In the spring of her last school year, Kamila told the family at the table that she was going to the medical college in Andijon, four hundred kilometres away, and that she had already sent the papers.
The table said what tables say. She was too young. It was too far. There was not enough money for a room. Her mother said, quietly, that a girl of seventeen does not know what she wants, and that in two years she would want something else.
Her uncle said that the college in our own city is not as bad as people think, which is true, and that it is not as far as Andijon, which is obvious.
Kamila did not shout. She had come with a folder: the list of documents, the hostel price, the bus timetable, and a page of her own arithmetic in two columns. She is as stubborn as a gate.
My grandmother was at the end of the table and she had not said anything at all. She is seventy-nine. She cannot read, and she was married in the spring of 1962, at sixteen, to a man she had met twice.
She put her hand flat on the table, which in our family means the same thing as a judge and a hammer.
"She is old enough," she said.
Her son started to say something about money and she did not let him finish.
"I was not as old as she is now," she said. "Nobody at this table asked me one question. Not one. They asked my father, and my father was too tired to argue with anybody that year, and I stood in the kitchen and heard the whole thing through the door."
Then she said the sentence that ended it. "I have had fifty-seven years to decide whether I was old enough. She has a folder. Give her the money."
Kamila went to Andijon in September 2021. The room was too cold in January and the food was not as good as home, and she came back for two weeks in February with a cough and did not complain once, in the main because she is stubborn.
She is in her fourth year now. She has enough money from a scholarship, and she telephones my grandmother every Sunday and describes the hospital to her, slowly, in detail, because that is the only payment my grandmother will take.