Just an ordinary life

'Where do I start?'
'At the beginning. Tell me everything from the beginning.'
Nuriya apay (apay is an honorific for older women) doesn't really want to talk about herself.
'What's so special about me? Just an ordinary life. Like everyone else.’

Nuriya apay gives me a cup of milky tea. We're sitting at a little table in a teashop in the courtyard. When I put my pen and notebook away she opens up. In a way she's right: her life seems to have been lived much as countless other Soviet women lived theirs. She worked for 40 years in a factory in daily contact with poisonous chemicals. Once she believed in Soviet communism and lived according to its rules. Now she believes in Islam and lives by Muslim rules. She prays.

'During the hunger of the 1930s, my father, a Tatar, single, moved from Russia to Bukhara because in those days Uzbekistan was reckoned to be rich, or anyway richer than Russia. On one of his visits to his sister in Russia, she pointed out a girl to him, a beautiful girl, living in her neighbourhood. This woman  - she became my mother -  was at that time being courted by another young man, and they sent each other little love notes.  That was the way people did things in those days. But anyway, this young man dragged his feet a bit, which is a mistake if you're serious. My father saw his chance and leapt in. He stole her and took her off to Bukhara. It was quite common to steal a bride in those days because you could save on the expense of a proper wedding. My parents went to live in Bukhara. They didn't have much luck with children: they all died except me. The war broke out and in 1942 my mother told my father she was pregnant again.  He said, “We're at war. It's war. You understand? And you want to kill another child. Go on then, give birth to it.” And I was born here in Bukhara. I was the fifth child.

‘My father went off to the front. He was religious, a Muslim; prayed five times a day. One day they said they'd be going into battle in an hour, and my father started praying; which, in the Soviet army  - this was a strictly atheistic army, remember -  was a serious crime, very serious. Usually you got the death penalty or the gulag, which was more or less the same. The captain called my father over and asked him why he was praying, and he said he was praying to Allah to let him survive. “Nothing else? Just that?” “Nothing else.” The captain felt sorry for him and reduced the sentence. They could have sent him to the gulag; instead, my father was taken into a penal battalian. Although it wasn't much better really because they were always the first to advance at the beginning of a battle: cannon fodder. No more people survived the penal battalions than the gulag.

'But my father did survive, got back to his village. He was very sick though, very thin, so thin that at first my mother couldn't believe that it was actually him. She thought he was one of those deserters who had lived off robbery during the war. When he got back to our home he didn't move from his bed for three days. Then, when he was better, he made his way back to Bukhara, but on the way he passed through a little town near Tashkent called Chirchik, and he liked it. He reckoned Chirchik was an oasis compared with Bukhara. He was right: the climate's much milder, there are trees and gardens everywhere. The water is sweet. There in Chirchik my mother gave birth to my brother and sister.

‘I went to school. I didn't know any Russian because in my family we only spoke Tatar. So I didn't do well at elementary school. The only thing that pulled me up into the next class was my maths. At school they taught us that there is no god and that if our parents told us otherwise they were wrong. At home my parents forced me to do my prayers and cover my head with a scarf. One day, when I got back home after school and went to sit next to my mum, who was drinking some tea, she picked up her tea and poured it over my head. She said she did it because I should have been wearing a headscarf.

'That was the beginning of my war. Because I was stubborn. I didn't believe in Allah, didn't want to pray, didn't want to cover my head. I went to the Young Pioneers instead. My parents tried all sorts of ways to force me towards Islam, but nothing worked. On Fridays, women from our neighbourhood would gather in our house for Friday prayers. It made me furious. I didn't want anything to do with Islam. But my father wanted me to get an education. So one day he told my mum, “Leave her be. She'll come to Islam in her own time. No need to force her. The time will come when she'll read from my Koran.” So they stopped. My parents allowed me to become a pioneer and later a komsomol. They accepted that they couldn't stop me believing in atheism.

‘I was very lively and had a busy social life. I couldn't sit still for one minute, was always getting up to mischief. For example: my father worked in Selmash, an agricultural machinery factory, and after work his clothes were always filthy. This was in the days before they had showers at the factory, so when he got home from work my mother would always have some hot water ready for him to wash in, in the yard. He was always exhausted after work, tense and moody, and he could get angry for no reason at all. One day I put on a work shirt of his, stuffed a cushion under it on my back (the penal battalion and heavy work at the factory had left him bent like a hunchback), and went indoors. My parents were drinking tea. Just like my father I started to grumble and to kick things; I upset a basin of water. My mum was shocked, just sat there on her chair with her hands over her mouth. My father didn't move an inch, but I thought I caught a little smile on his face. So I carried on, until my mum, who couldn't take any more, picked up a stick and chased me out. My dad didn't grumble so much after that.

'When my parents died I was left alone with my 13-year-old brother and 10-year-old sister. I was 18 and working at UzKTJM, the hardened and heat-resistant metals factory, on good money for those days. People told me to put my brother and sister in an orphanage, but I thought we'd be able to stay together. The factory gave me a one-room flat and we managed. It was difficult, but we managed. I worked hard and was respected for it. One day we were told to wash down some ceramic tiles. Each of us was given a separate area to wash. I did my best, but some of the stains just wouldn't come out. When our boss came to see how we were doing and saw the stains, he asked who had been working on that area. When they told him, “That's your Khairullina washing that bit”, he said, “Nuriya? Well, nobody will get it cleaner.” See?

‘I took part in any social event that would increase my CLP  - coefficient of labour participation -  because the higher your CLP, the higher your salary. We entered relay races, took part in demonstrations, went into the mountains. We did volunteer police work too. Once I was offered a job on the factory komsomol committee.

My first question was, “Okay mates, what's the money?”. It turned out that you got less, much less, working on that committee than as an ordinary factory worker. So I didn't take the job. Around that time a guy started taking me out, and not much later he proposed, but I couldn't allow myself to marry him until my brother and sister could look after themselves without me. So we decided to wait four years. One day, we were walking down the street together when we met my boss. “Nuriya, who is this guy? Where's he from? How long have you known him?” “He's my fiancé and he's a nice guy and I've known him for four years.” “Okay.” You see, in those days, in the Soviet Union, people looked after each other. You were never left alone. This was the kind of thing they talked over at komsomol sessions.

‘I have three sons and four grandchildren. When the Soviet Union collapsed, my eldest son moved to Russia, as many did in those days. In 1994 I got an Islamic calendar  -  I bought it. It had an interesting article in it called Thirteen Initial Lessons in Prayer. I started to study but it didn't work out, and I stopped. Then in 1998 I picked up the Koran again and began studying Arabic and reading prayers five times a day. We still have a whole load of soviet books, records of the Party congresses. There was a time when we would learn them off by heart. When I started learning Arabic I'd write Arabic letters and words in the margins of these books. Imagine!

‘There's a book, the Hadith, on how Muslims should behave. Here's an example of one of the commandments: If someone throws a stone at you, throw bread back. Or here's another: Do not befriend fools: sooner or later they will betray you. I always remember my father's words: “The time will come when she'll be ready for it, when she'll take the Koran in her hands.” The time came. Life changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can't say it got better or worse. Only, time flows, everything changes. The wind of changes blew.’

My three sons.