PLOV 12 - Honey and ginger paste
PLOV
Oh, the light in Buchara in the evenings, my friends. The greens and blues on the mosques and minarets, turning the jutting brick into multimillenial LEGO. The fluorescents in the madrassa dining hall where the students are eating after evening prayer. The swift orange-red shadow of a cat on the road. It's PLOV again, where I, Bernard, walk a very small radius of beauty over and over again.
(Fewer photos in this one; the internet's not great here. Next time!)
Last time: we missed the night train to Nukus. So instead: Buchara for two days, in full post-COP exertional malaise. All I need is a palmful of cheap, excellent restaurants, and a twenty-bucks a night guesthouse with radiant floor heating that makes my feet feel like they are blooming.
Down the lane from the guest house, there's a photo museum. Free entry. We pop into the courtyard, centre area dug up into raised beds, ice still glimmering anywhere there isn't sunlight. There are three men there--one my age, two older. The one my age turns to us, asks where we're from, and ducks into one of the rooms to turn on the lights and a CD of soft Uzbek folk. We follow him in. Photos along every wall, postcards on the centre table.
You guys: these photographs. Some of them dating back to 1911, but most of them recent, just a few years back: old men on donkeys, sure. But also--young bodies flinging themselves into pools in the heat of summer, perfectly horizontal over their shadow on the water. A kid tossing a chicken to a woman, both of them laughing, unaware of a cat flinging itself down right next to the kid's head. The kinds of shot that make you ask: where was the lens when this happened? Dozens of these photos, the kinds of pictures that are one-in-a-thousand.
We look at the exhibit book and it turns out the young guy outside--he's the photographer. Behzod's his name. Second-generation, his dad having started the place.
We head out to talk to him. He's been on assignment all over the place--Europe, other parts of Asia. He loves street photography; works with a Canon, but mostly shoots with his Samsung smartphone these days. He'd like to go to Afghanistan, Iran sometime, do some work there; his family are ethnic Iranians. He looks longingly at Kate's camera, a Leica Q. I feel my Fuji burning against my back. To be able to tell such stories, achieve such compositional balance, just be humming with sheer skill--I just want to give him my camera then and there, because what's the point? Give the tools to the masters, let them bring good art into the world.
We talk and laugh and I feel an immediate brotherly warmth towards him--stemming from the kind of humility that, when matched with this level of skill in a person, is a kind of jealousy-deactivation ray. He exudes goodness.
So: if anyone in my readership is a well-connected photographer, or a magazine editor, or just someone with a lot of money, look up Behzod Boltaev. Better yet, go to Bukhara. His shop's easy to find. Tell him I sent you, and then give him a job wherever he wants to go. You won't be disappointed.
My first hammam, this afternoon. I am told to disrobe. I am given an old piece of bedsheet to wrap around myself, some squishy flip-flops. I am led though another low door to a round, stone chamber with a white marble slab in the centre. The light pours down onto it from a hole in the ceiling. I try not to think about ritual sacrifice.
The attendant leaves me to steam in an adjacent chamber for twenty minutes, til sweat beads over me and my breath is hot on my lip. Comes to get me, brings me back to the marble slab, asks me to sit. Pours warm water over my head, running my hair into my eyes. Takes a scrubby glove and rubs my back in circles. My last memory of this sensation goes back to being three or four, in the bath with my sisters.
I am told to lie down. I am massaged to within an inch of my life by fingers that must be steel-reinforced. My body is folded into positions I don't have the proprioception to understand. Then, with both sides of me appropriately rubbed and contorted, he pulls out a brown jar: honey and ginger paste. Gets down to business of palming the gunk into each of my open pores, leaving the skin of my back and under my collarbones screaming hot. It feels like my whole skin is tasting habanero for the first time.
I go back into the hot room and lie on the rocks for another twenty minutes. Everything burns hard. It reminds me, quite viscerally, of the meditation course I did--being still, the brain screaming pain, pain, so hot, move. This is a difficult, unpleasant moment. But if you can acknowledge the pain, which eventually I can, you get to start asking questions of it, to feel it not as a block sensation but as an aggregate of feelings: waves of prickliness up and down the back, little puffs of air into the room. Your body kind of... gets loose, fuzzy around the edges, the ginger feeling somehow extending into the rock and fading back under the muscles at the same time.
And then the attendant comes back, pours another bucket of water over me, and it's over. Nothing but the feeling of fresh skin, every muscle singing, the brain chanting oh man, oh man, again and again. I walk out to the lobby and the air is light and springy and there is a little bench and a table with some green tea waiting for me. And the world, once I dress and thank the attendant and step through the low doors to rejoin it, feels lighter and more solid at once. Huh. So that's why people do it.
Another day before Tashkent, and then the plane back. Thanks for sticking with it, friends. Send word by replying if you're so inclined.
Honeyed and gingered,
Bernard
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