The open aired area near Indira's stall (pictures taken in September)
A self-contained standard container in the heart of the bazaar
Indira sells everything you need for a comfy bed. She has the sheets, the linens, giant comfortable padding, and the pillows that you need to turn your futon/fold-out with a giant ridge down the center and a saggy middle into a viable vehicle for a good night's sleep. She is located right on a main open space of sorts in the bazaar, right between the mosque and an important transit-way. She works along side many other home-supply retailers that peddle in hard ware, kitchen utensils, bathroom necessities and a variety of other indoor bits, parts and tools.
This location, though well traveled is less desireable than the initial rows of containers inside the alleyways of the bazaar. The containers are not as deep and the goods must be redisplayed every morning and stored each night as the stalls cannot simply be locked shut at night. They are not self-contained like the containers of the rest of the bazaar.
Indira is originally from the Talas region, to the West of the capital city but she has lived in or around Bishkek since coming here for university in the 1980's. She graduated with a degree in social sciences and went on to pursue the rough equivalent of a masters. Education was very central to success during Soviet times. Being highly educated, Indira enjoyed a comfortable and challenging teaching position. But after Kyrgyzstan became independent, the prestige and economic viability of her skills crumbled. With a young family to feed and no income to speak of, Indira made a dramatic move. She quit her work as an educator and became a trader at the bazaar. Other traders I have spoke with for shorter spurts have also revealed that they used to have a job for which they had been trained and educated. Elementary school teachers, engineers, professors and dentists all now sell goods at the bazaar rather than ply their trade. It is somewhat ironic and distressing because undoubtedly many of these skills are in direly short supply in Kyrgyzstan.
She also had to move her family from the relative luxury of a Soviet-built apartment to a self-made home near the bazaar in one of the novastroika (newly built) villages which surround the bazaar. Indira is clearly proud of having built her own house. She mentioned to me four times that she had built the home herself with help from her family. But the pride in being a self-supported and self-made mingles uncomfortably with frustration. Frustration with the geopolitical shifts that brought her plan for a stable but dynamic livelihood crashing down and frustration with the needless layers of adversity she had to overcome to achieve her modest autonomy.
"We don't live, we survive." Is how she put it. This struck me as a little dramatic. As a trader at a fairly central location in the bazaar for several years, Indira had an aire of self-confidence and shrewd manner that suggests she had succeeded in establishing herself above the realm of subsistence. Perhaps because of her former experience with apparent moderate prosperity, Indira is skeptical of her (apparent) economic stability. Even as she interrupts our conversation to bark orders to a helper or yell prices back and forth to her associates across the plaza, she describes herself as beseiged. She pays taxes but feel that she gets nothing in return... she made the money herself, what right does the government have to it. In this country official "corruption" is rife. (I put corruption in quotation marks because while it is real, there is no available alternative or "non-corrupt." Most dealings could be viewed as corrupt at some level so corruption here exists on a scale that should be measured differently than within a more unitary and autonomous state). To employ the model of one of my professors, society inhabits the states and coopts it for its own purposes. The state does little governing as an independent actor along the lines most people ideally envisage the state. So paying taxes and paying bribes and paying fees all begin to inhabit a much-overlapping gray area. And in that context, taxes make the least sense because the revenue is seen as going to the pockets of people that you never even see. Bribes result in tangible results as do fees.
Indira asked me if the government takes money that we make ourselves from us in USA. . It was a straightforward question but a simple yes or no would clearly leave the wrong impression. Of course, yes, I pay taxes. And while surely much of it could be better spent, I don't feel that my taxes simply subsidize the lifestyle of some powerful politician somewhere. I get good courts, fairly honest policing, and a number of services throughout my life. Her impression is clearly that this money is simply money lost. My yes, full of its implications of complete impropriety is not really accurate. But a no would have been equally misleading, we do pay taxes. I tried to explain some of the nuance but clearly I wasn't quite up to the full task.
