In July 1998 my grandmother stood at the gate with an envelope in her hand and one instruction. The documents for my uncle Rustam's university application had to be at the office in the district centre before twelve o'clock, and Rustam himself was in the field with the water, six hours from a road.
So she sent my father, who was thirteen.
The bus came at half past ten and it stopped after two kilometres, because something in the engine had had enough of 1998. The driver opened everything, looked inside, and lit a cigarette. Some passengers waited. Others walked back.
My father was late, so he ran.
He ran the six kilometres in the middle of the day in July, with the envelope inside his shirt because his hands were sweating, and he arrived at the office at four minutes past twelve.
Although he knocked for ten minutes, nobody opened the door. A guard came round the corner and told him the truth: the papers were fine, the boy was fine, but the clock was the clock.
So Rustam did not go to that university. He went to the teacher training institute in Samarkand instead, because it was the only place that still took applications in August.
In his second year there he sat next to a girl from Urgut in a library, and they argued about a map of the Silk Road for an hour and a half.
They have four children. The oldest one is a doctor in Tashkent, and the youngest one is my favourite cousin.
My father tells this story at every family table, and he always finishes it in the same way. He is fifty now, and he still runs — three mornings a week, along the canal.
"I lost by four minutes," he says, "so I got a whole family. Although I did not know it that day, that was the fastest six kilometres anybody in this house has ever run."