The case files of jewele.., p.1
The Case Files of Jeweler Richard Vol. 8, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyrights and Credits
Table of Contents Page
Foreword
Prologue
Le Premiere Jour: Day 1
Le Premiere Jour: Day 2
Le Premiere Jour: Day 3
Epilogue
Newsletter
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WHY ARE beautiful things sad?
I recall once asking that.
It wasn’t the day my grandmother told me that beauty and sadness go hand in hand. She said those profound words as if she were stating the obvious, but it took a lot of courage for me, a young child, to ask her why.
My grandmother wrote someone a letter that day. She was always writing letters to someone, but whenever I asked who it was, she just said they were “a friend.” I suppose she could say that with confidence, even though everyone on the estate knew she wasn’t particularly close to anyone, because she didn’t want the cloying oppression of friendships. I even believed, naively, that she might have many secret friends.
She slowly stood from her writing desk and turned to me, flustered by the gesture, and tilted her head eerily to the side.
“If everything in the world were beautiful, what would ‘beauty’ be?”
That question was much too difficult for me at the time. If the world was full of beautiful things, with not a single unsavory sight to be seen, wouldn’t it be nice to experience nothing but beauty all the time? If the servants who thought I was creepy for not acting enough like a child, or if my father, who barely ever saw me and treated me like a piece of luggage when he did, weren’t around… If the whole world were a pleasant place, wouldn’t that be nice?
I said as much. My grandmother chuckled like a crow and set her hand on my head.
“Pleasant and beautiful are not the same thing at all. Beautiful things can be terrifying, and carry with them great pain. But the most important thing to remember…”
Was that beauty wasn’t something you possessed.
Because beauty only existed when someone else observed it and declared it “beautiful.”
I asked her if it was like how, if no one were there to call the beautiful fallen leaves beautiful, they may as well not exist. “Yes, exactly,” she said.
I offered her the golden leaf I’d collected from the garden as a present, and she narrowed her eyes at me.
“What a beautiful leaf you’ve found. Do you like leaves more than flowers?”
I don’t remember what I said at the time. I liked both, but flowers wilted and fell apart so quickly. In that sense, I preferred leaves.
I caught sight of the letter on top of her desk. Something that looked like a bracelet sat next to it, and I think I asked her, “What is that?” Or maybe, “Who gave that to you?” Something to that effect. It was a string of ordinary natural stones that almost looked like a toy, though it did seem a little old for that.
She didn’t respond and just twirled the leaf around her fingers. It was either an elm or an oak leaf, with a symmetrical, spindle-like shape and not a single insect bite taken out of it. I’d thought that my grandmother, who loved gemstones so much, might like it. It was a product of nature that was perfect in every way.
But that intent didn’t quite make it across.
My grandmother, whose eyes sparkled like gems, looked down at the child looking up at her in silence and gave an exasperated laugh.
“You should be more assertive when you speak, Richard. You were born under a beautiful star, so you ought to make an effort to communicate more about yourself. I’m not saying you need to learn Sinhala—just use your own language. That’s what I want for you.”
I learned Sinhala. I learned French, Spanish, Italian, and other European languages even faster. I threw myself into studying Asian languages even as I was teased for it, with people telling me studying too much would damage my brain. It was like I was a fish and studying languages was the water of life. But the more languages I learned, the more my loneliness intensified. No matter which language’s waters I swam in, I couldn’t live in any of them. All I wanted was water, but I was beginning to feel like one of Princess Kaguya’s suitors, tasked with searching for the impossible.
One of my cousins told me I was being conceited but still watched over me in my pursuits. My other cousin praised my talents, all the while pretending not to see me at all. It didn’t really matter to me. It was all the same, either way. I was the only person living in my world.
I was still trapped in that world, whiling away my days, when I met her.
AUGUST 9TH
Hello, it’s Iggy from Sri Lanka again. I may not be the most consistent, but I have more or less managed to keep up this blog that I started to improve my writing skills. I greatly appreciate everyone who’s taken the time to read it.
I’m going to be writing about pricing negotiations in Ratnapura this time.
This should be pretty obvious if you go through my posts, but I’ve been in a little mountain city called Ratnapura since the end of July. I’ve been working on stocking gems—so shopping, basically. Ratnapura is an old mining town that still produces sapphires and tourmaline. Its name means “capital of gems” in Sinhala, and there are records of Europeans coming here to trade for gems as early as the Age of Discovery.
My boss says it’s one of the most interesting places in the world. Whenever I go there, it feels like every single person I meet is involved with the gem industry. Just about everyone has a parcel of gemstones (a parcel is like an envelope) in their pocket. It’s the kind of place where negotiations begin the moment you make eye contact.
And everyone is looking to trade.
This was my first time being trained in making a bulk purchase.
I’m sure the word training evokes images of a systematic process with reports, communication, and feedback. This was anything but. My training was just a steady process of meeting and negotiating with as many gem dealers as time would permit, with the goal of obtaining large quantities of products that seem like they’ll sell and avoiding those that seem like they won’t.
The thing is, whatever image the words gem dealer might evoke, most of the sellers here are men wearing sarongs and footwear that remind me of beach sandals. Nothing about it really screams “business.” The town is typical of Sri Lanka in most other respects, too—there are hardly any paved roads, and if anything, it feels like the people here are just temporarily renting the space from Mother Nature. Just like Colombo and Kandy, it can only be accessed via a one-lane mountain road that takes four to five hours to traverse, and even with your seat belt fastened as tightly as possible, you’re guaranteed to be totally worn out by the trip.
Still, every single building on the bustling city streets looked expensive. I’m struggling to find a good way to describe it, but as someone used to the shopping districts in Kandy and Colombo, the difference in budget was immediately apparent. The first time I came here, I let it slip to my boss that I thought so, and he praised me for being so perceptive. Most of the buildings here are owned by people who mined valuable gems and decided to invest some of the crazy money they made into starting their own shops. It’s kind of cute.
There’s a chamber of commerce-type institute in the middle of town for people who want to do business, but I’m working in a little hut on a hill some distance away, intently examining gemstones. It’s a tiny building—barely six square meters—with nothing but a desk, chair, and light, located among a line of similar little shacks where I spend hours upon hours.
Whenever they get the call that someone from my boss’s shop is here, a group of sellers whom he buys from fairly regularly—people you might call trustworthy, in a sense—come to the hut and show me the items they want to sell. It’s always a sight to behold. Obviously, there are things like ruby, sapphire, cat’s eye, alexandrite, and tourmaline, but also moonstone, spinel, kunzite, tsavorite, sphene, tanzanite, and even jade. There are always enough gems being brought in to open a jewelry shop. Big ones and small ones. Stones with stars and stones without. Stones mined in the area, stones that came in from who knows where. Heated and unheated. Stones dressed up in the names of more expensive stones, stones mistaken for inexpensive ones. Real and fake. Everything you could imagine. I can’t help but wonder if the Chinese idiom “a jumble of gems and stones” was inspired by such a sight.
As for the price ranges, I’d prefer to leave it to your imagination, but I’ll just say they were nigh boundless—from mineral show souvenir prices to high-end jewelry store window display prices. I’m very grateful my boss let me focus on just looking at real stones at first, rather than throwing me right into the deep end.
The vendors—or, rather, the sellers employed by the gems’ owners—rarely complete a sale at the first price given. Fixed prices really aren’t a thing in this world. What actually happens is you negotiate with the seller until you come to an agreement on a price, then buy what you want for that amount. But if the other party rejects your offers, negotiations are over, and they’ll move on to try to sell to another person.
This might seem obvious, but there’
You need some heavy-duty machinery to definitively identify a given gemstone. Acquiring that level of proof isn’t feasible when working in the middle of nowhere like this. Instead, it all comes down to whether or not you are willing to buy something, and all you have to rely on are your eyes, your experience, and your intuition.
As you might expect, the only people who come to sell stones to my boss are battle-worn veterans. It’s not hard to imagine how they might see a brand-new jeweler’s apprentice, who’s getting his feet wet for the first time, as easy prey. Which is why I always have a more experienced coworker standing behind me when I’m training in Ratnapura.
His nickname is “Hawk Eye”—because of his sharp eyes and unique facial features. He doesn’t have a mean look to him or anything, but as I was exchanging light banter with another jeweler, I knew what he meant when he said that his gaze could paralyze you with fear. Hawk Eye stands behind me while I’m encamped at the desk in the little shack, negotiating with gem dealer after gem dealer. Whenever he thinks my judgment is clearly off, he’ll say, “Pardon,” and give me some advice. He’s basically a safety net, but it makes me want to die of nerves whenever I hear that “pardon” after a negotiation is complete.
Over the course of half a day—with breaks in between—I met at least 150 people. My final score was 14 “pardons.” It was still impossible to say if that was the result of a streak of beginner’s luck or quite the opposite. It would all depend on how things sold later.
In Ratnapura, people don’t look at gems once the sun starts to set. They all know that gems are at their most beautiful—exactly as they’re meant to be—in morning light. It’s just a fact that gems look their best in natural light. This town isn’t exactly kind to buyers, but it does let you switch out of business mode in the afternoon and enjoy some elegant tea and cake at an English-style café that inexplicably exists here. Which is pretty nice, if you ask me.
One of the unfortunate side effects of this schedule is that buying starts very early in the morning. I have to be ready and waiting by 5 a.m. This is a particular struggle for Hawk Eye…but I’ll save that story for another time.
I think I just barely managed to stick to the three principles of buying: 1. Don’t let it show on your face, 2. Don’t let yourself be bound by obligation, and 3. Never tell anyone what item(s) you’re interested in. As a result, my face was always aching by evening, which worried my coworker. As scary and strict as he might be when it comes to work, he does let me take it easy in my off time, and I’m always glad to have him around.
Even with a chaperone, the experience of using the company budget (and a lot of it!) to buy a huge quantity of gemstones was so intense that I had trouble sleeping afterward. It wasn’t the thrill of the experience that kept me up at night but instead thinking about whether I made the right call by buying a stone at a certain price, or if I should have bought something I’d ended up passing on.
My colleague would scold me, reminding me that it was a waste of energy to worry about things I’d never know the answer to, and that I should spend only exactly as much time as is required to reflect on things and then use the rest of my time developing an optimistic attitude. I think that helped me strike a healthier balance. I guess I’m just going to have to get used to it all.
I know that was a bit long, but I’ll end my notes about purchasing stones in Ratnapura here for now.
I hope I do even better next time. I’m determined to.
[EDIT]
I forgot to mention this, but at least with respect to the people I encountered during my training here in this city, 100 percent of the gem dealers were men. I’m pretty sure if a woman so much as walked down the pedestrian-packed Jeweler’s Street (as I’ve decided to call it), she would have stuck out like a sore thumb. And I didn’t see any women among the mine shafts in the fields, either. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering it was dangerous manual labor, but it still took me aback to see just how male-dominated the space was.
I guess it’s just that way more women than men wear jewelry, and yet when it comes to the trade side of things, it’s almost all men. Maybe it’s less that it’s strange and more vaguely ironic.
AUGUST 10TH
Today I’m going to talk about transportation. I’m finally getting used to driving the three-wheeler I acquired the other day. I’m going to post a picture of it.
Ta-da! It’s one of those three-wheeled scooters you see all around Sri Lanka.
The body is red and the seat and canopy are black.
As you can see, it has a lot of ventilation. There’s seating for two people behind the driver, but since it doesn’t have any doors, whoever’s sitting in back has to be careful. If I just stuck some incense and stickers of Buddha and Hindu gods on the windshield, it’d look just like any of the taxis you see around here.
I didn’t buy it new. I got it used for cheap off of someone in the neighborhood. If you’ve ever been to India or Thailand, you can easily picture how these scooters are typically used as taxis, rather than exclusively personal vehicles. While they’re way cheaper than cars, they’re still a big investment, so a lot of people who work as drivers actually rent them from someone who owns a big fleet. There’s actually someone who operates a business leasing these three-wheelers near where I live. He offered to sell me some extra stock for cheap when they heard I was getting fed up trying to drive the car along those narrow roads.
I’m trying to keep it as nice as possible because I figure I’ll end up selling it to someone myself in a few years.
That said, I was really surprised by how inexpensive it is to get your driver’s license in Sri Lanka. I have an international driver’s license, but I was curious, so I asked the owner of that lunch place I frequent, and he said that it costs about 30,000 Sri Lankan rupees! As a point of comparison, in my home country it would cost several hundred thousand Sri Lankan rupees to get your license. When I explained that, all the Sri Lankans there at the time burst out laughing. “If it cost that much, no one would get their license!” they all exclaimed. They had a point. Considering the average salary in this country, several hundred thousand rupees would be practically impossible. After all, it’s not just the cost of a driver’s license but the cost of living in general that’s relative to the country you’re living in.
I’ve never lived abroad before, so I find myself impressed by every little thing.
I wonder what I should do for dinner tonight? If I get too swept up in chores, it eats into my studies, but I do appreciate the change of pace. And now that I have the scooter, it takes me no time to get ingredients. Maybe I’ll post photos later. Would that count as language practice? Well, whatever!
The other day, I was having some soup made from fish stock when this cute little stray mutt wandered into the house. I gave it some leftover fish and we had dinner together. There are tons of stray dogs in this area. Sometimes people feed them, and sometimes they don’t. It’s a pretty relaxed dynamic. It makes me wonder if the people here are less accustomed to the idea of keeping pets than the people back home. I guess I do see people raising chickens to eat whenever I go out into the countryside.
It was a very cute dog. I hope it comes back.
The stars were really pretty tonight, too.
AUGUST 11TH
I’ve been really busy lately.
You’re probably thinking, “preparing for the festival in August?” Unfortunately, it’s not that. I feel like I can hear someone saying that it’s a shame to not go to the festival when I’m living in Kandy, but I have plans for an extended business trip. I’ll post all about it when I get back, as usual.
I wonder how it’s going to go. I’m kind of nervous—but I do get to see a friend of mine for the first time in a while, and fretting about it won’t get me anywhere.
