The Solace of a Garden

In Tashkent I was always in a state of limbo. Waiting for my Schengen visas, for my UK one. At a crossroads of languages, cultures, and sensibilities. It was a place of fluctuating between violent happiness and utter devastation. 

I can still remember clearly the moment when I saw the photos that emerged from Bucha on April 3rd, and how I went out for a walk because I simply couldn’t stay inside. I was crashing at T’s at the time, taking care of his cat, and initially thought of visiting the Botkin cemetery nearby, the one where Usto Mumin is discreetly buried, but the sight of graves would have been too much to handle, so I opted to take a cab to the Botanical Garden instead. It was a place I would visit frequently, either alone or with friends, to walk and talk and decompress. Tashkent was in full bloom, almost obscenely so, and the Garden was swarming with happy families seemingly oblivious to the war crimes playing out in real time a few time zones away—a painfully beautiful scene. The images of people with their hands tied behind their back were indelible—I couldn’t help but see them everywhere, reeling from a mix of guilt (over not being able to prevent this), shame (for even being here, where it’s safe and sunny) and uselessness (as a citizen of a country perpetrating unspeakable atrocities). There was also numbness, horror, and gratitude to no one in particular for even being alive.

I wandered off deeper into the Garden, and in the far end of it I came across eerie, abandoned greenhouses and structures resembling cages and gas chambers. I walked among them in complete silence. The scenery was very much reminiscent of the derelict spaces one could see in J-horrors by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, one of my favourite filmmakers (and the director of what I consider the best film about Tashkent, To The Ends of the Earth). Back then, I hadn't seen a single film for a month—it was as if films, which I was heretofore relentlessly consuming for both work and pleasure, were made redundant, meaningless. 

They say that it’s sometimes soothing to watch horror movies because they release stress and make you process stuff. It just so happens that they are less scary than real life. They also give shape to your abstract feelings of fear, sorrow, and loss. The greenhouses freaked me out in a good way. 

I was probably too traumatised to recognise it at the time but now I see it as a point of no return—the moment when I firmly set my mind to accelerating the collapse of the russian state as we know it.