A European, like myself, who is able to spend a year with a Sri Lankan miner-family, will surely find her way back to her natural being. Making friends with spiders in the bathroom, containing myself when seeing rats running up and down along the tiles of the roof, even discovering a poisonous snake in the kitchen is all part of life here. One learns to calm down and make a fire if she simply wants hot water for coffee.
Their lives are what I lived. I swept the courtyard, picked up the children from the school and kindergarten, did the wash in our little river. My life slowed down to match theirs.
Naturally, I had plenty of time to sit on the edge of the terrace gazing at the leftover stones in the courtyard. The team (kattie) can only sell the “perfect” gems for a decent price, so many of the beautiful crystals and stones end up thrown out, scatting the ground of the courtyard.
I started looking at them, then cleaning, collecting, and later slicing into pieces and polishing. Eventually I fell in love with the stones. I couldn’t, and haven’t been able to, get enough of their countless miracles, inclusions, and air bubbles. I saw all of them as wonderful surprises which told the stories of their birth, and sang the verses of their struggles.
Oh, you boring gems! How long can your perfect beauty delight me? The reality of your value is concealed in your unchanging lights. But these stones! The more I stare at them, the more of their faces they reveal. Many prints of pain shape them, endowing them with their unique colors, shapes and forms, in endless variety, just like people.
The news had spread in our village that I collect these gems, stones and crystals of “special beauties” and all the mining teams in the neighborhood have started to bring the stones which, for lack of a better word, they call Gabi-gall (gall means stone in Sinhala). Soon I get a huge rusty iron chest for my collection that is growing rapidly every day.
With the help of our gem polishing friend, Isanka, we start sorting, categorizing, and willing the stones into jewels. He taught me how to polish, while his brother, the late Niluka, helped to slice the crystals.
However, to get Serendib Gem Jewels we all had to wait 13 years.
