Plot

In a Kyrgyz village, five older women adopt an infant foundling. Jump ahead about 12 years: the boy, Beshkempir, is entering puberty, the age, his granny says, when life goes berserk. He plays with friends, horsing around, sniggering about sex, going to an outdoor movie. He works, fishing and making bricks of mud. And, he's starting to notice girls. He and his best friend fight, and he learns to his consternation that he's a foundling. A death in the family pushes Beshkempir even faster toward adult roles: he must brush tears from his eyes, lead a funeral procession, and reconcile with his friend. Then, he borrows a bicycle and calls on Aynura: courtship begins.—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Prologue: During a ritual ceremony that brings together five female doyennes of a village, Azate, the son of a large family, is offered to a couple whose wife is sterile.

We find Azate in full puberty, left to his own devices like most of the boys in the village. His friends, including Tekine, Adyr, Bakyt, take advantage of their freedom to give free rein to their initiatives: making clay bricks, tracking bees to find the location of the swarm, spying on an obese woman who cures herself with leeches, shaping on the ground the body of a naked woman and miming the penetration of her sex, holding the role of messenger for a young male projectionist who takes Djanyl on his bike, going to the cinema where Azate tries to get closer to Aïnoura, a young girl who shows him sympathy. This behavior, in the middle of the village where all the adults in the course of the seasons do not have a moment's respite, irritates his father and his mother Raskan who do not support that this child does not have a more suitable behavior and does not participate more in the work of the fields.

During a game, the complicity between Azate and Aïnoura bursts and this provokes Tekine, Anipa's son, a crisis of jealousy, who, not being able to match him, tries to belittle his rival by revealing to him that he is a "beshkempir", i.e. five old women who presided over his adoption.

Azate, devastated by this revelation, asks his grandmother for explanations that he does not get and his situation is complicated when he becomes the object of mockery from his former friends. The death of his grandmother will allow him to sort out his problems. He becomes the executor of the will and assumes his status. His friends cannot play on this sensitive point and are reconciled with him.

He is now a young man and like his comrade who asked him to go and get Djanyl to take him for a ride on his bicycle, he can, on the bicycle that the projectionist lends him, take Aïnoura by installing her on the frame and not on the luggage rack.