancing a lot more, holding hands in a circle as we danced, Jamilya Aya shepherding me away from the boys when they got too close to me for her liking, Olim offering to drive us to the groom’s house, us declining, and then finally we drove away to Jamilya’s mom’s house. I was a little confused about where we were going and why, but this is how it worked out: we went to the grandma’s house – beautiful and spacious courtyard, chock full of peach trees and plump grapes. Apparently the building part is spacious enough to house four “brides” (brides meaning daughter-in-laws, traditionally and still very wide-spread today is the tradition of girls living in the homes of their husband’s family, and being primarily in charge of its maintenance – cooking, cleaning, etc)! I went into one of the bride’s divisions, and it was just a little entry room, and then a large living room in the back – that was where she lived! I met 2 of the other 3 brides, and the 5 children that they share between them – taking turns watching, feeding, etc. I was fed many fresh fruits, that I enjoyed thoroughly. They kept offering Farangiz and myself chairs, which we kept declining, but as we wandered around the yard they kept following us with them, we finally sat down. I also met the grandpa, who was out in the courtyard lounging on a bed watching TV – apparently a back injury/back pains had kept him from attending the festivities.
Turns out we were at the grandma’s biding our time, for later that evening was another traditional part of the ceremony: accompanying the bride and groom to their new home! This was a double wedding, however, and so it was accompanying the brides and grooms to the their (still single) new home (in other words, the grooms’ parents’ home). We all assembled in the street, and awaited the arrival of the two main cars. When they pulled up, the bride and groom emerged, the bride in an embroidered thick veil that covered her head completely, and the groom in a traditional hat and robe. They erected a make-shift type of canopy above them with a blanket, and one person walked ahead of them with a torch. Then the drummer and the wood-wind player started up a rhythm, and we all walked, danced, clapped, and hollered our way down the street, accompanying the two new couples. At one point somebody started up a chant: ‘dum-du-dum-du-dum-dum-dum” to which we all shouted back “yar yar yar-ah-meh!” The dum-du-dum was actually words, different wishes perhaps? And the yar yar yar-ah-meh part is kind of like a “hurray” equivalent. It was some sort of traditional song. It felt like we were in a different century, wandering through the dimly lit, dirt back alleys of simple homes to the wavering light of the torch. All of a sudden a blaze lit up the sky – bottle rockets! Or some kind of bright, blazing fire work shot out of a little canister. The amazement I felt at seeing it made me feel even more archaic. Neighbors lined the streets, looking on somewhat solemnly. The crowd however was clapping, hooting, and dancing. Farangiz held my hand loosely as we walked along. We rounded a corner to see a blazing bonfire! Which we then danced around as the brides and grooms circled it. There was a buzz of excitement and fresh waves of dancing whenever the drummer struck up a new rhythm. Finally we went in to their home, an anti-climactic moment compared to the fun that preceded it. The brides went into their separate rooms and apparently underwent some kind of ritual that I didn’t completely understand. Possibly putting on or taking off a veil? Behind a large hanging curtain. I think there was something that had to do with the wedding night, which I got from Jamilya’s vagueness and slight giggling as she told me what was happening, but I didn’t quite catch what.

Water - My New Best Friend

One other thing I’ve been meaning to write about, how water is used in abundance here. In the words of one of my classmates, they use water “like it’s going out of style”. And it’s true – the outside water faucet is often running, for no reason I can see (and if so, I usually turn it off, habit). Sometimes it’s running over a teapot of hot water, or a pot of compote, to cool them down. Othertimes it’s running over a watermelon or melon. Apparently Dushanbe has a lot of it, so I guess they might as well.

One day after church, in an attempt to maintain a Sunday Spirit I kept on my nice dress, all through lunch and everything. After lunch, Dilya and I were washing our hands in the outdoor sink. She splashed me a bit – Hey! I splashed her back. She splashed me a lot – I grapped a cupful of water and threatened her with it. As I was deliberating about whether or not to douse her with it, I all of a sudden felt a huge >>SPLASH<< all down the back of my dress! Dilya and I looked around astonished for Boboshka (would he really have the nerve…?) – no one in sight. Until Farzonka popped her head out of the bathroom window, grinning, with a bucket in hand. The fight was on, and all of my Sabbath good intentions were drowned with my dress, now sopping wet after a full on fight with Boboshka and Ulughbek gleefully joining in. The hose, buckets, bowls – it was all fair game, and none of us escaped it dry.

N.B.

These posts are compilations from random journal entries. If they seem somewhat scattered, it's because they are!

Food, Glorious Food

Yesterday I made plov with Jamilya Aya! It was super fun, I got a blister from cutting carrots with a broken knife though, ouch. We made it with chicken because there was no meat at the GOOD meat place when she stopped by on her way from home, and I liked it so much more! We all ate it off the same plate, yum. We all used spoons, except Jamilya, who prefers eating it with her hands. They all usually eat stuff off a communal plate. At first they used to bring me a plate of my own (I’m sure because the Program warned them about the strange American eating habits that require washing a lot more dishes) but lately even if they did bring me a plate I would eat off the community platter, I just think its more fun that way, I like being part of the family. And so now they don’t bring me a plate anymore, success! Mealtime integration completed. You just kind of choose a region of the platter and dig in, and then its funny because you get little rows of food in between sections – the in-between, no-man’s-land that no one wants to claim at the risk of stealing their neighbor’s food. Either that part eventually gets eaten by a brave soul, or it becomes left-overs. They all do the custom of making the motion of washing their face at the conclusion of a meal, a very Tajik (and I believe Muslim) tradition. I want to do it, but don’t.

Plov for dinner, apparently it’s a Thursday night tradition. Also, Ikrom sang a beautiful prayer while wearing a little white hat, alone in the living room. It was a song in remembrance of the dead. Yep, so on Thursdays you’re supposed to sing that prayer, and then eat plov, it’s kind of a Friday eve preparation I guess, preparation for the holy day.

Yesterday I watched Dilya and Jamilya make Tafir, a flaky layered flat bread like lepyoshka or nan. It’s quite the process, and requires a lot of rolling the dough out really thin, and then folding it up and cutting it, and rolling it up again. I’ve basically learned how, now I just need to try it myself, at the risk of ruining their dough! When it came out of the oven, all piping hot and delicious, they offered me some. Yum! Then they started breaking it into a wooden bowl, and then they mixed up some chaka with water to make a sour, kind of gross-tasting thin yogurt, and poured it all over the delicious bread! Nooooo…! was my internal cry! Then they topped THAT off with sautéed onions, and topped the whole thing off with cucumber/tomato/onion salad. And mixed it all together in the wooden bowl til it was nice and gloppy, and that is how you make a dish called ShakarAb.
I was also internally hesitant about eating it, but dipped my hand in just like the rest of them (they offered me a spoon, but said it’s tastier when you eat it with your hands, and so I did!), and… it was pretty delicious! And it definitely grew on me as I kept eating it. Yum, ShakarAb.

Crazy Russian Ladies and Cherry Trees

Today when I got back from the store there was a bedraggled looking Russian lady in our front yard, setting up a little foot ladder and looking completely ready to pick our cherries. When she saw me coming in the front door, she shot me a little deer-in-the-headlights look. Assuming that she was a crazy homeless lady, but not knowing if she was possibly a family friend, I said hello and nodded courteously. I then went inside and told the dad that he had a friend out there picking his cherries, whereupon he told me that she was a crazy homeless lady. :P Well, not exactly homeless. I asked Farangiz about her, and she said she lives with her son and his wife but they don’t take care of her, they steal money and stuff and she’s a little off her rocker so she just wanders around, I guess. She’s come before, apparently the family’s really good to her. Once she came right in to the house, just as Farangiz was waking up, scared her half to death. And asked if she could pick some cherries. Another time the dad set up a really high ladder for her to use to pick cherries (what a good family, huh? I wonder if our family would do that for a crazy homeless lady. I like to think so. Just wait for what comes next though -) and then she proceeded to strip down to her underwear and then climb up to the top of the ladder to pick cherries (and she was boasting about how she used to be a sportswoman and stuff, eek). Why?!? was my question. Because she’s Russian, was the answer. Apparently, and this has come from a variety of sources, the Russian women here often swim naked, so apparently climbing trees half-naked is the phase that comes between that and walking the streets mostly clothed.

Girls and Boys

Today Dilya and I went to the bazaar. We took a bus there and walked back. Dilya is so great, you can’t fluster or hurry her. She just kind of walks at her own pace and does her own thing, and cocks her head when she’s talking to boys. We ran in to one of her classmates on the bus, and while she was chatting with him, I was trying desperately to not look in the direction of the group of boys to my left, because if ever I did, the one kid immediately started muttering under his breath, “devushka, devushka” or “skol’ko vremya?” or some other stock Central Asian boy pick up line. When he got off the bus I pointed him out – macho black shirt, tight jeans, big old sunglasses – to Dilya and explained what he’d been doing the whole bus-ride. Hey, you should have pointed him out to be earlier, was Dilya’s response. I think she was only half kidding.
My favorite pick up story of the day (there were others, basically anywhere I went with my blonde-ish hair I got taken for a Russian and all sorts of little comments – “Zdravstvui, Natasha!” (Hello, Natasha) – which is a pretty safe guess, considering the shortage of Russian girl names. I don’t mind it as long as I’m with Dilya, we just giggle like girls do whenever we can’t see them anymore, though they can probably still see us. I think I’d feel a lot more awkward if I were on my own, which so far I haven’t ever really been, downtown.) was when we were walking through the bazaar, and a boy kind of pushed past us, Dilya was sort of in his way. Dilya looked back at him in her slow, princessly way as he nudged his way past her. He finally looked up and made eye contact, saw the cute girl he had just shoved out of his way, and you could see a moment of pleasant surprise register on his face. He flashed the cheesiest Casanova smile you have ever seen as he walked ahead and swiveled his head around to look back. The only thing that would have made the moment complete is a pair of sunglasses that he could have lifted up as he looked her over. It was fun.

I was finally able to classify and replicate the Tajik boy double-take, I did it for Farangizka and she recognized it immediately and applauded. I’ll see if I can’t describe it. Basically they walk by or past you and glance at you, look away, then look back at you with a grin that stretches out to their ears (in the words of Farangiz) as they start at your feet and look all the way up til they get to your head, where they try to make eye contact. Which is the last thing you want to do, unless of course you’re Farangiz and then you do and say “chyo smotrish’? (what you lookin’ at?)”. I am not Farangiz, but I’m tempted to try it one of these days, because HONESTLY. ☺

Men and Women

The dad thinks my name is Norma, because that’s what all the paper-work said, and I think in this patriarchal society it’s a bad idea to correct him (I think I’m the only one that could, and I’m too scared. I think my chance is gone anyway – since I didn’t correct him the first few times, it would look kind of weird if I did the third, randomly). And so I am Norma, in silence. And that’s how I get introduced. Fariz kept calling me different Tajik names that he could actually remember – first Anura, and then a really weird one like Nodira or something, and then he just called me Fatima – no idea where he got that one from. We played ball for a while. It was really neat seeing how they all interacted, especially with the little kids. The grandpa and dad were very affectionate, and often held and bounced and kissed the little guys. And then handed them back to the ever-ready mother and grandmother. There was a very strict imaginary line drawn between the house (where the men lounged in the living room, watching football and every once in a while emitting a “URAA! GOAL!”) and the courtyard, where us women-folk lounged watching the babies. A few times Jamilya went over to the open window and watched the game through it as she rocked the baby. But they kept the door (normally open) closed and the men just came out sometimes. Whenever the men came out and walked over to the porch, Farzona would immediately get off and let Firdaus get on, for instance, and just stand nearby rather than sit with him. Apparently her story is that they fell in love when he was a security guard nearby the house. Their parents let her marry fairly happily, without any kind of fuss that I’ve heard about.

Supeh fun day! It started out unusually. None of the girls were at home, and so I went out for breakfast and just saw some nan on the table, and a thing of sugar and a tub of butter. Hai, ladno, I thought (hai is a Tajik word, meaning something like “okay” or “whatever” or a myriad of other things – it can mean whatever it needs to mean for the context, they say it ALL the time, even in Russian speech) I’ll just eat some bread for breakfast and be done. Then I went to the store to get some stuff. When I came back it was about 10 am and the dad was like, “hey! Where’d you come from, I thought you were sleeping in there! Mom told me to make you breakfast”. I told him I’d eaten, but yes of course I’d eat again. So when I found him in the kitchen he said he was about to make me an egg. That was one of the craziest things I’d encountered yet – besides SEEING him in the kitchen, where I think no man has ever stepped foot before – since I’d especially never seen him in the kitchen cooking. So I offered to cook my own egg. “For my daughter, I will cook an egg”, was his reply. I was touched by the sweetness of his offer, but then shook myself awake and told myself cynically that the offer was just him being a gracious Tajik, and offered again to make the egg myself, at the risk of offending him. Okay sure – go right ahead! Ha, I was right in my guess, he succumbed easily even for a Tajik – normally you’re supposed to wait for the third offer before you agree to something that you want to agree to in the first place. So I fried myself an egg in the inch of oil he had heated up on the stove, and my heart was warmed by the fact that he probably would have fried me an egg, had the circumstances been more extreme. That was the most interaction I’ve had with him yet.

My Family

Here are some excerpts from my journal that express the way I feel about my dear host family:

I love my host family. And I hope we can be friends for a long, long time. It’s been so natural coming here, so natural being among these happy people – so much so, I think, that I take it for granted. When I say that I love them, I really mean it. And just watching them, I can tell that they are sincerely and truly happy. It is a happiness that’s born out of a life of doing good for good reasons.

I have been put with such a stellar family. I love them so much. I feel like I can’t express the way I feel about them – they lead such a good, happy, and simple life. Farzona and Firdaus just dropped by for about an hour, the whole family just comes alive with the little kids around. For a few minutes we were all in the living room together – mom, dad, Firdaus, Farzona, Farangiz, Dilya, Babajon, Ulukbek, Fariz, Matin, and me. Lucky me. It was such a good family feeling, with the men right in the thick of it. I loved how Firdaus – usually pretty stern and always very quiet around me – would occasionally reach over and tickle Matin, or stroke his head. And I’m just in awe of Farzona: such a woman, very demure and very kind and funny, and according to the girls, she’s amazingly skilled at all things domestic. She really does lead the family with her gentle goodness. Fariz decided to stay – until his whole family got in the car and was ready to drive away! Then he wondered where everyone was going without him! A lot of convincing, a few promises and bribes, and the car drove away. We all looked at him. “Ura, man mimunam!” (Hurray, I’m staying!) and threw his hands up in the air and danced around. Such a cutie.

Hurray!  It looks like I finally figured out how to upload photos.  Albeit awkwardly, sorry for the extremely unaesthetic appearance of this blog.  And for the fact that I have only made one post in nearly 2 months!  

My Home and Rudaki Street