by Neil Matthews
We had arrived in Tashkent on an early morning flight from Bishkek, but were only staying for a few hours until a connecting flight. Zamira was our guide for the day. She was in her late 40s or older, about five feet tall, built for comfort rather than speed, with short, wiry and unfeasibly black hair, a judicious sprinkling of jewellery, a red top and a white skirt. She fired off English as if from a machine gun. Thousands of miles away in a parallel existence, she might have been serving Betty's hotpots in the Rovers Return.
The day did not start well. We needed to change some money, but the local hotels' exchange offices were closed for breakfast, and then apparently unprepared to change as large a sum as $50. Sleepy-eyed and a little annoyed by now, we followed in Zamira's wake as she took us to a madrassah containing a seventh century copy of the Koran. The sense of history was somewhat dulled by the smell of paint (the building had recently been reconstructed). Next was the bazaar, where our smiling young driver coped with the double parking by carefully pushing the other cars out of his way. Zamira bought two huge flatbreads and munched on one of them as she marched along in front of us, scarcely noticing as we stopped to buy much-needed drinks.
Finally, her exasperation with this strange foreign couple began to show. Leaving the flatbread on the car dashboard (where the heat would surely turn it to toast), she asked: "What would you like to see?" The trouble was, we didn't really know. We hadn't given much thought to this part of the trip, being more excited by the possibilities to come - Khiva, Bokhara and Samarkand.
As we struggled to come up with a suggestion, Zamira said: "What about our underground?" What an excellent idea, we agreed hastily, especially as the outside temperature was close to 40° C. We enjoyed some respite from the heat as we admired the socialist realism art and the chandeliers in Cosmonaut station, reminiscent of the Moscow metro: how ironic to go underground in order to reach the stars. A couple of rides for a couple of stops and we emerged near Amir Timur Square, named after the rediscovered Uzbek national hero Timur the Lame or Tamerlane. The hero's statue dominated the centre of a very pleasant green park. Before him, Zamira explained, there had been a statue of Marx; before Marx, Lenin; before Lenin, some now-forgotten Russian general.
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| Timur |
It was as if I had tripped a switch. Zamira the tour guide disappeared. Another Zamira appeared. Even behind her dark glasses, her eyes were obviously flashing.
"There is a campaign...a crazy idea...to bring back the Caliphate...to create an Islamic superstate. It will not work, the Uzbeks are too different from the Kazakhs and the Kazakhs are too different from the Tajiks. But still there is this idea. And if that happens, then maybe Muhammed appears in this square instead of Timur. And I am afraid of that.
"Yes, I am a Muslim and I am an Uzbek, but still I am afraid of that."
And with that, Zamira the Uzbek patriot was off and running. Yes, the President had helped the Americans in the war on terror - but he had also been the first ally in the region to ask them to leave. Such courage! To stand up to the Americans! But it was clear that Timur was her real hero. If the builders of the new Uzbekistan had been there to see Zamira, they would surely have been delighted.
The ice broken, we wandered off to a restaurant with a rushing water cascade, for a long lunch of chicken shashlik. As we refilled her cup with green tea and her glass with Coke, Zamira held forth on education (not as good as it once was, she said, and she was an MA graduate), politics and some other strange visitors to Uzbekistan.
"Once we had a playwright and a producer from England. The playwright had red hair and was supposed to be famous. He spoke the most perfect English, but they did not want to see the normal things. They wanted to know where [President] Zarimov's daughter lived. I told them I did not know - I do not move in such circles! They went to the Ferghana valley for two hours on their own and told nobody what they were looking for. They even made a visit to the British Embassy. I remember them buying special new shirts for the visit - but they were turned away, haha! I never found out what they were doing."
A discussion about literature followed - Zamira liked Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen... and Sidney Sheldon, "because he writes about love". We rounded off the day with the Amir Timur museum, which included several models of the majestic architecture we were due to see later that week. Zamira saw us onto the plane that evening, worrying about us - "the heat in Khiva will kill you, do not wear that jacket please".
But by then we were smiling. A day which had started too early for us had turned out all right - thanks to a small bundle of Uzbek patriotism called Zamira.
First published in VISA issue 77 (Feb 2008)
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