Hello,
It’s Diyora. You may have noticed that I’ve changed the name of this newsletter from ‘the green fig tree’ to ‘windowsill’. Don’t worry, no one spam subscribed you into receiving this email (I hope). More on the name change below.
As mentioned in my last newsletter, I'm in Uzbekistan with my partner. We've been here for over two weeks, and I won't sugarcoat it; it's been a hard adjustment. It's the logistical stuff that's mostly messed us up, and the one time we nearly got kidnapped. (A story for another time.) Yet the grand expectations I've unintentionally set for this trip mean I am constantly disappointed when the reality doesn't match how I imagined places and situations. I'm trying to instead live in the moment and receive experiences with an open mind, but it's not proving so simple.
If you know me IRL, you know I've spoken about going to Uzbekistan for over two years. I dreamed of visiting my old flat and school for nearly two decades, taking a trip to see my grandfather's grave and discovering new places. On our first day here, when we took a metro train to my childhood neighbourhood of Chilanzar 5, I could barely recognise it. Even the train station's name had been changed since I was here last. I tried my best to match what I was seeing with what I thought I would see, but it was a disorienting experience. Everything seemed smaller, the roads felt wider, and the neighbourhood appeared much greener than I remembered. There were also many more cars in public spaces.
I tried to force the feelings I thought would come, but they never arrived. I managed to trace down my school from memory and cried a bit outside the school grounds, but the woman guarding the gate just looked at me as if I was a bit odd. With the pavement pulsating heat onto my legs, I stood there and let the sun burn me. I had over-romanticised this moment in my head for too long. It was almost embarrassing.
I believed homecoming would be like a scene from the film Lion, where Dev Patel acts as Saroo Brierley, the Indian-born Australian man who finds his hometown through satellite images on Google Maps, and, consequently, his family. Similarly, I had spent hours on Google Maps in the 17 years I was away from Uzbekistan, trying to trace the route between my mum and dad's house – a drive my dad and I often did together. Yet when I got to Chilanzar, no grand reveal came. No new memories flooded back. It seemed I had scraped over all of them already.
Instead, I have felt like a stranger amongst a sea of people who look like me. I also keep getting asked if I'm my partner's tour guide, which is annoying. A few years ago, I would have thought there was an insidious undertone to it because they couldn't fathom that a local woman was together with an English man, but I am now sure it's because of all the translating and the ragged bumbag hanging on my hips.
A lot of the difficulties I've faced have related to language. For multiple reasons worth discussing another time, the Russian language is quickly becoming obsolete here, but it's the one I grew up speaking at home. In the first week, as people expectedly spoke Uzbek to me but were met with a mangle of Russian and broken Uzbek, I felt the rest of the trip stretch out into a long, treacherous road ahead of me. I struggled with basic tasks like ordering food at a restaurant and asking someone to move out of our booked train seats.
The city's geography has tripped me up too. I usually have a solid grasp of directions and locations, so I thought that upon returning, I'd instantly configure roads and neighbourhoods to how they stayed in my memory and fill in any blanks. Again, this didn't happen because so much of Tashkent has been rebuilt and changed, plus my recollections have become distorted.
It seems to me that memories are shapeshifters. In the lifetime I've been absent from home, they've taken a form of their own, adjusting themselves at a glacial pace – one that's hard to notice. When I tried to force reality onto them, they did not comply. "That's not how this works", I heard them say to me.
Yet I may be at a turning point. By taking the pressure off, I am slowly picking up on familiar Uzbek words and managing to hold small conversations. I'm adjusting to the weather. A few days ago, I was beaming when I finally noticed that the road my partner and I are currently living on is one I've been on hundreds of times. It is almost exactly the midpoint in the drive between my mum and dad's old homes. Plus, one of my aunts – who would give me an endless supply of almonds every time my dad and I would show up at her house unannounced – used to live nearby. Something had snapped together in my head. I guess I had to walk down this road many times before it revealed itself to me like an old friend.
Why I changed the name of the newsletter
I love Sylvia Plath’s writing but felt I had outgrown referencing her most viral words on the internet. I guess I don’t want to come across like a directionless teenager still looking at their ‘famous (mostly out of context) quotes’ Pinterest board. At the time of creating this newsletter, it felt like an accurate description of what it was meant to be — a place for me to take my writing in all the different directions I desired. But it doesn’t fit anymore and I’ve settled on ‘windowsill’ because it represents the place I like to gather my thoughts the most; looking out of the window, tracing the light as it enters the room and warms it, people watching etc.
I chose one of Vilhelm Hammershoi’s paintings as the logo of the newsletter. I think about his window series a lot and the inimitable way he captures the light each time.
What I enjoyed this week
Shon Faye’s ‘Why is the thought of cooking so dreadful?’ essay on Vittles.
This profile of Drew Barrymore by E. Alex Jung. It was a long one that required a fair amount of concentration from my side, but my god, I love his writing so much! The gal-dem team (RIP) was incredibly lucky to have had a masterclass arranged with him on profile writing last year. A snippet of his genius:
“She wants to encourage everyone to just risk it and let that class-A weirdo inside you out. Because maybe then you’ll feel the way she feels right now, which is this incredible infinity sign of love.”
This very vulnerable piece on her childhood diary by Amelia Tait in The Guardian.
What I’ve been working on this week
I haven’t had any pieces out in a little while because I’ve started a new job recently! I’m the new editor at ACT Climate Labs — an organisation focusing on climate misinformation and communication, especially targeting the 69% of the population ambivalent about climate action. I’m there part-time, and it’s a super interesting project.
Being in Uzbekistan is part of the research I am hoping to put into a book at some point. I’ve been writing a proposal for a while now, but as I keep looking over it, my idea of what the book should be keeps developing — especially now that I am in Uzbekistan.