Kamola was twenty-three in the autumn of 2011, and she had one scholarship, one suitcase and a Tashkent–Istanbul flight at ten past nine in the morning.
A water pipe had burst under the road near the bridge that night. The taxi sat in one place for thirty-five minutes, and she watched the clock on the driver's dashboard the whole time.
She reached the check-in desk nine minutes after it closed. Nine.
She has told me twice that she sat on the floor by the window, next to her suitcase, and cried in front of about two hundred people, and that a woman selling SIM cards brought her tea and did not say anything at all.
The airline put her on the same flight the next morning, seat 14C.
In 14B there was a man of about sixty with a folder of tables and numbers on his knees, and he was making corrections with a red pen. Kamola looked at the folder for forty minutes, and somewhere over the Black Sea she asked him one question about a column she did not understand.
He was a professor of water resources at a university in Ankara. They talked until the plane landed. He gave her a card, told her to write in November, and then forgot her completely, which she knew he would.
She wrote in November. She wrote again in February. In 2013 he became her supervisor.
If she had arrived nine minutes earlier, she would have flown to Istanbul on the Tuesday, in seat 8A, next to nobody. She would have finished her master's, come home, and taught in a school, and she might have been happy — she says that part herself, and she means it.
She could have taken the metro from the bridge that morning. She did not think of it. Nobody thinks of it at twenty-three, with a suitcase.
Her defence was in June 2024, in Ankara, on water in the Amu Darya basin. She began the way nobody begins: "If a pipe under a road in Tashkent had not burst in 2011, none of you would have read this work."