Three Years in Jaipur

I was twenty-eight when I got on a plane to Jaipur. I had been drawing my whole life, I had grown up watching my father work with his hands, and I had no idea how a piece of jewelry actually gets made.

I stayed three years.

The market teaches before anyone speaks

Jaipur runs on stones. Not in a showroom sense, in a street sense. Men sit in doorways with folded paper packets, tipping stones onto a palm, arguing over a grade, folding the paper again. Nothing is behind glass. The whole trade happens in the open, in the noise, in the dust.

Nobody teaches you there in the way you might expect. You sit, you watch, and after a few months you start noticing that the man across from you rejected a stone in under a second and you cannot say why. Another few months and you can. That is the whole curriculum.

What I learned about stones

The most useful thing I took from those years was a habit, not a technique: look at what the stone actually is before deciding what you want from it.

The trade sorts stones into good and bad, and the sorting is mostly about uniformity. A stone that matches the others in its parcel is worth more than one that does not. That makes sense if you are producing two hundred identical rings. It makes very little sense if you are making one.

I spent a lot of time in the rejected piles. Stones with visible inclusions, colours that shifted from one end to the other, pearls that had grown into shapes nobody could match to a partner. They were cheaper, and to my eye they were more interesting, and I could not understand why those two facts sat together.

I still cannot. It is the reason my studio looks the way it does.

Hands

The workshops were the other half of it. Benches lined up, men who had been setting stones since they were boys, doing in four minutes what would take me an hour and still come out worse.

I learned to carve wax there. I learned that you can feel when a setting is wrong before you can see it. I learned that speed is what happens after twenty years, not something you can decide to have.

And I learned to work in that heat, which is its own skill.

Coming back

I returned to Jerusalem in my early thirties and spent the next eleven years as head designer at a jewelry house, drawing pieces that other people's hands finished. In 2014 I opened my own studio, and for the first time the drawing and the making were the same job again.

I am fifty-four now. My studio is a few minutes from the covered market in the Old City, where men still sit in doorways selling from folded paper, in a language I understand better than the one I heard in Jaipur.

Some days it is a shorter trip back than I expected.