Bukhara, 5:22 AM

The call to prayer reaches Lyabi-Hauz before the light does. I am sitting on the stone bench under the mulberry tree that is older than the Soviet Union and older than the Russian Empire and older, I suspect, than the man who first told me its age. The pool is still. The plane trees, the chinor we call them, hold their leaves above us like a green ceiling that has been there since 1620.

Aziz is opening his bread shop on the lane behind the Nadir Divan-Begi madrasah. I can hear his door. Aziz is fifty-eight. He has been baking the round Bukhari bread, the patir, since he was eleven. His father baked it. His grandfather baked it. His son baked it for one summer and then went to work for a delivery company in Tashkent, and Aziz does not speak about this.

I cross the square. Aziz nods. He hands me a piece of warm bread without asking. He has done this every morning of every visit I have made to Bukhara for nine years.

The word non in our language means bread, but it also means everything that holds the body. We say nonim halol, my bread is honest, when we mean we have not stolen. We say non yedik, we ate bread, when we mean we shared a table, even if there was no bread on it. The word does the work of three.

A taxi passes with the windows down. From the radio, a song by Sherali Jo'rayev, who my mother loved. The driver lifts a hand to Aziz. Aziz lifts a hand back. The light has now reached the top of the Kalon minaret. The bricks are the colour the marketing brochures call honey, but they are not honey. They are the colour of bread crust just before it is taken from the tandyr.

I sit on the stone wall of the hauz and eat the bread Aziz has given me, and I think: this city has been here for two thousand five hundred years. There is no morning of any one of those years when someone did not bake bread before dawn. I am a small link in a long chain. The bread is warm. The light is climbing. Bukhara is still here.