My father put the telephone down in the kitchen on the sixteenth of March 2020 and said five words: "The news is not good."
We have a guesthouse in a village outside Bukhara — four rooms, a yard, a mulberry tree, and my mother's cooking, which is the actual business.
The information from the ministry was clear enough. The borders were closing. The list of our spring bookings — forty-one of them, from nine countries — was on the table under a bowl, and by the end of that week most of it had been cancelled by email, politely, in short sentences.
Two million soʻm was what we had in the tin. Nine months with no guests is a long time in a business like ours.
People were frightened that spring and everybody's plans were finished, and my father, who is fifty-nine, did the only thing he knows how to do with a bad year: he made a list of work.
The roof over the two back rooms was repaired in April, by him and my brother, with money that was supposed to buy new beds. My mother wrote down thirty-one recipes that had never been written down in this family, and my aunt translated the whole menu into English properly, because our old menu was a page of mistakes that guests had been laughing at kindly for six years.
And I sat in that yard from May to December with a laptop and a bad connection and learned English — one hundred and forty lessons, four evenings a week, with a notebook that I still have.
The police were on the road at the end of our street until June. Mathematics was my worst subject at school and I did the accounts that year anyway, because there was nobody else to do them.
Our first guests after all of it came in July 2021: a family of five from Poland who stayed nine days and ate in the yard under the mulberry tree every evening.
There are six rooms now. The menu is correct. My mother's recipes are in a green book on a shelf in the kitchen, and I am the one who talks to the guests.