A martyr to his own imperial vision, Bobur suffered all his life from a disease known as gemoroi. “That sounds like ‘hemorrhoids’ in Russian,” I remember thinking.
“Do you know what gemoroi is?” Dilorom asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
A sad smile hovered around the corners of her mouth. “Every one of us does two things. We do them every day in the bathroom . . . Ey, Xudo!” she called to the ceiling. “Hey, God! Forgive me for mentioning these words in front of respected Elif!” Dilorom went on to describe a certain affliction of the large intestine that caused great difficulties in one of the two things we do every day in the bathroom, involving swelling and pain and the passing of hard particles through the anus. In short, the Timurids, as passionate horsemen, suffered chronic hemorrhoids. Luckily, such was the refinement of their culture that they had a special grain that, when cooked with fat, water, and sugar, made a special porridge; when you ate it, you never had to defecate. “Oh, if I could taste it even once!” Dilorom exclaimed.
Bobur, a lover of poetry, once wrote a letter to Alisher Navoi, who wrote back. Bobur wrote another letter. Then Navoi died. “How will one survive the next hour?” Bobur shouted. After Navoi’s death, a big black snake started thrashing violently. Bobur slit the snake open from mouth to tail. The snake died, and another snake came out. Bobur slit open the second snake, and out came a rat. While crossing the Himalayas, Bobur dipped his head seventy times in a hole cut in the ice. Then he swam forty laps across the Ganges, despite the undertow, despite the snowdrifts piled higher than his head.
In India, Bobur and his ten thousand soldiers defeated one hundred thousand Indian soldiers and one thousand elephants. To defeat the elephants, they used nails. Nehru wrote about Bobur and liked him, even though he had killed so many Indians, and their elephants. Bobur seized all of northern India, but gallantly installed the rajah’s mother in a castle with servants. The mother bribed Bobur’s cook, so that every day Bobur ate poisoned bread. He got sick, and so did his son. Bobur prayed to God that he would die instead of his son.
“This was a marked contrast from Ivan the Terrible,” Dilorom observed.
Bobur outlived his son by three days. During this time, he ate only the purest birds, boiled for two hours into a soup. His hemorrhoids miraculously vanished, but then he died.
Dilorom loaned me a book of Bobur’s quatrains in Russian translation.
I’m no martyr to miserliness, I’m no prisoner of silver.
I don’t think that “domestic good” is a great good.
Don’t say that Bobur failed to complete his journey:
I’ve only stopped for a moment—it’s time I set out again.
In separation, Bobur grew sick and weak,
From his melancholy Bobur became old and grayhaired.
Bobur sent you a present of a bitter wild orange,
So even you can see how yellow Bobur has become.
Her braided hair is a noose, into which I have flown.
Confused, strung up by the feet, and blinded—oh, woe!
Poor, poor Bobur: in affairs of the heart,
No matter what you do, you always trip up.
Poor, poor Bobur! I read these verses to Eric, who said that Bobur was like me: “He tells you about his problems, but he doesn’t actually want you to solve them; he just wants you to express sympathy.” We thought it was clever of Bobur to supply his interlocutor with the right response, and adapted this technique for our own use.
“No problem, Bobur, of course we can go get some ice cream!” Eric would say, and then I knew it was time to take him out for ice cream.
“Good work, Bobur! You’re doing a great job learning the Uzbek language and the associated literary tradition!” I told Eric when I came back from the university covered with dust, and then he knew just what to say.
Sometimes Dilorom talked to me about the natural sciences, just as if they were aspects of Old Uzbek literature. Human nature, she told me, is composed of four elements: water, soil, air, and fire. This fact was long known in the East while Europe was still foundering in damp ignorance. Later, Europeans stole the Eastern theories and used them to found the medical sciences. The god Shamol blew the dirt around and animated the humans, who were vainly looking through the dirt for something of value. The material trace left by this process is the human thumbprint, a sign of God and a unique marker of identity, as testified by the seventy-fifth surah of the Koran: “Does man think that We shall never put his bones together again? Indeed, We have the power to restore to perfect order the very tips of his fingers.” Europe didn’t know anything about fingerprints until the nineteenth century.
Dilorom also told me that every human being has worms in his or her small intestines. “Even me and you, qizim,” she said, looking at me sympathetically. The worms are tiny parasites, and it isn’t possible to get rid of them completely, but you can at least stop them from multiplying, using clay. This property of clay was known to the East already in the seventh century. Because soil is an element of the human organism, clay naturally combats many diseases, especially those of the spinal cord—including incurable hemorrhoids. In the Koran it is written: if you clean yourself with clay after going to the bathroom, and then wash it off, you’ll never get hemorrhoids.
Ninety-seven percent of the soil’s elements are found in the human body, and these minerals are transmitted via the soil to various fruits and vegetables. The reason the plum is the same shape as the human heart, the reason the Uzbek word for “plum” (o’rik) is very close to the word for “heart” (yurak) is that the plum contains minerals beneficial for the heart. O’rik is also close to sariq, which means “gold”: among all fruits, plums contain the highest levels of elemental gold. In the human body, gold and silver are found only in the hair. All this is proof of God’s conscious creation.
Muzaffar, who also sometimes talked to me about science, had a more skeptical worldview. He wasn’t sure if God had created things consciously or not. “I’m an empiricist,” he explained, adding that Uzbeks generally believed only what they had seen themselves. For example, the Americans said they had sent a man to the moon. The Russians said those pictures were staged, and the “weightless” American flag was nothing but a wooden board. “We Uzbeks don’t get into these ideological debates,” Muzaffar explained. “We keep an open mind. We don’t know if there was a man on the moon, or if there wasn’t a man on the moon. We weren’t there.”
On the weekends, Eric and I went sightseeing, a dutiful trudge from tomb to tomb. We spent hours in the necropolis called Shah-i-Zinda, or Tomb of the Living King, climbing up and down stone staircases, turning blind corners, finding ourselves in domed cubes or octagonal cells. The name “Living King” denoted one of Mohammed’s first cousins, who had allegedly been introduced into the premises through a well by the prophet Elijah, and still lived there, in an underground palace.
At the ancient site of Maracanda, the Sogdian capital that fell to Alexander in 327 B.C., we visited the tomb of the prophet Danieclass="underline" a long, windowless building resembling a warehouse, with a row of shallow domes set in the roof. An old man asked if we wanted to know why the tomb was twenty meters long. “Do you think Daniel was a giant?” he demanded. “Daniel was no giant; he was a regular man! Only, his leg grows three centimeters every year! A sign of saintliness!” At a rate of three centimeters a year, I reflected, Daniel’s leg would have outgrown the tomb hundreds of years ago. I glanced uneasily around the countryside. How far would it have reached by now?