Gulshada from Osh

I arrived in Osh, a small city in Southern Kyrygzstan, in the evening. The light fell warmly on the unkempt buildings as my taxi driver whipped me around corners before finally depositing me in front of a grocery store and overcharging me a paltry dollar.

The owner of the guesthouse I’d booked for that week came to pick me up there. She boasted several gold teeth and a friendly demeanor. The garden of her house, which had received wonderful reviews on Booking.com, smelled strongly of pig shit. I would later learn that it was also infested with cockroaches, and purposely left the bathroom lights on all night so that I wouldn’t see them scurrying out of the way as I marched towards the porcelain throne, my nocturnal bathroom journeys an unpleasant side-effect of eating Kyrgyz watermelon, apparently too early in the season.

Gulshada’s husband, who spent most of his time working in the garden, spoke Russian with a strange accent. The night I arrived, Gulshada informed me that Osh was part of a traditional Uzbek kingdom and that, because of this, much of the population including her and her husband, was Uzbek. “Now there are fewer Uzbeks than before because there was some fighting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz people a few years ago,” she said.

I attributed Gulshada’s husband’s accent to an Uzbek linguistic influence and his slow speech to consideration for my own poor Russian. People in Osh seemed to have a generally tenuous grasp of Russian anyway; one woman at the bazaar didn’t even know her numbers in Russian, only in a language that sounded to me like funny Turkish (the language was definitely Kyrgyz or Uzbek, but I couldn’t tell which one.) So I thought little more of it until Gulshada showed up the next day to see how things were going. I was weighing my options about leaving because of the afore-mentioned cockroaches and pig shit smell, and wondering if it would be worth the hassle to find another hotel and get a refund. I mentioned the cockroaches to Gulshada, who shrugged and said, “They probably walked in from the garden. It’s warm, you know, the door is usually open.” Having not made a decision one way or the other about leaving, I changed the subject.

“So how did you meet your husband?” I asked. “Oh, she said, “you know, he actually worked for me. And then of course, we fall in love and get married. He’s a good man and he loves my son, even though I had my son with my second husband. He even likes to pretend they look alike. But now he is kind of like a child because he has a brain tumour. Actually, that is why I started running guesthouses. Three years ago it was bad – he forgot everything, he even forgot his name. We took him to the hospital and they said, ‘It’s a brain tumour. There’s nothing we can do so take him home.’ In Kyrgyzstan the hospital system is very bad. So I brought him home and took care of him with natural remedies, and because of that I had to quit my job and I couldn’t work for three years. So because of that I started doing guesthouses. Now he is doing better. He can talk, he can work. But as you probably noticed, he is kind of like a child…”

I felt a pang of curiosity about whether or not the diagnosis of a brain tumour was correct (is it possible for patients to make that kind of recovery in the event of a brain tumour? Or were the symptoms more consistent with those of a stroke?) This was immediately met with a pang of guilt, and I decided to stay for the remaining few days, pig shit smell and cockroaches or no. Meanwhile, Gulshada sat on the couch and answered her phone, chattering loudly as I sipped kvas and continued feeling slightly guilty about the fact that I come from a place with free socialized healthcare and relatively small number of cockroaches.

Gulshada hung up.

“That was my daughter,” she said. “She is feeling stressed out. Her husband is feeling frustrated at work.”

“Oh,” I said.

“They live in Bishkek,” Gulshada continued. “And because there are tensions between Uzbek and Kyrgyz people in this country, Uzbek people can get a job but it’s very difficult for them to advance at work. They have to work in low-level positions, because there is fear that if they get some power than something will happen.”

“That sucks,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Gulshada. “It’s tough to be Uzbek in Kyrgyzstan.”