SILK ROAD RISING

IT WAS WHEN THE BLUE BOWL fell and broke that a desire to revisit Uzbekistan swept over me in a sudden tremor of remembered colors and patterns.

The bowl, made from fragile, salty clay by the masters of Khorezm, a historic pottery center in western Uzbekistan, sported an intricate, pale azure design I could gaze at forever. It was my trophy from a trip I made in 1990 to Uzbekistan, the history-saturated crossroads of the Silk Road.

That trip was an act of homage. My beloved paternal grandmother, Alla, was born in 1917 in the fertile Fergana Valley east of Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. She was raised there by her grandmother, Anna, a prominent Bolshevik women’s rights activist. In the 1930s, Anna was transferred to a political job in Moscow, and later, like many Bolshevik activists, she ended up in a gulag. Alla never talked about Anna—except on those special occasions when she got very drunk and made great fragrant mounds of plov, the carrot-strewn Uzbek lamb pilaf.

Though she lived in Moscow most of her life, Alla never lost touch with Uzbekistan. She visited often and returned with packets of intensely smelly zeera (wild cumin), green tea, shriveled black barberries, and striped fabrics from which she’d sew my pajamas. When my mother and I moved to the United States as refugees in 1974, Alla stayed behind. And when she died at age 60, I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye.

And so, on that 1990 visit, I ate buckets of plov and drank liters of vodka in Alla’s honor. The memories of that