We have two cousins with the same name. Jahongir the elder works in Moscow and has done for nine years. Jahongir the younger was twenty-two that spring and had never been further than Guliston.
In April 2016 my brother sent one message to the family group: My cousin who works in Moscow is coming on Tuesday for two weeks.
He meant to write: My cousin, who works in Moscow, is coming. Two commas. He was on a bus.
Without the commas the sentence tells you which cousin: the Moscow one. And that is exactly what my mother read, at half past nine at night, standing in the kitchen.
So the house prepared for Jahongir the elder, who is thirty-four, who drinks black tea with no sugar, and who cannot sleep in a room with a window on the street.
The good bed came out of the back room. The bed, which we had made up with the new sheets, went into the quiet room at the back. My father bought a kilo of the dried fruit that Jahongir the elder likes. My mother cooked for a man of thirty-four, which in our house means meat twice.
At eight on Tuesday evening Jahongir the younger arrived at the gate with a plastic bag and a football shirt in it.
Nobody said one word about the room for about ten seconds, which is a long time in a family of eleven people.
He stayed nineteen days. He slept in the back room on the good sheets for one night, and then he moved to the floor of the boys' room because it was more fun, which nobody argued with. He ate the dried fruit. He put sugar in everything.
My aunt, who notices everything, worked out what had happened on the Thursday and read the message out loud twice, slowly, once with the commas and once without them.
The other Jahongir came in August, in a taxi from the airport, and my brother met him at the gate with the sentence our family now says instead of hello: "Which cousin are you?"