A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (2 page)

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The walled city of Khiva

It was now near midnight and the silent, sleeping city lay bathed in a flood of glorious moonlight. The palace was transformed. The flat mud roofs had turned into marble; the tall slender minarets rose dim and indistinct, like sceptre sentinels watching over the city … It was no longer a real city, but a leaf torn from the enchanted pages of
 the Arabian Nights.

—J.A. MacGahan,
Campaigning on the Oxus,
and the Fall of Khiva
, 1874

‘The amazing thing about working in Khiva, or anywhere else in Uzbekistan, is what you might end up doing,’ Lukas explained during a recruitment phone call. ‘You’ll find yourself doing things you’re not qualified to do and would never have the opportunity to do elsewhere. You just do them because
no one else is.’

Over the next seven years I often thought back on these words, whether holed up in the British Library poring over medieval Persian manuscripts, debating Timurid carpet designs with an Oxford professor, stripped naked and radiated at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through worm droppings in an attempt to record the silkworm’s life-cycle, accused of drug-smuggling while
attempting to bring sacks of natural dyes out of Afghanistan, or running for cover as an anti-Western riot engulfed the Kabul carpet bazaar.

I had no background in textiles or carpet-weaving and no inkling that this would become my main focus in Khiva. In fact, my only background in carpet-weaving had been a rug-making kit I was given as a child. The rug still languishes, unfinished in an
attic somewhere, after I managed to impale the weaving hook into my nose, mid-thrust. It was now 1998 and I had recently graduated from a degree in mass communications, which didn’t seem very relevant for life in a Silk Road oasis. Lukas thought otherwise, and was excited to have someone work alongside him. We would be writing the content of an online guidebook about Khiva, requested by the Mayor
of Khiva to boost tourism. Lukas was working for Operation Mercy, a Christian humanitarian organisation, and they seemed happy with my qualifications.

There were many reasons to ignore Khiva and look for volunteer possibilities in more hospitable climates. It was a remote desert oasis with freezing winters and simmering summers; I knew that conditions would be basic, and everything that
I’d heard about Central Asian cuisine had been overwhelmingly negative. I would have to learn a new language and culture, and had never been particularly good at foreign languages. Operation Mercy didn’t pay volunteers – who were expected to raise their own expenses – and an initial commitment of two years felt far too long. My supportive parents reminded me of a note posted in the staff room at my
old school for teachers on swimming duty: ‘Beware C. Alexander. Jumps in deep end but cannot swim!’

I considered other options, but kept coming back to Khiva. I had been specifically invited there with a project waiting for me that fitted my skills. I appreciated the humanitarian and Christian ethos of Operation Mercy and was impressed with their current work in Khiva among the blind. There
was also something very alluring about Khiva and the Silk Road.

I was born in Turkey at one end of the Silk Road, and my parents held a fascination with China at the other end. I was intrigued by the peoples of the Silk Road, particularly those of the former Soviet Union. At school I had studied Soviet Politics, though the course was renamed halfway through due to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Before this, I had naively assumed that the term ‘Soviet Union’ was simply a Communist term for Russia, and had no idea of Tatars, Tajiks, Azeris, Kazakhs or any of the other peoples who called the USSR their home. Now I might be living among them.

It was also at Bedford School that I first heard about Captain Frederick Burnaby. He had attended the school and there was a house named after
him. Burnaby, reputedly the strongest man in the British army, was a Victorian hero. Bold, brash and assured of England’s God-given superiority over everyone else, he decided to travel to Khiva in 1876, largely because the Russian authorities had forbidden foreigners access to Central Asia, which they now considered theirs. Burnaby travelled overland on horseback in the middle of winter and narrowly
avoided freezing to death en route. He was granted an audience with the Khan, who was shocked to discover that the great Britannia was ruled by a woman. Burnaby had plans to travel through the Turkmen city of Merv and into Afghanistan but was apprehended by the Russian authorities and ordered home. However, his travels gave him enough material for a bombastic bestseller:
A Ride to Khiva
.

I didn’t want to travel to Khiva but to live there. I wasn’t sure what to expect and whether any of Burnaby’s encounters with ‘the natives’ would be similar to my own. In one respect, though, we were to prove similar: we were both single Englishmen in a culture of arranged marriages, which baffled Khivans as much today as it had back then.

‘Which do you like best, your horse or your wife?’
inquired the man.

‘That depends upon the woman,’ I replied; and the guide, here joining the conversation, said that in England they do not buy and sell their wives, and that I was not a married man.

‘What! You have not got a wife?’

‘No, how would I travel if I had one?’

‘Why, you might leave her behind and lock her up, as our merchants do with their wives when they go on
a journey.’

‘In my country the women are never locked up.’

‘What a marvel!’ said the man. ‘And how can you trust them to so much temptation? They are poor weak creatures and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband what does he do?’

‘He goes to our mullah, who we call a judge, and obtains a divorce, and marries someone else.’

‘What! You mean to say he
does not cut the woman’s throat?’

‘No; he would be hanged himself if he did.’

‘What a country!’ said the host; ‘we manage things better in Khiva.’

Captain Frederick Burnaby,
A Ride to Khiva
(1876)

With Burnaby’s book to guide me, I knew what Khiva had once been like but had no idea what over a century – most of it under Soviet rule – had done to change the cultural landscape.
My initial commitment of two years would extend to seven, before being cut short by deportation. A place I knew only through the eyes of a long-dead British soldier would become home. The bizarre would become familiar, and the exotic would become normal. Soon I would daily roll up my mattress on a balcony that overlooked the minarets and madrassahs of Khiva’s old city, glowing in the dawn sun,
growing used to these scenes from the pages of
The Arabian Nights
through which I’d slipped.

Khiva would leave a huge imprint on my life: toughening me up, humbling me with regular examples of sacrificial hospitality and kindness, broadening me with new friendships and very different perspectives on life. I would find myself not only living on the Silk Road but immersed in a world of silk,
discovering indigo blue, madder red, pomegranate gold and the subtle shades of life in a desert oasis. Random strangers would become my second family and an eclectic assortment of characters would be woven together to form a thriving workshop of weavers, dyers and embroiderers. People I might simply have photographed if passing through would become the tapestry of my life. Khiva was a place I would
come to love; and then, unexpectedly, Khiva was also a place that would eventually break my heart.

* * *

First, though, there was a compulsory two-month language course in Tashkent, the capital. I had savoured the exotic sound of this name, only to discover a drab, charmless city with no centre, no heart and little visible history. Tashkent had been levelled during an earthquake in
the 1960s and rebuilt by the Soviets in swathes of concrete. There was still a sizeable Russian community in the city, making it a contrasting place of mosques and mini-skirts, Russian rap and Uzbek folk music. Tea-houses full of bearded men wearing skull-caps and shrouded in smoke from skewers of sizzling
shashlik
evoked a timeless image of the Silk Road. Next door, a new Korean pizza restaurant
attracted upwardly mobile young Russians and Uzbeks with the Backstreet Boys blaring from the entrance over the clink of vodka glasses.

I found it hard to define Tashkent Uzbeks, who seemed able to flit between traditional and more Soviet ways of thinking and living. While I was scrabbling for a towel at the presence of a female cleaner in the men’s swimming pool changing rooms, young Uzbeks
around me would think nothing of sauntering past naked to collect their locker key from another female attendant. The world of sport, I learnt, was a Soviet one with no place for bashfulness. Yet these same youths got dressed, caught trolley buses or trams, and arrived home to a different world where parents planned arranged marriages for them, where food was cooked by the subservient wives of
older brothers and the day began with ritual washing and dawn prayers. It was a society looking for identity, marooned somewhere between Mohammed and Marx.

The government had moved dramatically away from the Kremlin after independence. The Russian-speaking first secretary of the Communist Party reinvented himself as President Karimov of Uzbekistan. He learnt Uzbek and, despite his initial
pleas to maintain the Soviet Union, marked the first of September as Independence Day. He encouraged the building of mosques (although in the fumbling early days of independence one mosque inauguration had scandalised its Saudi patrons with vodka served by skimpily-dressed waitresses) and the revival of Uzbek history, language and culture.

But by the time of my arrival in September 1998,
the government seemed to be questioning its embrace of all things Muslim as radical Islam gained popularity, particularly in the densely inhabited Fergana valley to the east of Tashkent which made up a quarter of the population. Having served as an efficient wedge between Tashkent and Moscow, Islamism was now the largest competitor to the government and its power monopoly.

My days were spent
in language study. I had only two classmates, Catriona from Scotland – a teacher also joining Operation Mercy in Khiva – and an enthusiastic American whom we dubbed ‘omni-competent Sarah’. She had arrived in Tashkent two months previously and as far as we were concerned, was already fluent.

We learnt phrases such as, ‘This is a pen’, and ‘Is this a pen?’, attempting to apply them practically
in the teeming bazaar just outside our classroom. Hawkers of stationery nodded solemnly in agreement, ‘Indeed, it is a pen.’

Our teachers – two women – spoke little English, which was good for forced language practice but didn’t help us with the many questions we had about Uzbek culture and traditions.

We learnt how to get around the city. Tashkent boasted a tastefully designed metro,
each station themed after an appropriate Soviet hero or after cotton, which seemed to be the main value of Uzbekistan as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned. We learnt to understand Cyrillic, despite new edicts attempting to move the country towards a Latin script. Laboriously pondering the first couple of letters on hoardings, we’d suddenly recognise words like
gamburger
or
got-dog.
Borrowed English words beginning with ‘h’ were translated into Russian with a ‘g’ instead, giving rise to places such as Gonduras or Gong Kong and a pantheon of new personalities including Gitler, Gercules, Gamlet, Frodo the Gobbit, Attila the Gun and Garry Potter.

I was placed with an Uzbek family who lived on the outskirts of the city. Their house was backed by a courtyard full of chilli
plants, aubergines and tomatoes; the pit toilet at the bottom of the garden guarded by a bad-tempered sheep. There were three sons in the family and the middle one attended the University of World Languages, speaking some English. While the small, rotund father of the house wore a traditional black skull-cap embroidered with chillies to ward off the evil eye, his sons wore jeans and tracksuits and
were all keen to emigrate to America. I learnt to enjoy greasy bowls of noodle broth called
laghman
,
and to cup my hands in prayer at the end of each meal. My host parents were kind and hospitable but also very concerned for my safety, wringing their hands each evening if I appeared fifteen minutes later than my promised return time.

After two weeks in Tashkent, smothered by my host family,
struggling to make any sense of the language and missing home, I slipped into self-pity. It would take over an hour to get home from language class in crammed buses, which seemed the perfect place for melancholy. Standing wedged between two stout Uzbek women, pungent armpits in my face, I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake in leaving England. A chicken, one of three forlorn birds trussed
in a shopping bag near my feet, pecked my ankle sharply. Khiva took on the allure of a promised land: the concrete claustrophobia of Tashkent replaced with a skyline of glittering minarets; a place with no overcrowded buses; a place where chickens could roam free.

* * *

I had imagined arriving in Khiva, after a long, arduous journey, to see its exotic skyline beckoning like a mirage
across the desert. In reality, my first glimpses of the city, at three o’clock one blustery November night, were the few metres illuminated by headlights after an eighteen-hour drive. There was no sense of exuberance, merely the opportunity to collapse on the piled cotton-filled mattresses that Lukas and Jeanette, my hosts, had prepared for me.