Bling

We got these in Jaiselmer. Vinod took us down a narrow alley, a cow, and crapping time, kids shitting in the gutter, then through a passageway into a house. A woman came out of a door with her hair uncovered, saw us and turned back, covering her head. We went upstairs to a big room and the three silversmith brothers. The chief was interested in J’s gold bead necklace, where had she got it, what was its history. He borrowed it and photgraphed it in detail with his phone. It was the filligree work he was interested in.
The silver filigree shoulder bag is J’s. You could keep a small handkerchief in it and maybe a key. It was made by the silversmiths’ grandfather, and the photo doesn’t show how fine and complex the work is. It is unambiguously lovely, a masterpiece.
I chose the bowl. I knew it wasn’t jade, the guy told me it was malachite and he seemed uninterested in it, as against the amber and silver bowls he wanted to sell. But in my mind it had already become an antiquity, I could see it in a glass case in the Silk Road exhibition at the British Museum. It was pretty filthy, and maybe it had lain in the sands of the Thar desert for centuries. Anyway I like that combination of green silver and red.
Later I read about the fake antiques industry in Iraq, and now I think the bowl is a fake - though a fake what I’m not sure - the semi-precious stones are just reddish pebbles, the malachite has cracks in it and the silver maybe isn’t even silver. It’s like a five dollar Rolex. Except that five dollar Rolexes are really good. They ask rude questions about five thousand dollar Rolexes. My bowl doesn’t ask those sorts of questions. Even so, trash as it may be, it still has something about it.