The sound summoned an infamous image from her native country, Kazakhstan, which was still part of the Soviet Union when she was born there in 1986. The mental image was of rusting and rotten ship hulls, desiccated atop the sand of a desert where one of the world’s great lakes, the Aral Sea, used to be.
“When I was growing up there, everyone knew about the disaster and what happened—there was water, and then there wasn’t. It was a human-made disaster, something we had done,” says Bisengalieva. “There was sadness.
