Letter from Tashkent: Uzbek writer-in-exile Hamid Ismailov remembers the city he has lost

I was five years of age upon my first arrival to Tashkent, accompanying my mother on a visit to relatives in the Old City, which, in many places, preserved its centuries-old traditional Uzbek look and feel. In my novel 1997 The Railway, translated into English by Robert Chandler, I gave the description of my auntie’s mahalla (or neighbourhood in English):

“The most exciting thing in this yard were the bolohana, the attic balconies, each of which lay adjacent to the tin roofs of neighbouring houses, making such a huge rattling noise when one walked barefoot across them, that they almost rang beneath your feet, only if you didn’t step on the joints that stuck out upwards; doing so caused considerable pain, as the scorching metal heat accumulated here like on the tip of a razorblade, cruelly cutting into your soles, so when you finally emerged through all the thundering and scorching into the shade of the neighbour’s mulberry tree, even the coolness of metal in the shade was unable to soothe the pulsating line, by now branded across the middle of your feet.

There, sat on the tree, he kept watching over the multitude of roofs of the Old City and listened in to the distant lazy voice of the street radio loudspeaker, emanating in waves due to the heat that warped the glowing white air…”

I also hunted for other armchairs in which to read or write, such as the ones in the basement of the Lenin Museum nearby, next to the cloakroom. There, in the shadow of Lenin’s statue, I made revision notes on many books about the 14th century Mongol military leader, Tamerlane the Conqueror.

Whenever I met up with my friends for lunch, we’d walk a bit further, down to the Kukol’nyi (Puppet) theatre, opposite the Russian Governor-General’s Pioneer Palace, to a dumpling place in a building that had formerly been the chapel of a palace. There, we would feast on dumplings at 15 kopeek a portion (next to nothing); 20 if we wanted a glass of sour cream on the side. Then, we would inevitably make our way to the coffee shop, on Karl Marx street, which became known as the Broadway since the fall of the USSR.

But my friends and I met up in the Revolution Square most often, in the densely planted park, created back during the Tsarist occupation in 1860-ties and cut-down only recently, after independence. We gathered under the shade of the centuries-old plane trees, and indulged in coffee drinking at a cafe beside the large hotel Uzbekistan, shaped like an open book. There, we really burnt the candle at both ends — coffee, cigarettes, the weekly Soviet newspaper “From Abroad” (fragments from the international press), the fountains, the Writers’ Union across the street where we went self-importantly and with aplomb, to relieve ourselves in the writers’ toilets…

I last visited Tashkent on the 1st March 2017, when the Uzbek authorities deported me from the airport as persona non grata, for my writing and journalism, which was often critical of the authorities. So everything I know about present-day Tashkent is through online news, occasional phone calls with my relatives, and the increasingly fewer remaining friends there. Like the great medieval Persian poet Saadi once said: “There are no more others left, while still others are far away.”

Surely, Tashkent still has many new and interesting things to offer! It remains one of the stars of the East, and the heart of Central Asia, with its glorious bazaars, shish-kebab places, friendly and welcoming people — with everything that exists on the surface, designed to catch the eyes of the awe-struck tourist. But I do take in what I am hearing. They say, many mahallas of the Old City, so dear to my heart since childhood, have now been demolished, having been replaced with bombastic yet still almost empty skyscrapers of Tashkent City, a business hub meant to galvanise the stagnating economy. They say that the Ilkhom Theatre of Alternative Art, founded in 1976, still exists, although its former director Mark Weil was murdered under unclear circumstances in 2007. They say that pockets of literary life are still kindling in several houses and museums, where poetry evenings and even “poetry duels” between young poets are held to this day. But this has now become a city that I no longer know, although it is still called the same — Tashkent. The city that has been forgotten and lost within me… As I once wrote in one of my Tashkent poems: