Last summer, my mother was diagnosed with celiac disease: a severe allergy to wheat, oats, and barley that prevents her from eating any flour-based food for the rest of her life.  We were in America at the time, so she relished gluten-free everything: rice cakes that taste remarkably like packing peanuts (I would know, having moved countless times as a curious child), wheat-free dessert mixes (I’d stick with brownies if I were you), and gluten-free flour, if that isn’t an oxymoron for you.

All was well and good until we, weighed down with heavy bags of flour that turned out to taste rancid merely because it was made of tapioca, got home to Samarkand, the Pearl of the East and producer of a round, flat, dense bread, non, that bears more resemblance to a wooden doorstop than anything else I can think of offhand.  Our van shared the road with several Russian Fiats whose back windshields were piled with this doorstop bread to an height probably illegal in most Western countries.  Who needs the cheap clay figurines that the vendors sell exorbitantly to European tourists?  Every well-informed Uzbek visiting Samarkand knows that the best souvenir to stock up on is Samarkand non. 

If the packed Fiats didn’t make it clear enough, our friends’ violently incredulous reactions to my mother’s announcement of her allergy quite clearly proved their devotion to non.  “What?  You can’t eat wheat?  That’s too bad.”  Pause.  “That’s alright, have some non.”  After which follow adamant assertions from my family that non is, in fact, made of wheat flour.  “What do you mean, you can’t eat non?  What do you eat then?  You can’t have a real meal without bread!”  For what is a diet of non and tea, after all, without the non?  Nothing but some muddy-looking water with leaves in it!

But non never does desert those who are faithful, and the Uzbeks surely are faithful.  So the Uzbek girl reaches for the thin, crunchy center of the non in hopes it will bring her a good husband, one who works hard and does not beat her and drinks only on holidays.  Thus the boy bites a loaf of non before he sets out as a soldier, leaving the bread to dry and harden on the wall while he is gone.  He hopefully anticipates the homecoming celebration when he will triumphantly finish the loaf in a soup prepared joyfully by mother and sisters for the occasion.  Non is trustworthy, so what else can the Uzbeks do but believe in its mystical power to heal the worst illnesses, even when all else fails?

Non is far more than a food; it is the friend of the Uzbeks, the miracle-worker, ranked with a deceased mother among the most holy things to swear by.  Unspeakable eternal punishments threaten the one who breaks an oath by non!  This is why Alexander the Great broke non with the father of Roxana of Samarkand to announce his solemn engagement; this is why the families of bride and groom gather to this day to break non in a binding ceremony to mark a betrothal. 

The children, too, must learn not to drop their non on the ground; they must remember to respect it like a mother or father; they must come to recognize it in all its power.  So the Uzbeks tell their children stories:

One day many years ago, after hours of hard work in the shimmering Uzbek sun, a farmer stuck the handle of his hoe in the ground and reclined for a rest in the hoe’s shadow.  The freshly tilled earth was cool and soft, and the exhausted farmer soon fell asleep.  Suddenly, a flying snake crashed through the hoe onto the unsuspecting farmer.  The snake prepared to strike, raised its head, hissed.  But then it caught sight of a piece of non that the farmer had tucked into his pocket for lunch.  Just as suddenly as it had fallen from the sky, the snake transformed into a biscuit and rolled away, harmless.  Once again, non had proven itself faithful to those who truly loved and respected it.