The Railway by Hamid Ismailov

Author:Hamid Ismailov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Literary, FIC019000, FICTION / Cultural Heritage, FIC051000, FICTION / Historical, FIC014000, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Islam
ISBN: 9781632060181
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: 2015-01-20T17:01:59+00:00

* * *

88 Kurban-Khait or Kurban-Bayram is a commemoration of Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram instead of his son Isaac. Families who can afford to sacrifice an animal will do so, and there is a complex code stipulating how the carcass should be distributed among friends, family and charitable concerns.

89 The main Soviet news agency.

90 “May your father be rich, may he have lots of money, may our house always be full of light, Amen!”

23

There were gypsies in Gilas. Some were the kind you see everywhere, the kind that are said to have wandered across from Europe, in the season when mating camels run wild in the Kazakh steppe and the apricot and the lilac come into blossom in the gardens of Uzbekistan. But Gilas also had gypsies of its own, who were already blending in with the darkest of the Uzbeks – the ones known in Gilas as black cow-pats – and these unforgettable lyuli had come not from some far-away Europe but from Achaobod, their very own quarter of the Old City.

The first kind of gypsies taught Gilas how to make the most of the railway line. Once a year the freight train would make an unauthorised stop beside the level crossing (something unthinkable in the days of Kaganovich)91 and the night would fill with the sounds of impatient prancing and freedom-loving whinnying. And by early morning the Orlov trotters, Turkmen Akhal-Tekes and Vladimir carthorses would have been taken to the Kok-Terek Bazaar and exchanged for Astrakhan wool or ingots of Uzbek gold. The life of the second kind of gypsies – the lyuli – was simpler and richer.

Every Sunday Gilas woke to the whistle of the 7:12 and the sound of Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum shouting “Sharra-Barra! Sharra-Barra! Rubbish and scrap!” In spring his donkey-cart would squeal in protest as it struggled, ever more heavily laden with old rags, rare bottles and ancient paraffin lamps, through the deep mud of the sidestreets. Sleepy children would come running after it, clutching bits and pieces they had put aside during the week and were hoping to exchange for something precious from the trunk on top of the driving-box: a bouncy rubber ball, a lollipop, a clay whistle that would start to dissolve in the saliva of a child’s mouth long before Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum’s next squealing visit.

Towards noon – when the last lollipop had been crunched up, when the balls had bounced into scorpion-infested attics, when whistles whose sound filled the mahallya had dropped into filthy ditches and pushed up their levels of fertile silt – another lyuli, Adkham-Kukruz-Popcorn, would appear. His panniers slung across the back of his donkey, he would shout out to the whole of Gilas: “Hot Fresh Kukruz! Hot Fresh Popcorn!”

And the children would again come running, exchanging whatever they had been too sleepy to snatch up in the morning for balls of hot popcorn that looked just like the apricot blossom now coming out all over the town.

Around three in the afternoon Gilas would be deafened by the metallic cries of Asom-Paraff, a half-Uzbek and half-Tadjik as black as any gypsy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.