It had been snowing all day, the heavy, silent snow that Tashkent sees only a few times each winter.
We were watching a football match on television — my father, my two brothers and I — while my grandmother was sitting by the window with her knitting. Ten minutes before half-time, the screen went black and every light in the house went out with it.
My brothers groaned and reached for their phones, and my father went to look for candles. Outside, every window in the street was dark. The snow had brought down a power line, and the whole neighbourhood was waiting in the cold together.
Within an hour the phone batteries had died one by one, and there was nothing to do but sit in the kitchen around three candles and the gas stove. That was when my grandmother started to talk.
She told us about another winter, in 1969, when she was nineteen. She had just started work at a textile factory, and one night the lights failed while she was walking home along the canal. In the dark she slipped on the ice, and a young man who had been following her at a respectful distance for three weeks — too shy to speak — caught her arm before she fell.
"That was your grandfather," she said. "If the lights had not gone out, he would still be following me."
In forty years she had never told the story to anyone, not even to my father, who sat listening with his mouth open like a boy. She told it slowly, with all the details: the colour of his coat, the first words he said, the bread he shared with her the next day.
Just after eleven, the lights came back. The fridge hummed, the television flickered on in the next room, and the commentators started shouting about a match that had long since ended.
Nobody got up. My grandmother, smiling, began the story of the second time my grandfather spoke to her.
Whenever the electricity goes off now, most people complain. I light a candle and wait to see who will start talking.