Fazal

Fazal

We spent the next two days eating at our favorite places, walking along the Galle Face Green at dawn, and generally loafing around the Tea Lounge at the Galle Face and Barista, the Starbucks-owned coffee chain built into the Galle Face Regency complex. One day Dan left me to relax at Gallery Café while he went and raided the Buddhist Publication Society for goodies, finding several books published by his new research subject, the stream enterer monk. “These are all his translations of American New Age books on reincarnation,” he explained. “All of his translations of American pop-paranormal books are still in print. None of his rational analyses of Dharma are still in print,” he furthered sadly. “The Sinhala dislike him for his attempts to re-interpret the Dharma and love this stuff,” he said, holding up a paperback book with a bad watercolor style cover.

On the evening of April 20th we decided to go and visit our jeweler to talk over a ring for Dan. When Dan had his security briefing at the Embassy back in August he had admired the security officer’s jewelry and she had referred him to Jewel Qudsi. Fortuitously, Jewel Qudsi was located 400 yards from the Barista built into the side of the Galle Face Regency. Jewel Qudsi didn’t have a fancy marble store-front or large illuminated pictures. The store was marked only by a modest yellow sign with black letters. One late afternoon on our second trip to Colombo when we stayed with Mrs. Ratanavale and met Typhoid Mary, we opened the glass door at street level under the sign, walked down a flight of steps, and then were buzzed into the subterranean shop. The first landing of the shop was all ready-made jewelry in semi-precious stones displayed in cases along the walls. We had to descend again past a wall of glass containing ropes of tourmaline, pearls, garnets, and other semi-precious stones to reach the main level of the shop. Both side walls were lined with cases of ready-made gold jewelry with precious stones. In the middle of the main floor rested a rotating table case in the middle of the room containing only rings. Glass boxes of loose semi precious stones were mounted into the back wall with a long display case of loose, individually-boxed Sri Lankan sapphires stationed in front of it. The shop continued around to the left to reveal a large, oval, oak desk for the owner and the door to the workshop.

I glanced briefly at the ready-made collection before zeroing in on the loose sapphire in the case where we were waited on by the owner, Fazal, a Muslim man in his mid-forties. His English was excellent and he used American idioms extremely skillfully when talking to us. Fazal had the relaxed ability to put both of us at ease, even Dan who had never entered a jewelry store before in his life except to get the band of his watch fixed. When I would become engrossed in a certain stone, Fazal would ask Dan about his research and was genuinely interested in drawing him out. Fazal showed us stone after stone in all colors of blue from pale blue, to cornflower blue, to deep royal blue, encouraging us to us to secure the stones in tweezers, hold them up to the light, and gaze at them under the loupe. He would explain the various inclusions that made each stone unique, “Here is one with a little bit of tourmaline there on the right side,” he would tell me before handing the stone over. He even showed us some recently acquired uncut sapphires the size of nutmeg seeds and showed us how to shine a pen-light through at different angles to determine the clarity of different regions of the stone. “’Qudsi’ means ‘pure’ he explained when I asked about the meaning of the store’s name.

Gradually my attention shifted to the yellow sapphires, then to the pink sapphires. “Do you have any green sapphires?” I asked. Fazal called for tea for all of us and brought out a box from under the display case of sapphires ranging from light green to dark forest green. “But these are from Madagascar,” he explained, frowning slightly. “We do not have green sapphires in Sri Lanka.” I looked at the green sapphires briefly, but I knew that I wanted something from Sri Lanka. “What other colors do you have?” I asked. Thousands of dollars of sapphires already littered the top of the display case, in and out of their white plastic boxes. Fazal seemed to relish the challenge, and called for another container of individually boxed loose stones to be brought from the back. I was sorting through the box and was initially transfixed by a few brown sapphires that glowed golden until I suddenly happened across the peach sapphire. The pink sapphires in the case were all florid hues of magenta, but the peach sapphire was a delicate shade of light peach, 4.55 ct deep square cut, and had a little tourmaline inclusion on one side that wouldn’t be noticed once it was set. I looked at the stone from all angles in the bright overhead light and I knew I had found my stone. The inner clarity of the stone indicated to me that the stone had been heated to improve the color, but I didn’t care. A non-heated stone would have an internal silkiness visible under the loupe. “This is from Sri Lanka right?” I asked. “Yes,” Fazal replied, smiling. “Put my name on this one,” I instructed, “We’ll be back for it,” I finished, and started to get up to leave. Fazal nodded and wrote our information on an envelope and filled the stone with other envelopes in a large wooden box. “It will be here for you,” he assured me.

When we re-ascended the stairs it was dark. That night over dinner at the Italian restaurant at the Hilton I told Dan “I don’t want that stone to be a ring,” I explained, “I want it to be the ring. You can give it to me whenever you want, years from now, but that’s my dream stone.” He reached across the table, took my hand, “Ok,” he replied and smiled.
“Look,” I continued, “I’m making this easy on you, do you want to have to figure all this out yourself?” I asked jokingly.
“No,” Dan replied laughing, shaking his head and widening his eyes in mock terror.
“That stone’s a bargain,” I ranted. “In the States that type of stone is totally unavailable and you couldn’t even get a half-carat diamond for that price, and setting it will be much cheaper too here, so really, you’ll be coming out ahead,” I reasoned with a touch of self-conscious sarcasm.
“Yes, I’ll be coming out way ahead with the 4 carat peach sapphire,” he teased me.
“Really, that’s just more a comment on how inflated diamond prices are,” I added, “but it’s still a really good deal.”

When we returned to the Galle Face for Christmas, I designed a simple setting for the peach sapphire with Fazal at his oak desk, two tiny three-point diamonds and a teardrop pigeon’s blood ruby from Burma on each side all bezel set in white gold. “You only get rubies this color red from Burma,” he explained as the three of us sifted through fifty teardrop rubies looking for the perfect pair, “Nowhere else. All other rubies are really more like pink sapphires, both rubies and sapphires are the same mineral, you know, Corundum, Aluminium Oxide,” He continued, sketching the cubic crystal structure of the mineral on a scratch sheet of paper on the green blotter of his desk. “Corundum naturally has no color, small amounts of metallic oxides give the color, titanium and iron in the lattice give the sapphire its blue color and Chromium gives the ruby its red color,” he finished, pointing to the joints in the lattice drawing with his pencil
“I remember reading about that before,” I replied nodding and finalizing my selection of accent stones.
“How has the drop in tourism affected your business?” Dan asked.
“It has been slow,” Fazal admitted. “But we always meet our targets. I will be thinking, oh, this is a terrible month, and then someone will come in and buy a 20,000 dollar stone.”
“What does a 20,000 dollar stone look like?” Dan asked.
“Well,” Fazal replied, reaching into a small wooden box behind his desk and pulling out an envelope, “This just came in from one of my cutters.” He replied and dropped a dark purplish pink rectangular stone the size of a small luggage-lock into Dan’s hand. The stone was massive, but I didn’t care for the color. I didn’t even think I would want a luggage-lock that color. “I don’t like the color,” I remarked. “Yes, it is a bit bluish,” Fazal conceded, “But if I heat the stone then all the blue will fade away and it will be a lovely ruby,” he finished smiling. I glanced back at the stone, unconvinced. “Where is it from?” I asked.
“Malawi,” Fazal replied.
“Who buys this sort of thing?” Dan asked, handing it back.
“Maybe Russians,” Fazal postulated, narrowing his eyes as if conjuring his future customer. “Maybe Russians with a box full of Pound notes.”

On our trip to Colombo for the Superbowl we picked up the ring the afternoon after the big game. I got a quick peek at it before Dan put the baby-blue box with white magnet bow deep into the void of his computer bag nicknamed “the sack of shit.”
“You know I’ll never find it in there,” I remarked.
“That’s the idea,” Dan replied gleefully.
“Ok, next thing,” I told Fazal, “Star sapphire for my mother, for her birthday. I want something she can clip onto her pearls,” I explained as we all moved down to the star sapphire part of the display case. I spent the next several hours digging around star sapphires of various colors and qualities as Fazal and Dan discussed how Dan’s war project was developing and Fazal’s decision to out-source stone cutting. “The cutters are from the village, so let them run their own businesses and cut the stones in the village,” Fazal began. “I used to have to pay for them to stay in Colombo, they would be coming to work by bus, and then I had to constantly inventory the stones,” he explained, shaking his head in remembered exhaustion. Since star sapphires only exhibit the star pattern when exposed to a concentrated light source, I checked the stones away from the focused overhead lights to make sure they would still look pretty in diffuse light. After picking the main stone Fazal and I drew up a design in yellow gold and selected a square white sapphire for an accent stone. “We’ll be back next month for this,” I instructed as we left the shop, once more well after sunset.

We picked up my mother’s pendant on our anniversary trip. Fazal was away on business and one of the other employees waited on us, resulting in a record short visit to Jewel Qudsi. While we were walking up the stairs back to the street I felt disoriented because it was still light out when we were leaving, the way you feel disoriented leaving a movie in the middle of the afternoon. “Do you want a Qudsi ring for, you know, future use?” I asked Dan as we walked back to the Galle Face. He thought for a moment,
“Yeah, I think that would be nice,” he replied.
“Well, let’s look at some designs on the web, and when we come back in April for my birthday we can talk it over with Fazal,” I suggested.
“That sounds good,” Dan replied as we entered the open-air lobby of the Classic side of the Galle Face.

Having done some research on www.Weddingbands.com, we descended into Jewel Qudsi on the evening of April 20th to design a ring for Dan. I knew that he wanted a two-tone ring and that he wanted to incorporate a few, small, cornflower-blue sapphires. Fazal had some more pictures for Dan to go over as we sat around his desk and he was quickly drawn to a white gold ring with a strip of yellow gold circumnavigating the band at its equator. “And what if we put three little sapphires in the strip of gold?” Dan asked tentatively.
“That would be beautiful!” I exclaimed.
“That would be really nice,” Fazal replied, nodding contemplatively. Fazal called for the container of small cornflower-blue square-cut sapphires to be brought out for Dan to pick his stones. As Dan began to sort though the thirty tiny stones with the tweezers, I looked at Fazal and realized that he didn’t look Sinhala or Tamil. I recalled that our friend Malik had told us once that his family was from Saudi in the distant past and his father had been an Imam. “Fazal,” I began “Where is your family from?” I asked.
“Originally?” he asked.
“Yes, originally,” I replied.
“My family is from Yemen,” he answered, leaning back in his chair. “I researched this. My family came from Yemen nine generations ago. They were builders. My family built the Colombo Museum for the British. They didn’t want any payment. The British asked, ‘what can we do for you?’ and they replied ‘close the museum on Fridays.’ The Colombo Museum is still closed on Fridays to this day. The Sinhala, they tried to change it, but they could not.” He added with a satisfied smile.
“But what language do you speak in the home?” I asked.
“We speak Tamil,” Fazal replied, “But it is our own dialect,”
“Really,” Dan remarked in surprise, looking up from the stones.
“Yes, it is a different dialect,” Fazal confirmed. “My mother even read Tamil in Arabic script.”
“Why do most Muslim families speak Tamil in the home and not Sinhala?” I asked.
“When the Arab traders traveled from the Middle East they settled in India and Sri Lanka as well,” Fazal began. “The Hindu and Buddhist merchants didn’t travel, so they used Muslim shipping companies. The Muslims in India married Tamil women and translated the Koran in to Tamil written in Arabic script. Tamil was the language of trade and also the language of the Koran for this area.”
“Have you gone back to Yemen?” I asked.
“I did go back and I took my family,” Fazal replied. “Yemen, is very poor,” he commented, frowning. I knew that Yemen was poor, but if a Sri Lankan was saying that Yemen was very poor, “then it must be really poor,” I reasoned internally.
“It was terrible,” he continued, “Everyone was walking around with a big cheek full of that stuff they chew, that qat, and my kids were freaking out,” he trailed off. I smiled at his use of the American idiom “freaking out.”
“Well, your kids should be thankful to great-great-great granddad Fazal for getting on a boat and coming to Sri Lanka,” I joked and Fazal laughed.
“Qat is supposed to be pretty gross,” Dan commented, having selected his three stones.
“I tried it,” Fazal answered. “I didn’t think too much of it,” he shrugged while putting Dan’s stones into an envelope.
“I think it needs to build up in your system, you have to chew it all day,” Dan added.
“Maybe that’s it,” Fazal commented thoughtfully, “I just really tried one mouthful,” he finished as another established customer entered the shop. The other men behind the loose stones counter would take care of run-of-the-mill customers while Fazal talked to the regulars at his desk. While we were picking out stones they had helped several customers. I could tell that the most recent customer was a regular because she looked past the shop boys and around the corner for Fazal.
“Well, we’ve got to get going to dinner,” I said, getting up. I could sense that it was time for his next customer. “We’ll be back to get this ring right before we leave the country in May,” I added. Fazal stood up to say good-bye and we all shook hands before Dan and I re-ascended to the dark Colombo street and headed back to Nihonbashi for dinner.