When the airport taxi stopped at the gate of my guest house in Tashkent, I found myself in a house that was probably 100 years old, with an inviting courtyard adorned with fig, apricot and persimmon trees. The air smelt earthy, like the onset of spring, as though the trees were exhaling the aroma of the earth. Before showing me to my room, Gulnara – my hostess with beautifully wrinkled eyes and hair hidden behind an oramal (traditional cloth kerchief), who appeared to be in her sixties – invited me for a steaming cup of green tea and tender melons so sweet they could’ve been injected with sugar. Watching the crimson sun make its final descent towards the horizon, Gulnara and I chatted in broken English and Uzbek/Russian words I struggled to decipher but tried to interpret through her expressive eyes. She wistfully reminisced about her childhood in Bukhara, the Soviet times, the mohallas (neighbourhoods) of Tashkent and the way the city had changed since she had arrived here as a new bride. By the time I went to my room, I felt like I had arrived in the house of a friend’s grandmother instead of a country unknown to...

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