Every Saturday at about six in the morning, Ravshan aka comes down into our courtyard with a bag of carrots and starts a fire under a cauldron that does not belong to him.
He is fifty-eight. He works in a bank — thirty-one years in the same building, four floors, numbers all day.
He is very good at counting people, which is the part everybody forgets about cooking for a courtyard. Forty-two people live in our block. He knows who is away, who is fasting, who does not eat meat since her operation, and who will say no and then come down at two o'clock without saying anything.
Cooking for one person is boring, he says. Cooking for forty-two is arithmetic, and he likes arithmetic.
He does not need to do it. Nobody pays him. Twice a family has tried to give him money for the meat and he has refused to take it, politely, and once rudely, because the second time they insisted.
Two years ago a restaurant on our road offered him work on Saturdays and Sundays. Real money — more than his bank pays him for a week. He turned it down in about four seconds and he did not tell his wife for a month, and when she found out she did not speak to him for two days, which he admits was fair.
My grandmother asked him about it in front of everybody last spring, in the way that only a woman of eighty can ask a man of fifty-eight.
He was washing rice at the time. He did not stop working, and he did not look at her.
"I enjoy cooking," he said. "I do not want to be paid for cooking. In 1991 my mother and I ate in this courtyard for two months from other people's pots, and nobody mentioned it once, and I have decided to pay that back in rice for the rest of my life. It is cheap at the price."
Then he asked my grandmother to taste the salt, because she is the only person in the building he trusts with that, and she took it very seriously, and the two of them argued about it for a while.