A woman came into the repair shop under our block in March with a phone from about 2014, in two pieces, in a plastic bag.
The screen was in pieces — she had had it knocked out of her hand on a bus near Chorsu. She wanted the screen replaced and the battery changed, and she asked what the whole thing would cost.
My cousin Timur, who has been repairing phones there for nine years, told her the truth: the parts for that model are hard to find, the repair would cost more than the phone, and for that money she could buy a working second-hand one that afternoon with a guarantee.
She said no. He explained it again, in a different order, the way men do when they think somebody has not understood the numbers.
She let him finish and then she said: "There are forty-one voice messages from my mother on that phone. She died in 2021. I do not know how to get them off it, and I have been afraid to give it to anybody."
Timur is not a sentimental man. He replaced the screen in forty minutes and put in a new battery. Then he asked her to sit down and got her to unlock it, and he spent an hour and a half on something she had not asked for.
He had all forty-one files copied onto a memory card, and then onto a second card, and then he uploaded them to an account he made for her while she watched, and he wrote the password on a card in large letters because she is sixty-four.
She paid for the screen and the battery. That is all that was on the paper.
She came back in April with a bag of somsa for the whole shop, and now she comes about every two months for no reason at all, and Timur complains about it to everybody, and he has never once told her not to come.
She still uses that phone. She had the buttons cleaned in June, and she is having a case made for it by a man in the market who works with leather, because she is not going to be on a bus with it in her hand again.