Tut tut (=mulberry, mulberry)

The streets of Khujand are lined with mulberry trees. The silk culture, weaving and dyeing trades that demanded vast quantities of fresh young mulberry leaves with which to feed the voracious silk worms are largely a thing of the past, but the trees remain, flourish, and are still planted in large numbers, Happily the fat-bottomed sheep of Khujand are also partial to mulberry leaves.
At the moment, the mulberries are ripe and keep falling from the trees with a miniature plop, making it hazardous to pause under a tree – especially the ones bearing black fruit. A kilo of mulberries in the market now costs less than 50 US cents, but we rarely have to go that far to get them, because a little boy called Anvar knocks on our door every couple of days, to ask whether we want him to go and pick mulberries for us. He takes our order – for black or white mulberries – and brings them to us a little later in a large glass jar, whence he carefully transfers them into one of our large glass jars, which we acquire whenever we buy locally produced apricot, apple or rosehip juice. Once he has delivered our mulberries, Anvar often stays in our courtyard a little while, and tries to pick out a tune on Ed’s recorder (Ed has given him a couple of lessons, and he is a keen pupil), or kicks Jacob’s football around. He also rings our bell at other times asking to borrow Jacob’s ball for a game in the lane with his friends, but as he is one of our most welcome young visitors, we usually allow him to. The little hands who bang on our door are many, but I think they have slackened off a little over the past few days, after Ed and I both began losing our tempers over the ill-timed and persistent requests to come in and play. This makes us sound churlish, and perhaps we are, but it is a position we have come to after opening our door to over a dozen children, who stream in merrily and swarm all over Jacob’s things without so much as a by your leave, much to his consternation.