Dushanbe

April 26–28, 2013

There are two interesting things in every Asian country: the fates of the people and the commerce. Let’s begin with the fates.

Here we have some children in the foreground. The young woman in the headscarf on the left is their mother. She’s illiterate. Had three kids, her husband died, she doesn’t know what to do. Being illiterate, she can’t even go to the social services office and apply for aid. In the background is an older woman. She used to work in Moscow (selling things at the market in the Domodedovo district). She has a grown son, things are good. She’s selling flavored fizzy drinks. She doesn’t trust technology, so she dispenses the flavor syrup and carbonated water herself directly from inside the machine.

And now we’ve come to the topic of commerce.

Sacks of potatoes are lying in the road. For some reason, the trolleybus is unable to drive around them.

Freshly baked flatbread.

Gasoline for sale, straight off the tank truck. Gas stations exist as well, but apparently they have higher prices.

Meat.

A group of women at the market rests in the shade of a prize car.

Express photos.

Lots of currency exchanges. You can exchange Russ. rubles.

$ dollar, Russ. ruble, Uzb. som, Kyrg. som, China yuan

There are cellphone top-up kiosks on every corner (identical to the ones in Kabul).

Many store entrances have semi-transparent vinyl strip curtains to keep the cool air inside.

A bridal salon.

The aesthetics of the 1980s are being carefully preserved here. “Pay telephone.” Isn’t it a beauty? The sign is quite new.

Pay telephone. Quick cheap reliable

“Long Live the Peoples’ Friendship,” read the signs lined up on three consecutive buildings. I decided to go up onto the roof of “Long Live” to get a shot of the letters up close. I step into the elevator, the doors close behind me, the lights go out. The emergency phone button doesn’t work. Total silence. Twenty minutes of sensory deprivation—it’s the eighties, after all.

Or take this. At a trendy nightclub, a janitor suddenly makes her way through the revelers on the dancefloor. The headscarf, the old musty rag on her mop—she’s a perfect Soviet cleaning woman down to the last detail.

A post box.

Announcements and posters at the post office.

Telecommunication services. Write your telegrams correctly and legibly

In general, Dushanbe is a reasonably pleasant city. Quiet, peaceful, relaxed.

Many buildings remain untouched by the scourge of plastic window units and aluminum doors. Simply because no one has the money to ruin existing beauty.

Photos. Copies. Scanning, typing, printing. DVD, VCD, MP-3, MP-4 recording

Majestic lions and policemen guard the base of the country’s recently erected main monument. After a minute of conversation, the policemen revealed that they get paid very little and asked me for financial assistance.

Electrical cables going into a building.

A payphone.

The visors on vehicle traffic lights appear to be defective in some way—almost all of them are rumpled or broken.

A crosswalk button.

A pedestrian light.

A Tajikistani license plate.

The most common type of decorative lawn border.

Irrigation ditches run throughout the entire city (like in Juba, Almaty, Teheran, or Kabul).

The Dushanbe bus shelters could easily fit an entire bus’s worth of passengers under them. Distances within the city are customarily described in terms of the number of stops (“You’re looking for the post office? It’s four stops away.”)

An old street sign.

A thirty-year-old street sign (like the ones in Baku or Kiev).

A sign from the 1990s. In three languages. Like a trunk with reinforced corners.

The downtown area has Chinese trash cans.

Drying laundry in the street is a tradition of the nation’s capital.

Euro Style Beauty Salon

Another tradition is washing rugs at the fire station. When they don’t have any fires to put out, naturally.

The Tajikistani world rests firmly on three elephants standing on a giant tortoise. On top of the world is a Tajik to whom the planets are sticking like burs.