Gem of a day

It happened during the week that my friend Karen came to visit us from Denver. It had been a few years since we had met, but had we kept in touch off and on – more on than off – ever since we first met through a bathroom door in the college dorm so many years ago. My visits to her home had been nicely balanced by her visits to mine, and our holidays together, albeit brief, had been memorable. Since this was the second time she was coming to my city and she had little time to spend in it, leave alone to wander around the country, we decided to concentrate our energies and attention to what we could do during the day, coming back home to roost every evening. A lot of the travel time we had in the car, waiting in traffic jams for the lights to change or bouncing about while the driver negotiated potholes, was spent in excited chatter about everything new and familiar, each of us learning something from each encounter and relearning a lot that had slipped into the recesses of time and memory.

One day Father took us to see a gem dealer, one that I had heard about for years and had even spoken to, but never met. He had a small office deep in the old part of the city, very close to where the presiding deity, Mumba Devi, had her abode. Karen and I walked there to meet Father after doing some desultory shopping in the main market, and dodged cows, people and sleazebags alike, doing agile twists, turns and side-tracks to avoid being bumped, felt up or just plain commented at. Every now and then – to her disconcernment, she insisted – I would grab my friend’s arm or hand and yank her in the direction that I wanted her to go; only later, after I explained, did she understand that it would have taken a while for me to explain and it was far easier and quicker to just hold and pull. We did want to go into the temple and say hi to the Goddess that Karen had met on her earlier visit, but were daunted by the crowds of loitering young men who insisted on trying to attract our attention and make comments that were descriptive, to put it mildly.

But finally we found the place we had to rendezvous at. It was in a not-too-high and very dilapidated building, one that I would never have imagined to be holding so much of such high value. After some hesitation and my carefully asking the person who seemed to be most respectable and least lecherous, we walked in. The entrance was narrow, almost like a dingy alleyway between two walls. The elevator was the old fashioned kind, one with sliding doors that had to be pulled open and shut. We walked up uneven, dirty, slippery stairs to a small door in one wall. The place was dimly lit and dank, smelling of stale food and perhaps a rat or two. I rang the doorbell and vaguely felt someone staring at me. From the seemingly fragile wooden door an electronic eye looked sternly at us, deemed us fit for entry and buzzed us in. In a very small and narrow foyer that was a-drip with laminate, we had to take off our sandals and wait a second or two before we pushed open a heavy door into a room where Father sat across a long desk from three other men.

The Big Man had a seat near the window. He and his obvious junior, a large and smiling-faced moustached gentleman, beamed fondly at me and stared curiously at the orange-haired visitor I had brought in. we were offered water, something cold, something hot, something to eat perhaps? But we had other business there; it was getting close to lunchtime and I was set on finishing what I had come for and then heading food-wards. So it was down to the wire. The Big Man emptied packet after packet of the most exquisite gemstones – emeralds, rubies, tanzanite, alexandrite, pearls…He practically flung ropes of preciousness at me and I looked and felt and wondered. It was a bewildering embarrassment of riches that made my head spin and my acquisitive instincts long to run helter-skelter out of there. So much was frightening. And all I wanted was something small, something – on the scale of what we were being shown – so minor that it would be like one grain of rice in the plenty cooked for a feast. I saw, managed to ask intelligent questions, and made my decision as fast as I could. And then, we left, sweating slightly at the stress of the whole deal and excited at the results.