Lazzat's 36th Birthday
Lazzat first contacted me three days before I was due to arrive in Turkistan. After I booked her guesthouse online I received a message on Whatsapp from an unknown number which read, "Asher. Come. I'm waiting for you." It was a bit of a jarring message but after a little back and forth I realised who exactly it was that was instructing me to come because they were waiting for me.
And so, after a sixteen hour overnight train ride, I arrived at Lazzat's place in the late afternoon. Her house was in a residential area of Turkistan, away from the shiny lights at the centre of the city. Turkistan was slowly becoming a mini Las Vegas in the region. Next to old, blue mausoleums and archaeological digs, new constructions were still being built and adorned with the new president's name.
"I thought you were coming in the morning," her phone translation read, "and you didn't pick up my calls." She had assumed, for reasons unclear to me, that I was coming in the morning and had subsequently tried to call me all day whilst I'd been on the train, disconnected from the internet. I wondered how she expected those calls to go given that we did not speak the same language. I was sorry that she had not been able to contact me but she hadn't asked me to specify an arrival time.
Needless to say, it was an awkward first encounter. But it gave me an insight into the woman's pushiness and general unhappiness at my existence in her home that I would soon become accustomed to.
She showed me to the room described online as a six bed dorm. It was a large almost-empty room except for some piles of clothes on the side and a single wooden bed frame without a mattress on it. She lifted some flat cushions onto the 'bed' and threw a sheet on top. At best, sleeping on it would be like sleeping on a table with a heavy tablecloth.
With only one bed in the room I pointed to the khaki-camouflage rucksack with a sleeping mat attached next to the door. Concerned that I would be sharing my bed/table with another traveller, I asked if there was someone else also staying in the six bed-less dorm. "No," she answered through her phone, "this is my son's. He is a police officer and always likes to have a bag ready in case he needs to leave in a hurry." I found this a little concerning but at least it explained the three sets of nunchucks lying about on the table next to the bag.
I moved to the dining room as Lazzat prepared me some tea in the kitchen next door. The air was filled with a scent I found hard to detect. It was a mixture of an old man's breath and very old cheese. The table, meanwhile, was adorned with all sorts of food that I was unable to identify because they were covered in mould and mosquitos. It was the first time I was seeing mosquitos in dry, arid Kazakhstan, and at a time of year when it would get down to cold, single-digit overnight temperatures. All the flying insects in the country were staying at the same place I was, hovering over the bowl of grey melted butter and beige cherry jam.
Lazzat emerged from the kitchen with a cup of tea made from a reused tea bag she had first immersed earlier in the day. She warmed up some beetroot salad in the microwave and pushed me to eat some cheese with my tea. She was hospitable but I was ok with the secondary tea only.
Swatting away some mosquitos with a half-broken fly swatter, Lazzat pointed to some flowers on the table, still in their wrapping. I then looked down at the half-eaten cheesecake with burned-out candles next to the flowers. I was slowly putting the story together in my head but Lazzat did the hard work for me. The flowers were from her son and the cake was for her. It was her birthday.
Of course it was. So now I was made to feel guilty for making her wait for me on her birthday. I felt bad but I reminded myself that I was only discovering this information now. How was I to know that catching the 11pm train would have such catastrophic effects?
Despite me not wanting any, she begrudgingly sliced me a piece of the cake which had candles display '36' on it. There were three possibilities I could think of. Either this was her sixty-third birthday and the candles had been accidentally put on back-to-front. Or she had bought someone else's thirty-sixth birthday cake on sale. Or she was only in her mid-thirties but had had a very difficult life. I sat on the decision for a moment but eventually decided that it must have been the first option.
After some tea I retired to my bed/table for some afternoon rest. Lazzat quickly followed behind and set up an ironing board in the room next to me to do her birthday ironing. She began a never-ending phone call which, spoken in Kazakh, repeatedly had the word "Australia" in it. Paranoid, I moved back out to the main room with its cheesy, old-man-breath smell.
An hour passed and some older visitors soon arrived. These were Lazzat's sister and brother-in-law. Despite it apparently being her birthday, she was still in charge of making the tea and the snacks for everyone. The brother-in-law invited me to the table so I joined whilst they all spoke Kazakh to each other. I tried to smile and be polite but I was low on sleep on account of the overnight train. It wasn't really the night I wanted a 'unique local travel experience.' I just wanted to get to bed as soon as possible.
I had agreed to having dinner and breakfast at her place. This was quite common when it came to homestays. However the general cleanliness and my tiredness had turned me off having a full meal. I had a little bread with my tea and I was happy to leave it there. But it was then that Lazzat told me that this tea with her sister and brother-in-law was just tea and snacks. She was still preparing me something for dinner which I could have once they'd left. I didn't really want anything but it was too late and too difficult to say no to her.
A few hours later, after her sister and brother-in-law had left, Lazzat told me it was time for dinner. She brought me a plate of food and sat next to me, watching that I eat all of it.
The food would have looked identical if it was photographed in a sepia tone. There was rice that had turmeric added to it. It was gloopy, but edible. Next to it were sliced-up, mass-produced, pink sausages that I had had elsewhere in central Asia. Usually eaten for breakfast, they had a mushy texture and a flavour that felt many fields away from an actual cow. Finally on the plate were some grey, circular slices of some sort of meat. They had a chewy texture and tasted a bit like the old-man-breath smell that had floated around the apartment all afternoon.
I thought they were sheep intestines. I was close.
I was shovelling the grey slices into my mouth as fast as I could so I could get through the meal and get to bed as quickly as possible. But in a moment of stupidity I asked Lazzat to tell me exactly what they were. "Ahhh," she exclaimed, reaching for her Google translate app. The phone simply displayed the text 'horse gut.'
That was enough for me to hit the brakes on my rapid assault on the meal. 'Gut' was probably a mistranslation of either lower intestine or rectum. Whilst travel encourages new experiences, running on low sleep in a smelly house I couldn't escape from was not the time or place I wanted to be adventurous with my food.
People sometimes say they are so hungry they could eat a horse. I realised that even if I had been hungry enough to eat a horse, I would not have been hungry enough to eat horse.
I also realised that the smell I had been smelling all afternoon was, in fact, the equine offal boiling away on the stove.
I was overcome with exhaustion, nausea and a general bewilderment as to how the decisions I'd made in my life had taken me to where I was. I ate some of the rice, moved some of the food around the plate and made an excuse that I was too full so that I could leave the horse rectum to the mosquitos. Lazzat was, of course, not happy with this excuse but I was reaching a point where self-preservation was the name of the game.
I climbed into my bed/table hoping to get a good night sleep as the rectum taste trotted around my palate.
