Nodir aka could not read a page without his finger under the line, and he was afraid of talking to more than three people at once. Everybody in the village knew both of these things about him, and nobody cared, because for twenty-two years the whole street depended on him for its water.
The pump house stood at the bottom of the road: a low brick building with a green door, an engine from 1981 inside it, and nothing written on any wall.
He was brilliant at machines and bad at explaining them. When the engine made a new sound at two in the morning, he would get out of bed, walk down the road and listen to it for a minute, and he would know which part was tired. He never discussed the problem with anybody. He opened the engine and mended it.
In March 2016 he fell off a ladder and broke his right arm in two places.
That was the week the village found out what it had really been relying on. Nobody else knew the order of the valves, or which of the two belts had to be changed first. The pump ran for four days and stopped, and three hundred houses carried water in buckets for a fortnight.
When his arm came out of the plaster, somebody at the mahalla meeting asked him why he had never written any of it down.
He was quiet for a long time. Then he answered the question honestly, and it cost him something to do it: he was ashamed of his handwriting, and he had been afraid of a young man laughing at it.
The answer came from his neighbour's daughter. Dilnoza was fifteen and good at drawing, and she was not interested in anybody's handwriting.
For three weeks she sat on a wooden box in the pump house with a pencil and a sheet of paper on her knees. She asked him to do everything slowly, twice. She drew the engine from the front and from above. She drew every spare part and numbered it, and she drew arrows where his hands went. She did not write one sentence in the whole book.
Twenty-nine pages of it hang on the pump-house wall now, behind glass, and two young men who look after the engine today learned the whole machine from those pages.
Nodir aka is sixty-one. He is still afraid of crowds and still says he is bad at explaining things. He is wrong, and the wall proves it. He explained the engine perfectly. He was just waiting for somebody who was not afraid of a pencil.