Mayhem in Kataragama

The day we arrived in Sri Lanka, February 14th, Valentines Day, we heard news that some crazy Iranians accidentally blew the roof off their rented house in Bangkok fifteen minutes from our house with C4. Two guys ran out and one was caught. Then another staggered out, dazed and confused, he tried to catch a cab, but nobody would stop, so he lobbed a grenade at a taxi which exploded. The police came and he threw another grenade at them which bounced off a tree, ricocheted back, and blew off both his legs. Silly terrorist.

The news in Sri Lanka was that a road crew digging a new highway hit pockets of fine sapphire crystals near Kataragama and the gold rush was on. Thousands of ants marched to the honey jar. Fights broke out between the locals and the interlopers. Broken arms, bloody noses. My partner along with a minister went to have a look. They managed to get 415 ct.of glassy blue crystal before the army came in with rifles.

Today we drove back to Kataragama from Balangoda. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also put a man on the moon. We wanted to see the area of Thammannawa where the crystal came from. My wife and I as foreigners were not permitted to enter, and by recent court order our Sri Lankan friends found that neither were they.

All of the hotels in the area were full, from five star to no star, there was no accommodation. However, our friend, who is the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the Maldives, has a beach bungalow nearby Yala National Park, just a few kilometers from Kataragama. Yala has the largest number of wild leopards per land mass in the world.

Fifty meters from our friend's door is the warm Indian Ocean with shell covered white beaches. I found a cowerie shell with the top missing. All that was left was the bottom opening which looked like a toothy smile. Our friend unfortunately is away in the Maldives where they are having a coup after removing the president at gun point.

The bungalow is very funky with matching deer heads outside flanking the chairs on the verandah hung with kerosine lanterns and a monkey skull impaled on one long horn. The window slats are painted blue, yellow, red and green stripes. There is a black carpet of flies at my feet and needless to say the wife is not thrilled. The wind rips off the ocean but flies are tenacious.

Some of the boys walked to a local fishing village and bought 6 kilos of lobster. One friend won't eat them because he saw them crawling around on the porch. We drove back around sunset in a three vehicle caravan of high speed land rovers on thin roads through tiny villages when suddenly a pebble flew off the tire ahead at about 140 kilometers per hour, hit our windshield and cracked it. My partner slowed down and we lost the convoy.

"Anybody got a sapphire crystal" I asked. A strange question except with this group as, naturally, everyone did. I took one sharp crystal from Manju, got out and cut a circle around the crack to keep it from spreading. Unfortunately it didn't work as the glass was laminated and the crack increased like a spider web.

Things heated up in Kataragama as the court order was still in place barring entry to everyone. The government Gem Authority had the idea to auction off small parcels of land but that fell apart quickly. Our partner went out again with the minister who is from that area, and has clout. Yesterday the army was overwhelmed and withdrew. 25,000 people streamed in to the area and they expect that number to double. An article was published Thursday February 16th in a newspaper called "Lanka Truth" regarding our friend the minister titled "Wijeyamuni Soysa declares war to plunder a gem mine". The article goes on to say that he is infamous for gem rackets and is engaged in illegal gem mining in the area. Apparently the newspaper is communist.

Back in Balangoda, the minister lay outside in a hammock tethered to palm trees with his servant fluffing his pillow. My partner was sitting in a chair on top of a grassy knoll. I came out to join them, sat down sideways in another hammock and fell out on my back with my legs sticking straight up in the air. A moment to relish.

This morning my wife is putting on her makeup when a scowling fang baring macaque came to the open door upstairs, raising his intimidating eyebrows, and threatened to come in. She screamed and I chased him off. Got to get a baseball bat. Now at dusk the downstairs living room is filled with flying termites. The two German shepherds, Blackie and Bulla run around snapping at the air. If you google attractions in Balangoda, you will find there are none. No museums, no movie theaters, not even a damn bar. Each buffalo here seems to be assigned one and only egret as a personal valet to pick off ticks and other undesirables.


The government land auction for potentially gem bearing land is back on for tomorrow February 24th. My partner along with many of the major gem players will attend. The 49 allocated plots were auctioned off each being about 3,000 sq feet, some plots sold for more than $200,000 each. The plot that my partner bought was supposedly the lot where the land was first removed for the road, and the original blue crystal was found. The gem authority sold all the plots for a total of $2,700,000 dollars.

Now we wait and see if there is anything actually there. Since there is no source for water, the soil all must be moved to a place where it can be washed. We will know in a few weeks what if anything is found.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, how easily it rolls off the tongue. Ceylon until 1972, before that Taprobane and also Serendib where the word serendipity comes from, meaning to find something wonderful unexpectedly.

Sri Lanka is truly a magical island. Hanging like a baroque pearl at the bottom of India. To the West is the Arabian Sea, to the East, the Indian ocean, and to the South the first land mass one would encounter is Antarctica.
In the south-central part of the country are the towns of Balangoda, Pelmadula and Ratnapura, literally Gem City. All are geologically rich gem areas yielding hexagonal crystals of sapphire in every color, stars, catseyes, zircons, spinel and garnets.

Much of this gem crystal has been washed away from the primary sources by millions of years of monsoon rains into rivers which, over the course of time, have shifted direction and left the alluvial water tumbled stones in gem bearing gravels called illam which are the sedimentary gem gravels. From this illam stones are mined.

King Solomon was said to have gotten his gems here as he wooed the Queen of Sheba. Marco Polo describes this gem land in his travels. Sinbad the Sailor was lifted high into the air by a giant bird called the Roc which left him in a deep valley with walls so steep he could not escape. This valley was filled with rubies. Gem merchants threw fresh meat into this valley where no man had ever set foot. The meat rolls over the precious stones which stick to them. Eagles pounce on the meat and carry it away in their claws to their nests. The merchants run to the nests, frighten away the eagles and collect the rubies.

Sinbad thought that he would never get out of this valley, but then he had an idea. He gathered the biggest rubies and filled his pockets. He went to the largest piece of meat in the valley and tied himself to it. An eagle came, picked up that meat in his strong claws and took him away to the mountain top and left Sinbad in his nest. Sinbad escaped the eagle's nest and in this way made himself rich.

Sri Lanka has an abundance of gems. In fact, Sri Lanka has the highest density of gems (compared to its landmass) in the world.

Earlier this year in August, I decided that I should get back into doing one of the few things I was really good at, gems. We traveled back to Sri Lanka to re-establish old contacts and become involved again in the business.

I first came to Sri Lanka in 1980 and met a very influential man and his father, both of whom were land owners and gem miners. At that time the influential man's son was an 8 year old boy in short pants. The grandfather built a beautiful ginger bread house with carved eves and moldings high in the foggy hills of Balangoda in 1924. Human bones of Homo Habilis found in caves near here prove that Balangoda has been inhabited for 70,000 years.

I was in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka in July 1983. In the north of the island near Jaffna, a Hindu Tamil girl had apparently been raped by a Buddhist Singalese soldier.
In reprisal, a convoy of Singalese soldiers was ambushed and 13 were killed. In revenge, the Singalese went on a killing rampage in Colombo, hacking Tamils dead in the streets, burning Tamil businesses, some of which had employed them. I saw a bus which had been petrol bombed with people at the windows screaming in flames. Horrible. That smell of burning flesh never leaves your nostrils.

The killing spree went on unabated for 4 days and nights without intervention. This was the beginning of a civil war which would last 26 years and claim at least 100,000 lives. The war was only ended in 2009.

The young son had moved his family away to Australia after a bomb had exploded near his family. They left for a few years to escape the violence and had only just moved back to Sri Lanka.
So, when I came back here to re-establish myself in the gem trade, the timing could not have been better.

The cut and polished end of the gem business had lost its allure for me. The stones that I was interested in, the really fine natural fantastic beauties that I loved buying and selling had become difficult to obtain and prices doubled and redoubled with new players coming into the market such as the Indians and Chinese flush with cash. Demand far out-striped supply.

Meeting the younger son's children, I had now known the family for 4 generations, and was in a sense a part of it.

Mining is exciting. It is the most exciting aspect of the business. You never know what the earth will release to you. Much of mining is luck, and my luck has always come from the earth.

The son introduced us to two of his partners from the nearby town of Pelmadula. They were young men of great luck who had uncovered 10 million dollars worth of sapphire crystals when they had excavated the foundations of their house.

In September, we all traveled together to Hong Kong for the Gem Show to view stones and develop a common gem language of color, beauty and what constitutes value. The slightest difference of hue can mean thousands of dollars of value and spell the difference between success and failure.

In October, my wife and I had been in Japan and only returned to Thailand in early November when Bangkok and our house was threatened by floods. Our house manager and other friends laid sand bags, as did most businesses and residences in central Bangkok to protect from possible floods, which had already inundated outer Bangkok with water up to 2 or 3 meters. By late November central Bangkok had been spared from the worst, and by early December we removed the sand bags to the shed, and returned to Sri Lanka.

December 10th 2011.

We woke up to the sounds of Buddhist chanting, rhythmic and continuous from somewhere far below the hills we were on top of in Balangoda. I pushed the mosquito net open and looked at the river down below which was swollen from yesterday's rains. From the verandah we are surrounded by fruit trees, jackfruit, guava, mango, and bananas. Birds flit through the branches like living jewels, orange, yellow and red. Some birds are so thick and fluffy as if covered in fur rather than feathers. Groups of macaques come to forage fearlessly and stare back at us. Then the drums begin. It is a full moon tonight and there will be an eclipse.

The dogs came in tonight after being outside by the river. Small pools of blood glistened on the white tile floor where thick grey leeches which had attached themselves to their paws, inch across the floor and looked for a way back to the foliage. A gecko on the ceiling, walking upside down, lunged at a luminous firefly but missed.

We drove out of Balangoda in the Landrover where many prehistoric monitor lizards scampered into the jungle. A long cobra slithered away. We stopped near a water fall below which were narrow terraced mud rice fields which we slowly walked over toward a river. Occasionally crystals of sapphire, blues, yellows, pinks, violets and the rare orange could be found on the banks of this river after heavy rains.

Huge circular wrinkled indentations showed where wild elephants came to forage at night. The miners had built a rather large concrete box shaped structure with a pit in the center which they jumped into and hid when challenged by marauding elephants. When the elephants trundled back into the forest, the miners raised themselves out of the pit with the help of over hanging branches.

Back in Balangoda, I showed my partner an old Dutch coin that I kept in the coin pouch of my thick ostrich skin wallet. I bought the coin in Colombo and it was dated 1791 during the time when the Dutch occupied Ceylon. My partner said that his father had dug up a clay pot with many coins like this and he wanted to show them to me. From the safe he brought out a bag weighing several kilos which he poured out jingling on to the table. They were all dated from the early 1700's to the late 1700's, the newest dated 1789. Many were covered with a green patina so thick that the dates couldn't even be read.

Late in the afternoon the marauding band of macaques swing through the trees, jump on the verandah upstairs and try and force open the doors of our bedroom. The sky explodes with thunder and rain as black as steel and make over ripe jackfruit, thorny and rotten red at the stem, drop to the ground with a mushy thud like swollen basketballs.

Early the next morning I noticed that there had been a migration of thousands of pure white egrets which had all landed together about a kilometer from here. Looking out at them, it was as if the jungle had been covered with snow.

A Man of His Word

Dennis Rosner was born in Rangoon in 1920 of German immigrant parents who were dairy farmers from the time of King Mindon (1853-1878). Few men have had such an impact on the Kachin State as Rosner. He was a farmer who introduced new crops to the state; he was a British soldier who led his troops into battle against the Japanese; and a teacher who taught thousands of students the English language. I have met young people from all part of Burma who speak flawless English because of his teaching, many of whom became teachers themselves.

In 1941 Rosner was commissioned in the British Army at Meiktila, south of Mandalay, in central Burma. That year the Japanese took Myitkyina, and by 1942 they controlled much of the territory in the Kachin State. At that time Rosner and 25 other officers were sent to Putao, where thousands of civilians were leaving for India to escape the war. The commander of Rosner's unit was a major H.N Stevenson, and he sent twenty of the officers west to India with provisions and money for other units. Trekking through the Hukawang Valley, the Naga Hills, and the Ledo Road, nineteen of the twenty died of cholera and the twentieth officer was court-martialed for desertion. Rosner and five others had been ordered to stay behind near Sumprabum.

Rosner was 22 years old in 1942, and his major said that they had better learn the Jinghpaw language because they didn't know how long they would be in the area. Rosner learned Jinghpaw and was promoted to captain, and all of the land from Sumprabum to the Naga hills fell under his command.

Rosner's scouts informed him that 150 Japanese were coming to attack his unit of fourteen men and himself, so they went with Bren guns to Kumon Pass in the Kumon Range and selected a spot above where the Japanese would approach. They dug trenches, aiming the brens in a crossfire ambush. suddenly, down from the mountains, came three Jinghpaw girls of fourteen, fifteen and seventeen years old. Rosner asked them where they were going, and they answered that they were going to get salt.

"You can't go. There are Japanese coming up the valley", Rosner said.
"Who are the Japanese?" the girls asked.
"they are our enemies".
"They are just people", the girls replied. "There is no danger from people".
"They will come and shoot us and you".
"Why? we haven't done anything to them".
"If you aren't afraid of the Japanese, there are tigers". One of Rosner's men had previously been dragged away by a tiger. His companion had shot the beast, but also killed the man.

The girls said, "We are not afraid of tigers. We will chop the tiger with our machete. Let us go and get salt".
"There are wild elephants", Rosner said.
"Elephants! We are used to elephants. We will climb a tree until they go away".
"Not afraid of the Japanese, not afraid of tigers or elephants..........
you come back tomorrow and I'll give you all the salt you want".

The girls went back to their village, and soon after that, Rosner and his men saw the Japanese coming up the valley with their provisions on two elephants and on mules. He instructed his men not to shoot the elephants. When the Japanese got to within meters of the ambush point, Rosner and his men opened fire, killing 85 of them in the first attack. The Japanese withdrew and Rosner's unit captured the elephants and went back to camp. Later, he was inside his tent making his report when the three girls arrived, asking for their salt.

"Sir, those three girls are here and they want salt", one of his men informed him.
'Yes, yes, give them all they want", Rosner replied.

Next day, the girls returned.

"Sir, those three girls are here again".
"Why?" Rosner asked, annoyed. "Do they want more salt? Didn't you give them their salt?'.
"No sir, it's not that. They have brought presents-baskets of pumpkins, eggs, rice cucumbers, and beer".
"Oh, well, ask them to come to come into the tent", Rosner said.

It struck him that these girls were both grateful and brave. The seventeen-year- old who was leading them wasn't afraid of the Japanese, nor of tigers or elephants. Rosner told his sergeant to tell her parents to come along and see him.

Two days later, a half dozen members of the girl's family came to inquire what was happening. Rosner told them that he wanted to marry her.

No, he was told. No white man had ever married a Kachin. "No, you will leave her". they protested.
"No", Rosner insisted. "I promise that I will stay. I will marry her for life".

The family discussed the proposal and said that if he married her, he would have to pay double the bride price. The dowry was to be so many buffalo, Chinese long coats, gongs, and guns.

"I haven't got buffalo or gongs, but I can give you as many guns as you want, and I can give you money", Rosner told them.

Rosner was paid 900 rupees per month as a captain, and that had not been paid in a year. His troops received sixteen rupees per month. Over the radio he asked to draw his money, and the silver rupees were airdropped by parachute. In 1943 Rosner paid 7,000 rupees for his bride. Buffaloes and pigs were sacrificed for the ceremony, and Rosner was married.

In 1948, at Burmese independence, Rosner was given the choice of going back to England or staying and becoming a Burmese citizen. He chose to stay. In 1950 he began to teach English at St. Columban's in Myitkyina.

One day he was on his bicycle when he met an Indian man who asked him if he wanted to buy a plot of land. The Indian took him to the land, which was overgrown with bushes.
Rosner asked how much, and the Indian asked for 300 rupees.
"I'll give you 250", Rosner replied.

The Indian agreed, and after they had signed the papers, Rosner asked the man why he had sold so cheaply.

"I have your money and you have my land, so I'll tell you the truth, and please don't get angry", the Indian replied. "Every night, three Japanese soldiers march by my window with their long swords dragging on the ground".

Rosner wasn't afraid of ghosts, and began to clear the land. Underneath the overgrown bushes he found bomb craters three meters deep. During the war the Americans had held Myitkyina's airfield and the Japanese had held the town. Rosner's land was in between the two, where many bombs had fallen. Clearing the land, he dug up 21 skeletons, which he gathered together and buried in one grave near a bamboo grove at the back of his land.

When I visited Dennis, he was growing strawberries, which he had introduced from Maymyo, near Mandalay; also many kinds of vegetables and orchids. I brought him tomato seeds from my father's own garden, which would yield him fruit of more than a pound each. He planted them the very next day.

Dennis spoke fluent Jinghpaw, English, German, and Burmese. He had twelve children, all of whom he delivered himself after his wife had prepared boiling water and laid down to give birth. His last two were twins. At each birth, his wife told him to measure the baby's umbilical cord to its knee, cut it with a sliver of bamboo, tie the end, and dip it in saffron powder with ground nutmeg paste and Kachin liquor.

Dennis had 33 grandchildren, 26 of whom lived with him on his productive farm. Of the twelve children and 33 grandchildren, all looked like Jinghpaw, except one, a granddaughter, who looked like Dennis-a lovely little girl with curly blonde hair and blue eyes.

At the age of 77, Dennis still rode his bicycle every day from his farm into Myitkyina town, wearing his old straw hat, to tutor his students in English, to say a prayer at the church, and to sit down for a welcome cup of tea in one of the teahouses.

To The Virtue of a Prostitute

Delicious strumpet. Most worthy and most ancient profession, I salute you. Your perfume lingers on my fingers. I have been pondering your fortitude, self-denial, justice, ethics, simplicity and excellence since lately, whores form my most intimate circle of friends and are the class of people with whom I generally choose to spend my precious time, attracted as I am by the unmistakable knowledge of what the bargain requires.

True, with a harlot there can be few conversations and discussions of Shakespeare or of macro-economic trends in disadvantaged countries of sub-saharan Africa or of the relative merits of nuclear versus neutron bomb superiority in a scenario of mutually-assured destruction, but these subjects make me puke, and anyway, I would much rather know what that girl, shifting her ass on that bar stool needs to spread her legs.

Prostitute: A woman willing to have sexual relations with men for money.
If that definition is reliable, then by that same definition, do not most women prostitute themselves, the only question being one of price? To paraphrase what George Bernard Shaw is said to have said to a woman sitting next to him at a dinner party:
"Madame, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?".
"Humm, a million dollars, yeah, I guess I would".
"Well then, would you sleep with me for ten dollars?".
"Sir, what kind of a woman do you take me for?".
"Madame, what kind of woman you are has already been established; what remains is just to agree on a price".

Jackie O says to Ari, supine on her yacht chair, "I'm a former First Lady, the nearest a person can rise to royalty in these United States of America. I am beautiful and a millionaire in my own right, perhaps the most desirable woman in the world, but ok, Ari, I will sleep with you, your ugly Greek, simian ass, for say, twenty million in Switzerland, and a bag of large diamonds".

Does that make Jackie a whore?

How about the girl next door in the blue gingham dress, which matches her sparkling eyes, and the golden corn-silk hair, pursed lips in the shape of a heart, who wouldn't let anyone near her 'secret place' and would probably deny even having one if somebody asked her, who winced when she had to touch it herself. She says nothing, but blushes red, but you know for certain that she will sleep with you at least once for forty years of marriage, emotional and financial support for life, and a degree of blindness on your part with regard to the cellulite that she will develop, as thick as a callous on the backs of her monstrous thighs.
How different is this from the honesty of a girl who offers to screw you for a ten-dollar bill?

Sigmund Freud had it all wrong with his theory of penis envy. Jack told Jill that he would show her his if she would show him hers. After seeing his dangling penis and inspecting the empty space between her own legs, she runs home distraught and cries to her mother a lament of her envy for his penis and how she wants to have one. Her mother, raising Jill's skirt, points to the dimpled mound between her daughter's legs and says, "Don't worry dear, with just one of these, you can have as many of those as you want".
In the seventeenth chapter of "The Book of Revelation", from that worn out, dog-eared supermarket rag known as the bible, the Great Prostitute is described as a woman sitting astride a red beast that has wicked names written all over it. The beast has seven heads and ten horns. The woman is dressed in purple and scarlet and covered with gold ornaments, precious stones, and pearls. In her hand she holds a gold cup full of obscene and filthy things, the result of her immorality. On her forehead was written a name that has a secret meaning, "the mother of all prostitutes and perverts in the world".
Until then I had not known that I had a patron saint.

With all the vagaries concerning the good girl or the bad girl, we are told that the good girl will only let you have it after marriage and not before. The bad girl
will give it to you or anybody else she fancies because she likes it as much as you do. Good girl, bad girl, the blur is as indistinct as a grey cat in the fog. I prefer to skip the ambiguity and hypocrisy entirely and to shoot fish in a barrel. True, the sport is missing, but the conclusion is sure. Let the deluded fool who said "money can't buy you love", spend some time with me and I will prove his conjecture to be as absurd and ridiculous as that of the fool who proposed the existence of phlogiston and the auto-combustibility of matter.

A prostitute's genius resides in her meritorious response to the legions of men in need of love and understanding. She, the dedicated lover who reveals more truth and illuminates more hidden chambers in the dark hearts of men than all the libraries of psychiatry.

Two Legs Are Better Than One

The ancient, abandoned capital of Pagan had flourished from about the ninth century until-as one theory goes-the armies of Kublai Khan overran the city and its one million inhabitants for not paying tribute, thus causing the entire population to flee. Whatever the true reason for Pagan's demise, the city's thousands of magnificent temples, stupas, and pagodas were left to stand abandoned, silently and intact, for many centuries. The huge city-situated on a plain as flat as a drum, and bordered by the gigantic Irrawaddy River on one side, and mountains on the other-remains one of the great wonders of the world.
I left Taunggyi in the Shan State heading for Pagan. There were at least 25 people crammed into every space of the truck. People hacked out the portals and they smoked nonstop, next to the gasoline drums; babies, held by their mothers, pissed from the tailgate and it flew back into our faces; and old ladies leaned on me and dug their bony elbows into my ribs. My ass felt as red and swollen as a baboon's from sitting on the truck's wooden bench for ten hours. All the while the eyes drilled me, and there were probing questions.

"Are you a tourist? Where is your group?"

"Have you been to Burma before? How many times?"

"Where have you been? Where are you going?"

I finally arrived in Pagan. Nearly two years before, I had ordered a lacquered table in five different colors from the best shop in Pagan. the table would take a full year to make, so I'd left a deposit of 1,000 Kyats. The lacquer ware of Pagan, in all of its applications, has been produced for centuries. The extremely dry climate is ideal for the drying processes, which must be undertaken for every layer of lacquer applied. Lacquer can be painted on teak furniture, applied to woven bamboo for utilitarian articles (such as monk's alms bowls), and even to woven horse hair that is so delicate and flexible that one side of a cup lacquered with it can be pressed to touch the opposite side. It can be etched and is waterproof. I paid the balance, and a final hand-polishing with petrified wood dust and teak charcoal made it gleam.

I invited a group of local friends out for dinner to feast on fresh river prawns.
One friend named Mya Mya had a sincere appreciation for Burmese arts and culture, and mentioned to me that several stone fragments of a Buddha statue dating from the late eleventh or early twelfth century had just been unearthed near the huge Sulamani Temple.

The next day Jizshe and I drove on a dirt track lined with cactus and thorny scrub brush that could only be eaten by goats. We plodded on along a rutted track until he pulled his sweat-glistening horse to a stop at a lonely enclosure within sight of Sulamani Temple. Here, a long wooden table was covered with chicken-wire to protect artifacts that had been unearthed from near the temple. A family lived near this enclosure, a husband and wife with two daughters, whose sold job was to guard the relics. Their house was more like a temporary shelter built of bamboo.

As I leaned forward to get a better look at the massive fragment of the Buddha's head-classic, with fine lines and curves, indicating that it was from the twelfth century-I noticed a girl with a radiant smile standing beside me. When I drew back to look at her, I saw that she used a crutch and was missing her left leg below the knee. I asked Jizshe to ask the family how this had happened, and they said she had simply been born that way. By the glow of her smile I could see that in no way did she see her condition as any particular impediment.

Hkay Ti Win was twelve years old and had huge sparkling eyes. Something in her spirit inspired me. So many people with no handicaps defeat themselves in life, while this girl, hobbling along on one leg, was filled with hope. I took some pictures of her, some with the Canon and others with the Polaroid, which I gave to her. She was attending school and was obviously a bright student. I could clearly see her family's love for her, as they dressed her in the best cloths they could afford, and her sister tied ribbons in her hair.

One of my dearest friends in Rangoon, then eighty years old, was Dr. Maung Maung Taik, who was the chief forensic pathologist in Burma. He estimated that he had conducted over 30,000 autopsies, in various cases, including one on his own son, who had died of a drug overdose years before, I couldn't even imagine a man conducting an autopsy on his own son! He had also performed the autopsy on General Aung San, Aung San Su Kyi's father, after he was assassinated in July 1947. Dr. Taik had trained hundreds, perhaps thousands, of doctors, and he was looked upon with the great respect that only a lifetime of service can merit. He was also a noted golfer, who still played several rounds a week. He used to play with General Ne Win, who in his paranoia, wore a metal helmet, even on the course, as he expected to be shot by his political enemies.

Dr. Taik drank a few glasses of single-malt whiskey every day, and was one of the best cooks I know. He probably spoke better English than me, and during my visits we often debated the origins of words, consulting a dog-eared dictionary several inches thick. He would often invite me over for a dinner, and during the frequent electrical blackouts in Rangoon, would start up his 100-year-old gramophone with a hand crank, and we would listen to thick scratchy records.

The beauty of the statue fragments I had seen in Pagan remained in my head, but Hkay Ti Win's family were the guardians of the pieces and I could never have compromised them because the archaeological authorities in Pagan would certainly have known about them. When I got back to Rangoon, I mentioned to Dr. Taik that I had met a girl of twelve years old near the Sulamani Temple, and that she had been born without the lower half of one leg. he asked me where the leg ended, and I told him just below the knee. the joint at the knee functioned perfectly and the upper tibia and fibula were present, ending in a blunt stump.

Dr. Taik mentioned that one of his former students was now the superintendent of the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Rangoon, and that he would be happy to introduce me, as they could provide a prosthetic leg for young Hkay Ti Win.

I immediately arranged to have her and her mother come to Rangoon for treatment. It was the first time she had ever left rural Pagan. the journey took twenty hours because the bus blew five tires on the way.

The hospital had open windows and overhead fans that didn't work. In a courtyard scores of patients awaited new limbs or learned to use their new prosthetics with nurses assisting them. Hkay Ti Win, her mother, and I were shown into the superintendent's office, where Dr. Taik introduced us to Dr. Min Lwin Ramu, who examined Hkay Ti Win's leg.

Dr. Min Lwin Ramu said that they would be glad to provide the new prosthesis and the training to walk on two feet. They would also provide lodging for Hkay Ti Win and her mom, as well as food. Dr. Taik said that if I didn't have the money, it wasn't a problem since they would provide all of this for free. I said thank you, but no, I was willing to pay. the entire cost was only a few hundred dollars, which I happily paid.

I learned later that Hkay Ti Win and her mom had stayed at the hospital for a few weeks, and Dr. Taik and some of my Rangoon friends visited often, bringing cookies and magazines. The cast for a new limb was being transformed into a new leg, which she would be taught to use by the staff. With her new leg cast fitted, Hkay Ti Win was soon able to run and ride a bicycle for the first time in her life. I asked her for only one thing in return-the well-worn, well polished wooden crutch that her father had made for her. I have that crutch now, in Bangkok.

Salome

This youtube video was made by a friend who shot me painting, one time each week, for the 3 months it took to complete the painting.

The Death of an Orange Sapphire

It was virtually the last piece of fax paper to roll out of the machine, striped with red edges, the end of the roll.
Since we were moving to a new house the next day, there was no use to put a new roll in the machine now. We would have a new phone number, and there is no such thing as a tape-recorded referral number in Bangkok. My old friend Dharmaratna in Sri Lanka, had he sent the fax just a few hours later, would not have been able to reach me. It had been five years since I had seen him, although I had briefly been in Sri lanka a year before, in 1996, shortly after the Tamil Tigers had blown up the Central Bank in Colombo, killing scores of people. I had had a specific job on that trip to deliver money and to pick up stones, I called nobody.
The fax read: "Urgent, there is a rare gem piece with me. Please contact me or my son immediately". I called him right back and he laughed mirthfully as he described finding a large gem crystal with his own hands that very day. He said it was found in the rain-soaked earth of his mine near the mist-shrouded mountains of Balangoda in southern-central Sri Lanka.

It was an orange sapphire of over 400 carats-clean, bright, and a deep orange. He had not seen a piece like this in thirty years of mining, and I could sense the confidence he felt in his luck. Knowing how very rare such a piece was, I wanted to be a part of it. I flew to Sri Lanka.

When I arrived in Colombo, Dharmaratna came immediately to my hotel. In my room. I held the crystal, which was as large as a chicken egg, 425 carats in the rough, with three natural crystal faces from the original hexagonal six till evident, yet frosted as if alluvial and water worn. One side was a concoidal fracture that was glassy and allowed a transparent, if concave, window through which I could see into the interior of the stone. This view showed that the stone was quite clean with none of the inclusions such as 'strong silk' or 'liquid feathers' that could impede the passage of light and affect the brilliancy once it was cut. The few cracks that it did have on the surface did not seem to extend deeply into the crystal and could easily be removed by cutting. On one of the frosted faces there were three or four parellel lines of blue caused by minute traces of titanium remaining from when the stone was formed, but they were confined to the outer skin. The stone told an interesting geological history, confirming that it had not been treated in any way.
The color was tangerine orange. Although not the salmon reddish-orange of a sunset, called padparadscha, it was surely colored by a combination of chromium and a slight bit of iron. On first inspection, the shape of the crystal seemed to lend itself to a 'cushion' cut, losing a minimum of weight while retaining the maximum of brilliancy and luster. The table cut seemed obvious, being the largest surface and slightly rounded, leaving room for graceful 'shoulders' and crown facets. What could become the pavillion, the bottom of the stone, already had its angles present, as if they had been formed into the crystal by Nature.

The stone seemed like it was born to be a 'cushion'. However, cupping it between my thumb and fingers and viewing it down the side rather than through the open face, I could see I was wrong. The stone would display a richer orange and the body color could be multiplied by cutting the table in the opposite direction, although the yield would be smaller. I figured that it could be cut into a single piece of 120 to 140 carats. The potential was there to produce perhaps one of the world's largest orange sapphires.
Dharmaratna only dealt in rough stones, since he was a mine owner, but I thought that if a cutter could just open a face, I could better determine the ultimate color and clarity. This however presented new problems. The first was the problem of secrecy. Could we find a cutter who would not betray to other dealers the existence of such a rare stone? Another problem was that after the stone had been opened, Dharmaratna would see clearly what the stone would become, and would thus raise his price if it exceeded his expectations. Not opening the stone presented the danger of finding some inclusions that could not be seen in the rough. Buying rough stones is a gamble, but uncut is where the big profit is, as well as the big loss.
I decided it best to bring a buyer here to see the stone himself, in the rough, and have him decide what to do. the questions which remained were how large, how clean, how brilliant, and how much.      

Enter the buyers:

Teddy Doyle, and Australian  ex-SAS commando, married to the daughter of a high-ranking  Indonesian general, and Lee Wolf, who had a gem company in Bangkok called Pacific East Trading. Teddy had spent several years in Indonesia before moving to Thailand, where he met up with Lee. They decided to work together, and in 1997 formed a new company called the Opal Factory at Khao Yai, northeast of Bangkok, at the foot of some beautiful mountains near the entry to the national park there.
I found out later that the new company was financed by another Australian, a nerdy-looking guy named Max Green. Max, who I met several times at Pacific East Trading's office on Convent Road in Bangkok, turned out to have looted up to 20 million dollars from trust funds under his management. Of that sum, 10 million dollars was said to have been given to Teddy and Lee to run Pacific East Trading, the Opal Factory, and to purchase stones.
All of the stone-cutters and polishers at the Opal Factory were handicapped men and women in wheelchairs, and Paul Elmer, the manager, built modified three-wheeled motorcycles for each of them to ride to and from work. Teddy and Lee were very generous. As a practical joke, Teddy had imported real Australian road signs warning drivers of kangaroos, and put them up on signposts on the country roads around the Opal Factory and the national park. The local authorities never even noticed, and the signs weren't removed. Unsuspecting visitors to the area were fooled into thinking that wild kangaroos were hopping around this part of upcountry Thailand. For all I know, the signs are still there.
I called Lee from Colombo, and described the orange sapphire. Of course he was interested, he said, and was prepared to fly to Sri Lanka straight away to purchase the stone for cash.
Lee had his first chance to see the stone, and offered 25,000 dollars, eventually raising the bid to 40,000 after the first round of negotiation. Dharmaratna must have been disappointed with this bid, as he returned to Balangoda and called me later that afternoon, saying that he had found a buyer for 70,000. I asked him to return to Colombo immediately and to bring the stone with him. He asked me if there was really a reason to return, as the trip was a three-hour drive. I assured him that there was.
Calling him back again, he told me that a buyer in Ratnapura had offered him 90,000. Maybe he was bluffing, trying to drive up his price, but he knew we had cash and that we were scheduled to leave soon. His reluctance to return convinced me that he really did have that offer. I knew that if we did not get him back soon, the stone would be bid up beyond the gamble that we were willing to take.
Dharmaratna returned later that evening and Lee canceled his return flight to Bangkok. For four hours we negotiated back and forth and, exasperated, Lee finally bought the stone for an even 100,000 dollars. Later in a Chinese restaurant out of Lee's sight, Dharmaratna gave me 10,000 dollars.
What would happen now depended on what was inherent in the stone and the skill of the cutter.
                                                                           *
Lee and I returned  to Bangkok, where he and Teddy would decide what to do with the rough. They had paid for it, it was their stone and their decision.
Lee, who is not a gemologist, was convinced by somebody that the orange color could be enhanced by burning.
Burning a stone at a low temperature to remove 'silk' or to improve the brilliancy or color can be a way of completing Nature's process. It can also be a dangerous operation with unpredictable results. I cautioned them and said that, as it was, the stone would yield a flawless gem of over 100 carats and would be perhaps the finest of its kind in the world. My advice was ignored and they burned the stone.

The result was that the rich tangerine-orange was burned out, and what remained was a golden yellow-lemon. Rather than having a fabulous gem worth over a million dollars, they now had at best a 50,000 dollar stone.
Worse was to come later.
In the meantime, I joined up with a couple of Japanese gem-dealers to assist them in their buying. We bought large, sometimes  100 kilo boulders of jadeite, in Burma. These huge white-and-green streaked monsters were shipped to the Opal Factory at Khao Yai to be hollow drilled into long tubular seals which the Japanese, having the characters of their names etched in the bottoms, use to sign legal documents for real estate and banking transactions. They are called hanko. Some had a very fine medium emerald green color.

One afternoon in March 1998, I was with Teddy, waiting for a new batch of hanko to be polished by his workers, when his mobil phone rang. Max Green was dead. He had been murdered in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in room 511 of the Sofitel Cambodiana. It was a very professional job. The hallway cameras had either been disabled or the film removed.Whoever had murdered Max was extremely angry. Stealing 20 million dollars would make many people angry. Max's head had been smashed completely. His gold Cartier watch, his cash, passport, credit cards were still in the room. Only his laptop was missing. He was so disfigured that he could only be identified by dental records. Later in Melbourne, by court order, he was exhumed to prove it actually was him. It was.

So who killed Max Green? Who knows?  I can say for sure that it was not Teddy Doyle, as the Australian press had suggested. I know because I was with Teddy at Khao Yai when Max was murdered in Cambodia.
After Max's death, the money dried up, and the businesses were closed. Teddy was said to have gone to England. Lee was said to have gone to Pattaya to manage a bar. I lost the share I would have received from that unrealized magnificent orange gem, but at least I did walk away with 10,000 bucks.