A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (15 page)

* * *

We prepared to leave the following day. I had enjoyed myself immensely despite the heat and dust, but was worried about getting back. As I had discovered at the bazaar, Afghanistan was still the largest exporter of opium in the world, and I knew a lot of it was trafficked across the Bridge of Friendship. Quite what would be made of two young men with more than their combined body weight in
sacks of powdered substances remained to be seen. I was particularly concerned about the zok, a crumbly white substance that even I knew looked suspiciously like heroin.

We said goodbye to Helga and the chowkidor and drove back through the desert to Hairatan, our vehicle thoroughly overloaded with sacks and looking considerably more Afghan than when we’d arrived. At the customs office I
spotted a trolley we might use to cart the sacks over the bridge – no vehicles were allowed across without special permission.

An impressively moustached border official circled our stack of sacks, asking in textbook English about their contents. I produced letters of explanation from UNESCO and Operation Mercy in English and Russian. He read them through and looked at the sacks again.

‘You must know, sir,’ he began, ‘that this border has been used on many occasions for the smuggling of opiates. These letters are very good, but look at these sacks, they are full of so much powder. I will need to have them analysed.’

‘Of course, I quite understand,’ I replied. ‘Which sack would you like to take samples from? Do you need samples from each sack? Where is your lab, and
how long will it take to make the analysis?’

‘We do not have any laboratories here. We must take the samples back to Mazar,’ explained the official.

‘Really?’ I asked wearily, imagining the two-hour journey back through the desert. ‘We’ve just come all the way from Mazar this morning and we need to be back in Uzbekistan today. Is there no alternative?’

The official thought for
a moment, and I was seized by a rare flash of inspiration. ‘Sir,’ I continued, ‘I understand your position and the job that you must do. I am glad to meet such excellent guards at this border who search carefully for narcotics, which bring nothing but misery to so many. However, I am a good man here to buy dyes to help poor people gain employment. I am not a drug smuggler, I am a man of honour.’

‘A man of honour?’ mused the official. He thought for another moment and then said, ‘Well, if you are a man of honour then you may proceed.’

Momentarily stunned, I thanked him profusely and left before he changed his mind. I felt both humbled and gratified that I had been given something quite rare in Central Asia: trust.

We repeated our ritual search for someone to stamp our
passports and then loaded as many sacks as possible on the trolley and pushed it towards the bridge. The powdered madder seeped out of some of the woven plastic sacks, mixing with our sweat and covering us both in a brick-red sheen. I wasn’t sure if we would be allowed to pull the trolley across the bridge, or whether we would have more problems on the Uzbek side and find ourselves refused entry.
Just as I was offering up a quick prayer, a UNICEF jeep turned up. After discussion with the occupants and a flourish of the UNESCO letter, they agreed to take the dyes over in the back of their jeep and we trotted behind them.

We unloaded on the other side, the customs officials assuming we were UNICEF personnel and giving us no problems. The sacks of dyes were put through an X-ray machine
and a sniffer dog unleashed to check them. I watched, imagining what might have happened had I brought even one opium poppy head with me as a souvenir. Everything ran smoothly and within an hour and a half we were through. Full of gratitude, we parted from the UNICEF staff and found a truck to take us into the city centre. This was to prove the easiest of all my returns. Each year the border became
more of a challenge.

Back in Termez, it felt as if a magical transformation had taken place. Instead of dirt tracks and open sewers here were long, straight streets and even flower beds! The drab Soviet architecture exuded a reassuring aura of order. Gone were the three standard types of Afghan women – blue burkas, white burkas and the occasional olive green burka. In their place were women
of every age, shape and size, roaming freely.

A van driver at the Termez bus station was willing to take us to Tashkent and we settled down, tired, smelly and red. An hour or so later, in the foothills of the Pamir mountains, we stopped at a large, clear stream near the road for a wash and swim. The water was far too cold for the driver who watched in horror as we jumped in with a bar of
soap, convinced we’d be dead by morning.

From Tashkent we’d take a bus with all the dyes back up to Khiva. I was relieved at how well the trip had gone, but there was still the question: Would the dyes be any good, giving us the black and reds we needed?

7

Bukharan cunning

It is a pity that this people, in spite of the high antiquity of their origin, and their grandeur in time gone by, should have attained the very highest stage of vice and profligacy.

—Arminius Vambery on Bukharans,
Travels in Central Asia
, 1864

I entered the madrassah with the sacks of dyes feeling heroic, having braved borders and bureaucracy.
The weavers were soon squabbling over hook-knives and comb-beaters and the dyers set to work unpacking the sacks and putting them into storage. Keen to see if the dyes would actually yield colour, we soon had cauldrons on the boil. The madder bath was much redder than anything we’d achieved before, and next to it a cauldron of inky black zok brewed.

The following day, Madrim fished out the
skeins, rinsed them and hung them up to dry. The colours were strong and we deemed our trip a success.

In my absence, a carpet we’d dubbed ‘Benaki’ (inspired by the Benaki fragment of a Timurid design) had been completed up to the edge of the border that would frame the field design, and the girls were now waiting for a decent madder-red before starting the central field. The other carpets
were also progressing nicely, although something had gone wrong with the colour scheme of the Rustam carpet. Instead of a pomegranate gold border, the apprentices were weaving with a murky olive – not quite green or yellow. It didn’t look right, but the apprentices beamed at their hard work. I took the two ustas aside for a telling off.

‘It wasn’t our fault!’ Ulugbibi explained, reverting
to a stage whisper. ‘Of course we knew the right colours. You made us write them down on the design and everything. It was Ulugbeg. He misled us. There have been other things as well.’

Ulugbibi shut the door, adamant that the cunning Bukharans were attempting to oust the competition. Could I not see that they were worried at our rapid progress? Allegations of sabotage were not to be taken
lightly and we summoned Madrim, who confirmed Ulugbibi’s suspicions.

‘Fatoulah will tell me to write down quantities for making red with madder-root and oak gall,’ Madrim began. ‘I write everything down but check these figures against the notes I made at Jim’s training last year. Then I say to him, “Usta, these quantities that you’ve given me are different from Jim’s. Why is that?” He looks
at my notes and excuses himself, and says that he has made a mistake, but it keeps happening. The first time he told me I must have written down the quantities incorrectly, and one time he told me that Jim was wrong. I asked him whether he or Jim were the usta.

‘Then there was the fermentation pots. Jim explained that the pH level will only change if there is no oxygen in the pots, but each
day Fatoulah stirs them vigorously and they bubble.’

I took this more seriously, as the first skeins to emerge from the pots had been foul-smelling and a dull yellowy-brown in colour – not the stunning reds and blues we’d been promised by Fatoulah. We’d endured the stench of these pots for a month and the few skeins of silk resulting were all an unattractive puce. Abandoning fermentation
dyeing altogether, the dyers had filled each pot with earth and seeds, the weavers no longer scurrying past holding handkerchiefs to their noses.

‘Aslan, you don’t know what Bukharans are like, but we do,’ Ulugbibi whispered. ‘They’re all cunning. They don’t want to work if they can steal someone else’s work, and they always lie. You can never trust them.’

Just then Fatoulah walked
in and our discussion came to an abrupt halt. I wasn’t sure how seriously to take these allegations, and whether this was just the age-old enmity between Khivans and Bukharans. I knew that if I spoke to the Bukharans about this, they would simply adopt a wounded tone and deny all knowledge of a conspiracy. We needed a trap of some kind, and while reading a book on natural dyes, I came across one
that might work. According to the book, black mulberries produced a vibrant purple dye that fades quickly in sunlight and is therefore unsuitable. I nonchalantly asked Fatoulah what he knew about dyeing with mulberries.

‘Ah yes, mulberries,’ he began ingratiatingly. ‘Aslan agha, you are so clever to discover the secret of these berries. I, myself, have used mulberries for years and the colour
they give is the most beautiful purple.’

‘So, this purple colour, does it fade at all in the sun?’ I asked.

‘That is a very good question. No, the colour is very permanent. Why, I still have a
suzani
embroidered with mulberry-dyed silk hanging outside in my garden. After all these years the colour is still strong.’

My trap was working.

‘That’s good to know,’ I said. ‘Why
didn’t you tell us about this extraordinary dye before? You’re supposed to be teaching us all you know about dyeing.’

Fatoulah assumed an expression of abject penitence. ‘We have been so busy and there is all this work for us to do. It slipped my mind, but now we must use it in one of the carpet designs. What about the Mehmon design you want to start? It would look so nice with mulberry
purple in the field design.’

I asked Toychi to collect a bucketful of black mulberries that had fallen from the tree next to the Friday mosque. We made a dye-bath, but dyed only two skeins of silk as an experiment. The skeins emerged a rich purple colour, but after two weeks in the sun had faded to a dull grey lilac. Convinced that a plot was afoot, I called Barry in Tashkent. He wasn’t
interested and told me not to get involved in petty, clannish suspicion. He further complicated the matter by inviting Davron, a dye-master from Marghilan in eastern Uzbekistan, to join the training in Khiva.

Davron’s workshop in the Fergana valley made traditional
atlas
silk – the national fabric of Uzbekistan. Most atlas silk was made on machines, but in Marghilan they had retained the
traditional approach, making their workshop a mecca for textile enthusiasts. I visited his workshop a couple of months later and watched the complicated process of dyeing atlas silk using
ikat
dyeing, in which warp threads are bound according to a pattern and then immersed in dye-baths, building up a colour pattern through resist-dyeing, a kind of tie-dyeing. The reassembled warp threads are then
woven with just one weft colour, creating a vertical blur of colours subtly bleeding into each other.

A young weaver in love is credited with the invention of atlas silk. The object of his affections was the daughter of a wealthy landowner
who showed no interest in the humble weaver. His only hope, she told him, was to dazzle her with the most beautiful fabric ever created. The besotted
weaver set to work, but nothing he produced received more than a scornful glance. Finally – his hands worn to shreds – he gave up. Dejected, he went to a stream that ran near his workshop, dipping his bleeding hands in the waters. Blood-red blended with the shimmering yellow of the reflected sun and dashes of green from the overhanging trees and the patches of blue sky. Inspired, he rushed back to
his loom and wove atlas silk. His shallow sweetheart fell passionately and predictably in love with both the design and the designer.

Interesting though the origins of atlas silk were, I was more concerned with the dynamics of another rival usta joining our already strained relations with the Bukharans. I had my own prejudices towards people from the Fergana valley, who styled themselves
‘real’ Uzbeks and despised anyone from Khorezm.

‘They are so uncivilised up there! Almost like animals … no, like Turkmen!’ I’d overheard a woman on a bus in the valley exclaim. ‘Who can understand their strange dialect? It sounds so horrible, so mangled!’

‘And what about their treatment of guests?’ began her neighbour. ‘You sit down and maybe they say a blessing, maybe not and then
what? There’s no “
oling
,
oling
”, no insistence that you eat. They just seem to think that if you feel like it you’ll eat and if you don’t, it makes no difference to them. What kind of custom is that?’

‘And the tea!’ interrupted the first. ‘Always green and impossible to drink with their salty desert water. And do you know what?’ She turned to a third woman who was sitting in rapt silence.
‘They give you your own teapot.’ This elicited an audible gasp. ‘Yes, they just leave the teapot beside you and expect you to pour yourself. The host doesn’t even say “
iching
,
iching
”, just leaves it for you to pour yourself.’

‘Or,’ interrupted the second woman, ‘if they do pour tea for you, they pour it all the way up to here in the tea bowl – almost halfway! It’s as if they just want you
to drink up and leave! That’s what happens when you live in the desert; you become primitive. Yes, they can dance and sing well enough, but I shall not be going there again.’

My own experience of being a guest in the Fergana valley had been stifling, with overwhelming barrages of ‘take, take’ or ‘drink, drink’ when my tea bowl was already at my lips. Each time I drank, my bowl was replenished
with a few drops more, forcing the host to continually service my cup. Instead I felt inhibited, leaving thirsty and keen to return to the scandalously casual traditions of Khiva.

Davron, on arrival, immediately allayed my fears.

‘Nechiqsiz, Jorim?’ he asked in fluent Khorezm dialect, laughing at my surprise. ‘Look, my best friend at university was from Khorezm,’ he explained. ‘We
shared a room and he taught me lots of words in the dialect. I really like it!’

Madrim joined us at my house for a meal. After supper – during which I harangued him to eat and drink, hoping he’d feel at home – Davron excused himself and went to ritually wash. He returned and unfurled his cloth belt which doubled as a prayer mat. Few people under the age of 60 prayed like this in Khiva. Afterwards
we talked about the situation in the valley for pious Muslims and the restrictions and persecution they faced.

The following morning Davron joined Madrim and the dyers around the cauldrons and was soon correcting much of what he heard, explaining the importance of the pH scale and which products sold in the bazaar could alter it. Fatoulah scowled as Davron revealed other tricks of the trade
withheld from us so far. Did we know about
bikh
, for example? Used to make a sticky meringue-like syrup with beaten egg-whites and sugar, Davron explained that bikh – cream of tartar – washed over a finished carpet, brought out silk’s lustre and sheen. He was with us for only two days, but left us with a wealth of information.

We were still stuck with the Bukharans. I debated the wisdom
of a head-on confrontation with them, deciding that it really wasn’t worth the effort. A few days later they left – taking with them, we discovered later, many of our original designs.

‘UNESCO pays them to come here and train us, but who did the training?’ asked Ulugbibi in disgust. ‘Zamireh teaches them a better way of knotting, and Davron teaches them how to dye properly. What did they
teach us? Lies, nothing else – and how to steal.’

* * *

With the Bukharans gone, we settled into a routine. My day began with a tour of the looms – the two weaving ustas in tow. Sometimes the weavers used mismatched colours and would need to undo a line or two, or had made obvious mistakes that needed correcting. The rest of the day was spent working on designs or giving tours of the
workshop. We experimented with local plants to see if any of them yielded colours. The weavers showed us how they used
usma
, a nondescript little plant that looked like woad. They ground the leaves into a paste, adding a little water and smearing the resulting kohl over their eyebrows, creating a mono-brow once considered the height of beauty. But as a dye-plant it proved useless. The only successful
discovery we made was that the broom plant’s seeds yielded an attractive fawn colour, but we could already achieve this with a light madder bath – and a few onion skins tossed in.

Tourists began trickling through, often pausing to photograph the Pakhlavan mausoleum dome framed in our front archway. Only then would they notice the racks of drying silk and the steaming cauldrons. Some were
incredibly rude, marching around the workshop uninvited and not even acknowledging my offer of a free tour. Others sat at the looms learning to weave knots and posing for pictures with the weavers. The apprentices chorused ‘good morning’ regardless of the time of day and learnt that tourists expected them to smile for photos.

A number of tourists, after a lengthy tour and a look through
the albums of miniatures and sericulture I’d produced, wanted to buy a carpet and were frustrated that we had nothing for sale. One or two wanted to contribute anyway, insisting that I take money from them, so we set up an ice-cream fund with this extra cash, dipping into it for birthday celebrations.

* * *

As the pace of work slowed, I decided to spend more time with the apprentice
dyers. We’d started with four boys but one had quit after a week, leaving Toychi, Davlatnaza and Hoshnaut. I invited them for an evening at the Anusha Khan homom. Madrim declined, stating that it would be undignified to disrobe in front of his apprentices. The rest of us set off after work, armed with towels and shampoo. The homom – one of the oldest in Central Asia – was tucked between the Strongman’s
Gate and the White Mosque. Unfortunately, the interior had been modernised. Inside a domed hallway an ancient television garlanded with plastic flowers spluttered to life, a greasy, threadbare couch in front of it. A home-made bar sold drinks and soap. Next to this was a corridor in which shifty-looking men waited impatiently. Toychi – an authority on the subject – explained that this was
one of the most popular brothels in Khiva. The communal homom, once a stone domed maze, had been partitioned into three separate chambers, each with a grubby Russian-style sauna and shower inside.