Otabek came to Tashkent from a village near Kosonsoy in March 2016 with four hundred thousand soʻm, one bag, and two telephone numbers written on the back of a form.
He describes that spring in one sentence, and he chooses the words carefully, because he is the kind of man who chooses words carefully.
"I had little money and few friends."
Not a little. Not a few. The first number he called did not answer in three days. The second one belonged to a man who had left for Russia in January. He slept in a room with five other men above a car workshop in Sergeli and paid by the week, and in the second month he had very little work and he ate bread and tomato paste for eleven days, which he mentions the way other people mention the weather.
He can weld. That is the whole reason this story does not end there.
A man from the workshop below asked him to fix a gate in April for payment in food. He did it in one evening and did it properly, and the neighbour of that man had a canopy that needed mending, and that is how work moves in this city: sideways, one gate at a time.
He has a workshop of his own in Yangihayot now. It is not big. There are three welding machines, a hoist he bought used in 2022, and a sign he made himself and hung crooked on purpose, because a straight sign, he says, looks like somebody else made it.
Quite a few men have worked for him — eleven or twelve — and four of them are still there. Two of them came from his own district with numbers written on paper, and he answered his phone both times, on the first day, within an hour.
Last winter he was interviewed for about six minutes on a local radio programme about small businesses, and the woman asked him how he had started.
He said the same sentence he always says, and then he said the other one, and you can hear him stop for a second in the middle of it, because he was working out whether he had earned it yet.
"In 2016 I had little money and few friends. Now I have a little money and a few friends. In English that is one letter. It took me nine years."