Dilnoza had been saving for eleven months, and everybody in that house knew it.
She had been walking to school instead of taking the bus. She had been collecting bottles from the street behind the shop. In July she had been selling apricots from their own tree at the gate, in a bucket, for two weeks.
The money sat in a jar behind the flour: three hundred and forty thousand som. A second-hand bicycle in the bazaar cost three hundred and fifty.
In April her grandmother's glasses fell on the floor and broke in two places. She had been reading with them for nineteen years.
Her grandmother said nothing about it. She read the newspaper at the window, in the best light, holding it at arm's length. She had been holding it like that for two weeks when Dilnoza noticed.
New lenses cost three hundred and twenty thousand.
On Saturday Dilnoza took the jar to the optician on the main street and came home with a paper bag and twenty thousand som.
Her grandmother put the glasses on and read for four hours without stopping. Nobody said one word about a bicycle.
Then, on the last day of school in June, Dilnoza came through the gate and there was a bicycle standing in the yard. Blue, old, and strong.
Her grandmother was sitting next to it with an empty tin box in her lap.
"You had been saving for a bicycle," she said. "And I had been saving for a day like this. For nine years. I never knew what it was for. Now I know."
That tin box lives on the kitchen shelf, and it is not empty any more. Dilnoza has been putting coins in it since June, and she doesn't know what it is for either.