Blissful Ignorance

In a dilapidated historic, tiny, dark house in Baku's ancient inner city, Asghar Quliyev was busy eating dinner with his mother and children. At the same time, his wife pulled up a chair after serving the meal. Everyone was eating in silence.

Today's meal consisted of Dolma (rice, minced filled capsicum) and a drink of Feijoa for the week's revelry.

Feijoa used to cost 20 manats which were very expensive. There was a mysterious silence at the dining table. Nigar Quliyeva, Asghar's wife, looked before her while taking small sips.

This silence was very awkward. Asghar broke it with his words.

"Today, I don't feel like my house is small."

His mother stared at her son through her old eyes. Then, looking at the Feijoa floating in his glass, she smiled and said: 'When your favourite drink is in front of you, then you don't think anything is small, neither the house nor the glass.'

"Not even your vision". His wife also gave him a bite.

'What happened? Are you taunting me Nigar?" He placed the glass firmly on the table without caring about the splash of the drink and said.

"I'm just saying." Seeing him getting worse, Nigar wanted to change the subject, but it was too late.

"Look Nigar! You call me narrow-minded? I brought you from a small village and settled in Baku. And allowed you to wear short dresses. I take you to the theatre with my limited income. We live a good life. You are no less than a lady. Then how did I become narrow or short-sighted?" Asghar spoke as if his trust had been hurt, which he had built in years.

"Oh God, you just loading things! I was just giving a poetic commentary.", Nigar retorted.

"Poetry was not being presented here. It was a happy family gathering which you ruined.", Asghar shouted. And then left the unfinished food, picked up the cigarette box, and slammed the door by humming.

"It is tough to entertain silkworms and women."

On a cold night in the cobbled streets of the ancient city, where tourists strolled, he was busy blowing away his sorrows in cigarette smoke. Walking like this, he reached the shore. Seeing the couples holding hands, smiling, and talking on the beach, a tingle rose on the left side of Asghar's chest even though he was living a happy married life. Or just what he thought he had. Nigar's view was different.

Asghar was a chef in an old traditional food restaurant in Baku. He learned these dishes from his grandmother and mother. And now he was a cooking expert. A parallel of his pilav was hardly available. A job in the magnificent restaurant of Qabala Khanlar was also a matter of honour and glory.

Local and foreign presidents, diplomats, ministers, elites, etc., came here. But his family never came. When he put a rib cage in the oven, he knew how delicious meat would come out forty minutes later. The city of Baku was a great mystery, a beautiful combination of poverty and affluence. Middle-class people like Asghar pretended to live joyful lives and passed on stories to their generation. And like those rich kids and their parents who didn't know where to spend their money. Women selling socks, men selling vegetables, children selling bread, and old people sweeping around were also the state's responsibility. But much, if not everything, was wrong at the highest level. Bribery was at its peak. Cruelty was common. Might was right, and minor was crushed like a peanut. When Asghar returned home late at night, his mother was awake, turning her hand over the family tree paper, their family heirloom. When Asghar came, she kissed his forehead and went to sleep, and Asghar spread the paper and sat in the corner of the old sofa.

His fingers froze at the name of Jafar Quliyev. He was her great-grandfather. The only proud man of his family who was...

Asghar had to go long and far down memory lane, so we take you there by holding Asghar's memory finger.

Jafar Quliyev was among those 124 people living in the town of Lachin, which had a crucial geographical position in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. This town was earlier called Abdallar because the Turkic tribe of Abdali lived here.

Then it was changed to Lachin because Falcon was called 'Lachin' in the Turkic language.

As if it was the town of the Falcons.

With the collusion of Russia and Armenia, local Azerbaijani Turks and Kurds were forced out of this area. Armenians were settled in their places. This left the area at their mercy. Among those evicted was a family of Jafar Quliyev, who had somehow reached Baku in a state of desperation. Since Quliyev cooked delicious meat called 'tandır' meat, his fame in a city like Baku reached the then President Nariman Narimanov. He got a job there as a special chef for Nariman Narimanov. It was the year 1920 when one day, Nariman Narimanov ordered food in his library, and Jafar served the food. When Jafar came to wrap up the table, he saw that Mr Narimanov was passed out from drinking too much alcohol, and a letter in Russian was lying next to his plate of meat. Jafar immediately picked up the letter. On which was the seal and signature of Russian President Vladimir Lenin. The text read: 'The region of Lachin will be given to Azerbaijan. And that's my promise.'

Tears fell from Jafar's eyes and fell onto the plate of meat. And he put the letter on his chest and hid it in his pocket. Then no one knew where Jafar went with this letter. Instead, no one even knew that Jafar had gone with the letter. Nariman Narimanov was dismissed after a year, so the new staff had nothing to do with the old team.

Narimanov, whose real name was Nariman Karbalai Najaf Oğlu Narimanov, now devoted most of his time to his literary activities. At that time, in the theatres of Baku, he translated Nikolai Gogol's play 'State's Inspector', which was very popular. It is a masterpiece of rationality, ignorance, laziness, luxury, cruelty and malice.

Gogol exposed them and their truth to the public.

Narimanov translated this stage play into Azerbaijani Turkish and produced many literary works, among which his work 'Nadir Shah' is the most prominent.

Asghar came out of the past memory when a dog laid head on his doorstep, barking from cold and hunger.

Asghar got up and fed him something. It was Sunday morning, and he wanted to bring joy to Nigar's mood. So they planned to eat out today and prepare to go to the theatre where the 'State's Inspector' was to be performed at Fuzuli Theatre. Some kissing scenes during the play were unsuitable for children. Still, the children kept clapping and smiling at these scenes very smartly.

March 15, 2020, came as an upheaval in his life when the government banned people's entry to all public places, including restaurants, because of the global epidemic Corona. Everyone went into quarantine. The stock of food in the markets was getting less, and there was a lot of fear in everyone's hearts. Since no one knew much about the causes and effects of this disease, everyone was in the grip of an unknown fear. Everyone thought that death was a mad dancer who danced from street to street, gathering souls. Every day in the news, the death toll was in the hundreds. It seemed that the apocalypse had come or was about to come. Asghar also got fed up with the financial situation and started thinking about returning to the village. But the wife insisted they would go to her town, i.e. Nabran, where her family lived. Nabran was the last town in Azerbaijan on the border with Russia, famous for its natural beauty. There was also the sea. There were fields, and there was also the forest. So, no disease or quarantine.

Asghar created his own YouTube channel and started cooking and vlogging on it, in which a complete family background would be presented. Mother's words of advice, children's play, and the deep, sincere relationship between wife and husband in which they always seemed to support each other. Asghar's fan following increased daily as people had never seen Azerbaijani traditional food made live like this. A few months later, in September, sad news came that Armenia had martyred General Polad Hashimov of Azerbaijan. After that, Azerbaijan had no choice but to conduct a war on the disputed territory of Karabakh. 

Thus, the two forces encountered, and the Azerbaijani army rapidly took over the occupied area. The harshness of the weather and the difficulty of the terrain were great. Meanwhile, Asghar received a message from a military commander that he could cook for them. As the soldiers are busy fighting, they cannot cook. Like his grandfather, Asghar wanted to do something for the country's soil. He handed over YouTube vlogging, home, children, and mother everything to his wife Nigar. He became the cook of this army battalion.

In the 44-day war, Azerbaijan took back the territories Armenia had occupied for thirty years, including Lachin, a critical region.

Being with a military battalion, Asghar also had access to areas where civilians could not. After all, Lachin was his native place. In this deserted valley, he could smell the soil of his elders. He was in a state of gloomy gladness. He borrowed the wireless phone of Commander Kumail.

He contacted his family and asked them where his ancestral home was. He memorized the signs and went there, accompanied by a few soldiers. Nothing was left in the ruined house, or maybe everything was just this. Digging far into the wreckage, he found a box containing a few decaying papers, including a letter that his great-grandfather had received from Narimanov's palace. 

It was as if Asghar had been given the treasure of king Solomon. He brought it to Baku at the war's end, handling it with joy and fear. He preserved it in a frame and thought that on the day of the celebration when Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev appeared in public, he too would line up and give it to him. But the security personnel in this chaos and crowd kept him from the President by pushing him. 

Very upset, he gave an interview to Dunya News, an Azerbaijani channel, that he had a letter from his great-grandfather, a historic letter written by Lenin to Narimanov. When this news was broadcast in the presidential palace, Asghar was quickly searched. The letter was taken away from him, and he was not allowed to meet the President again. The letter was kept in Azerbaijan's Literary Museum and other Narimanov documents, but Asghar remained empty-handed. As his great-grandfather, who had lived a historical event by taking that letter from Narimanov's hand, he too was living a historical moment being a part of the Second Karabakh War. But he did not realize it. How blissful is this ignorance! The long boulevard of Baku suggested to him.