In Which I Do Not Stay in the Village and Marry a Nice Tajik Boy

Scene: It is the second Tajik wedding I have crashed in a day. I am sitting on one of the long pillows that makes a ring around the woman's room when another aunt or grandmother enters. My legs are  folded carefully under me to avoid rudely pointing my feet at an elder, and I struggle to rise and go through the routine of greeting. One hand to the chest, the other clutching the newcomer's, one, two, maybe a third kiss on the cheek, repetitions of "soz, soz, narz, khub". All of which words mean good, and eclipse the often unspoken "How are you?". Again the explanation, "We are two students from America" - except I think I just said "I am two students", but no matter, we move on, into further mutually half-understood conversation. Eventually the question comes. Shohar darid? No, I say firmly, I do not have a husband. No, thank you, I do not want a husband. Thank you, but I must go back to America. Yes, I like Tajikistan. No, thank you very much, but I do not want to have a Tajik wedding.

Then the look of confusion, and the gesture toward my eyebrows. Eyebrows? In this case, I am pretty sure my eyebrows are fine, though it is amazing how quickly one becomes aware of an insignificant body part when half the people you meet are fascinated by it. The first woman has now been joined by another and they both tap their own foreheads determinedly. If they are trying to give me fashion advice, I am not sure I want to accept it. The unibrow has many devoted followers in Tajikistan. I look at the small girls dressed up in party clothes that look like fairy princess costumes, girls with a dark line painted above their noses. Though who am I to judge the gold teeth and friends who wear matching print dresses? I, after all, arrived at their wedding with a giant backpack and khaki fishing pants.

My fashion faux paus seems to distress the kind women around me, though it does nothing to diminish their determination to make us dance in the center of the wedding party in front of 200 people. The amazing Tajik generosity springs into action. Somehow I find myself in possession of, first a headscarf, then a borrowed blue velvet dress, then a pair of purple and silver zebra print socks. Finally Mari and I have our positions reversed - now I look Tajik, and she is labelled as Uzbek, Kyrgyz, maybe Kazakh? Walking through town, an awkwardly tall Tajik in a blue dress with shoulder pads, I apparently resemble our host's sister Nozanin, and that's the name everyone in the town of Tavildara adopts for me. Nozanin, why don't you stay here and marry a nice Tavildara boy?

Tajikistan is a surreal country, and maybe I have dwelt too long on the things that seemed bizzare. I have adjusted fairly well - for example, I now own my own Tajik clothing, which is loose and comfortable and extremely practical for travelling (confession: Mari and I wore the same pattern in two colors of blue today). Some differences are good differences. The plain truth is, where else in the world could I turn up on the doorstep of a random house in a strange city -  because our taxi driver took "UNDP guesthouse" to mean "the nearest foreign compound" and took us to the street of the OSCE - and have the family of said random house invite us to stay with them and give us watermelon, hot showers, and a taxi? (This happened in Kulob the night before last. BTW: guidebook fail. The Lonely Planet central Asia doesn't say a word about the entire Khatlan region, and the Pamir book suggested two guesthouses that no longer exist). Just when things seem too strange, too ridiculously bureaucratic, there is someone with a cup of chai and some naan and a friend of a friend who can fix the problem. I think it only fair to warn my parents that if strange Tajiks show up at our house someday, they had better put the kettle on, because my karmic debt is growing faster than the budget deficit.

But to return to the eyebrows for a moment, because the mystery has been solved at last. Two days after the wedding, we met Gulnora and Zarnigor, teenagers from a village higher up the valley. This time, I think mischievously , I will ask the questions first and give them a taste of their own medicine. Shohar darid? They giggle, and say no, and again touch their eyebrows in explanation. Wait....it slowly dawns on us. You don't shape your eyebrows until you get married? Ohhhh....so we'd been giving out conflicting (though probably more appropriate) signals to the matchmakers of Tavildara. Who knows what the drunken gold mine inspectors were thinking about us...but that's a story for another day.

From lovely Kulob, land of cotton and big salt mountains,

Anna (Nozanin)

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