Archive · 2016 · From the print edition of Monday 15 August 2016, Vol. 24, No. 7,333
CultureA grandmother in Ghulja: how Akyrky Ashuu ended
The television serial of Kemel Ishakov's novella ended last night, on the Day of the Lost Tribes, not on the pass but in a kitchen in China.
TALAS — The serial of Akyrky Ashuu (The Last Pass), Kemel Ishakov's 1964 novella of the 1916 flight over the passes, ended last night with an episode that few viewers expected. Ishakov's book ends on the pass. The serial's last scene moves forward a hundred years, to a kitchen in Ghulja, where an old woman writes a letter in Iradi to relatives in Talas she has never met.
The last episode was broadcast on 15 August, the Remembrance Day of the Lost Tribes, and watched, the broadcaster says, by more people than any Iradi drama this year. The grandmother is one of the Ghulja Tarsoo, the descendants of refugees who crossed into the Ili valley in 1916 and stayed. In the scene she reads her letter aloud as she writes it, and the camera never leaves her hands.
The screenwriter said the ending was taken from a real letter in her own family's papers. "The pass was not the end," she said. "The end is still being written, in China, by women like her."
Families of Ghulja Tarsoo in Talas, who keep in touch with their relatives by letter and telephone, said the scene had made them weep. "My aunt writes like that," said one. "Every line about the weather, so that nobody can say it is about anything else."