Rushana

Dans la maison de Rushana, rue Khakikat.

I am straightaway going to visit Rushana who runs a carpet shop next to the hammam. I knew her in 2002. She and her friend Nilufar sold trinket for tourists on the square between Kalân Mosque and Mir-i Arab Madrassah. They were 16 years old and were already very crafty for the trade. I remember that Rushana (she said "Roxane"), had invited me and her friend for lunch at her home. I found audacious this invitation and I accepted with pleasure. The house was street Khakikat, between two trade domes, and had a room in pure Uzbek style. High-ceilinged, coffered ceiling, mouldings, stucco and curios in abundance. Carpets on the floor, a tapshan and a divan along a wall. The mother had prepared a plov and had left me with the young ladies. At the end of the meal, we had made a photo session, my camera lens showing a clear preference for Rushana. Then the father-in-law had chivvied the girls to return to hound the tourists and win three dollars.

The young woman invited me to follow her in the Kakhikat Street to show me the new tapshan she offered to her mother. The courtyard is small and doesn't have a vine arbour which is the essential complement of the tapchane in the garden. So, this one is covered with a white sheet to protect it from the sun. Rushana's mobile phone doesn't stop ringing. That is what it is here. Everybody phones all the time. One wonders how they made before the invention of the mobile phone. Another tapshan, former, has pride of place in the neighbouring house.

Rushana is now in the carpet business, activity about which she doesn't complain. She argues selling well but she will say no more. She is married, two children, a car, and above all an apartment in the new districts. What is much better that to live in her parents-in-law's house. No more quarrels and chores. At 18, she did, however, meet a young Frenchman, a tourist. He brought her to France and she lived two years with him until her mother ordered to return.
- Then I went back home and I got married with an Uzbek, she says with a pout of fatalism.
Rushana speaks very correctly French with some expressions in "verlan" (speaking youth of the Paris suburbs). She has no regrets, even if her husband is unemployed. She earns enough for two and that allows her to live her life the way she chooses. To go back in the charming atmosphere of our meeting, I ask to see again the room in which we had lunched and where I can again admire the back wall with its niches and its trinkets, the mouldings, the magnificent carpet. The beautiful room is used only on rare circumstances and it releases a faint breath of nostalgia, an old emotion with a tatse of regret for an impossible thing.

The next evening, she invites me for a dinner at her home. She drives me in her Spark to the suburb between town and steppe where she lives.
- District for "nouveaux riches", she says proudly, knowing full well that this word has a pejorative sense in France.
Buildings do not look anything special, six-storey blocks recently built, a geometric street plan, bumpy roads, no vegetation. But interior space is opulent. It is a very spacious 3-room. An immense dining room with chandeliers and mouldings, a long inlaid veneer table, white leather armchairs, Louis XV massive wooden chairs. The kitchen is equipped with an enormous refrigerator with mirror doors. All the household gadgets are present. The girl Rhusana does not things by half. How long ago it is since she bullied friendly the tourists with her friend on the square Kalân. In the absence of the husband, we have dinner with a plov prepared by the nanny and cleaning lady. Generally, the men have dinner between themselves and the women stay aside. But Rushana doesn't care principles.

Double tapchane chez le voisin de Rushana, rue Khakikat.

Rushana en 2002, à l'âge où elle faisait son école de commerce sur la place Kaylan.

More photos Bukhara