What's Yours is Mine

I get on the train to find a woman sitting in my seat. Well my sleeper seat, my bed, essentially. It's eight in the morning and, whilst I am boarding an overnight sleeper train, I am only taking the train during the day. The train left from Tashkent yesterday evening and so everyone onboard is waking up after a night amongst the click-clack of the old, Soviet carriages.

The woman is older, maybe in her late-sixties or early seventies in a brown headscarf and a patterned pale pink, brown and white full-length dress. It's a stylish number but not uncommon in this part of the world. In fact, if anything, it's quite subtle compared to the bright green, polkadot pink or orange velvet one-pieces I've seen older women wearing all over the place. (Although mostly on their bodies.) Uzbekistan might be a conservative country but the fashion is anything but dull.

I've travelled on trains in the country before but those were day trains. The night trains, despite me still taking it during the day, are a different affair. The cheapest seats are still all sleepers but are open so that you can hear all fifty or so people in the carriage. If any of the fifty are snoring, you hear it. There are bunks facing the direction of travel on one side of the corridor and groups of four bunks facing the window on the other side.

I'm not that concerned about sitting in a seat that isn't mine but I'm in a country where I know you need to stand your ground. So I approach the lady with my ticket to try to communicate that she is in my seat. She is uninterested in my predicament. And maybe understandably so. For one, I haven't yet realised that the train has travelled overnight from Tashkent so she is probably a little confused as to why she should move so that a foreigner can lie on the bed sheets she's just spent the night in.

Unaware of the train's previous route, I try to make my case before the conductor taps me on the shoulder and indicates that I should sit in the more comfortable seat next to the window. I oblige. Now sitting on the bed next to the window and facing the table and bed opposite, the train begins to depart.

The old woman gets up from her bed to sit opposite me. She's a small lady, short and stout like the pots of tea that are now passing down the aisle. It's morning so everyone is helping themselves to the free porcelain pots of tea at the front of the carriage. Tea is essential and always shared.

The woman shares this communist view of tea-drinking as she prepares her tea in front of me. She removes a mug from her bag and fills it with hot water. She dunks in two tea bags and looks up at me. "Chashka?" She asks. I say I don't understand. A head pops out from the bunk above. "She's asking if you have a cup."

The head and adjoining body belong to a twenty year-old robotics student living in Urgencht, the final stop of the train this afternoon. He tells me his name is Sultan, although I think he is shortening his name so that I remember it. (It works because I can't remember anyone else's name.) I thank him for translating but inform him/her that I don't have a cup. His head disappears back into his bunk and Sultan returns with a glass mug from his bag. He hands it down to me. The woman looks back at me and instructs me, "voda" she says, pointing to the front of the carriage.

I walk to the front of the carriage to try to find the cistern of hot water. I expect a new, plug-in electric cistern but find that the hot water system was built with the train. It's an ancient steel contraption straight out of Willy Wonka's factory with seemingly unnecessary pipeage and a thermometer hanging off. It has a lot of moving parts for something that's just meant to boil water. I find the tap and fill Sultan's/my cup with it.

I sit back down in my new seat opposite the woman. She removes the two tea bags from her cup and starts dunking them in mine/Sultan's. Whilst she hasn't drunk from her cup yet, there's something slightly off-putting about drinking second-hand tea. I generally try to have virgin tea as the second draw isn't usually as pungent.

I sip on my/her tea, the vaguely-flavoured hot water, whilst the woman breaks some bread from the two round loaves in her black plastic bag. She struggles to break the plastic packing off of her industrially-red beef salami but eventually does so. She cuts it into slices using the sharp kitchen knife she's travelled with in her bag. Everyone here seems to travel with their own crockery. I reflect on the airport-level security I had been through to get on the train twenty minutes ago. Everyone on the train is travelling with very sharp knives that are allowed through security so why bother with the security check at all?

She proffers the meat and bread and I enjoy eating it as I haven't had nor brought any breakfast with me. After a few minutes I realise I have some snacks in my bag I bought in Bukhara. I can make a reciprocal offer with these. There is some dried melon and some balls made of sesame and sugar, a kind of deconstructed, pre-halva. I bought the snacks as they seemed typically Uzbek. It is a way for me, the humble traveller, to fit in amongst the locals. Placing them on the table, I gesture towards the woman asking if she would like any of my Uzbek-special, local snacks. I expect excitement in return, hoping that the woman is impressed that a foreigner would eat these local foods. She looks at the box and says something I cannot understand. Sultan's head pops out from above. "She wants to know what it is."

The woman takes a ball from my container of what I thought were typical Uzbek sesame snacks. They're small and easily eaten in a bite or two but she takes only a small scraping off with her teeth, enough to flatten the bowl so it won't roll away. She looks at it, then at me, shakes her head and puts it in her plastic bag. Something tells me she isn't saving it for later.

After breakfast she moves back to her/my seat and talks on the phone on loudspeaker, waking up anyone still resting. Sultan comes down to sit with me whilst pots of tea continue flying down the aisle. I talk to Sultan and another friend of his for some of the morning, aided by Google translate. The empty desert landscape whizzes past for hours. We eventually cross a river and the fields of sand become fields of cotton as far as the eye can see.