Rubies and Rucksacks
or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Trust My Gut
By Mel Christie
Bangkok, 1987
Smells of fish sauce and wok-charred stir fry wafted from street stalls as the tuk-tuk threaded through traffic. Our driver wrestled taxis, mopeds, and black-fumed buses. At one stop, we came alongside a tuk-tuk containing a large Western man. He lay limp in the back. A woman was screaming. She was German.
“He has hit his head; he needs a doctor.” Blood spilled from the man’s forehead.
Somchai yelled something in Thai to our driver, and our tuk-tuk lurched forward.
We span away before I could properly see the damage.
The day had started benignly enough, when Somchai came up to me and introduced himself. It had been my third day in Bangkok, and until then, I had been alone. I was standing in a wide-open grassy area in Sanam Luang Park when he approached, no one around me, and I was facing away from the Grand Palace.
“Somchai,” he declared with an accented hint of BBC. I noticed that he was wearing a formal grey suit. He had a generous smile.
“Ren,” I returned. I couldn’t tell if I should be wary of him or trusting. “Well, Aren really, but people call me Ren.” Trust your intuition, I thought. He seems a good guy.
He asked me where I was from, and when I told him I was from London, he asked which team I supported. He was a Liverpool fan; he knew all the players. “Rush, Dalglish, spaghetti-legs Grobbelaar,” he announced.
He knew the players that a casual fan would not remember. “John Wark like Dalglish is Scottish, yes?”
He kicked an imaginary ball, but his kick looked awkward, and I could tell that he didn’t play football himself. “But old spaghetti-legs I like best. He’s from Zimbabwe. I want to visit his country.”
He knew my own team, Tottenham. “We’ll always beat you,” he teased.
We spent the better part of an hour talking football, after which I asked him, “So what do you do?”
“Rubies,” he replied. “And other jewels, but most of the time, I trade rubies.”
Somchai was the manager of a gem factory a couple of miles away. He asked where I was headed next. “Hong Kong,” I volunteered, and he described how travellers take gems to Hong Kong because you can get a better price for them there. “Most of the time, they take rubies, but other jewels, too, if you are experienced,” he said.
I had heard of the gold run and of the milk run, where travellers would transport goods between countries because they would not arouse the suspicion of customs. It was okay for Westerners to be dripping in gold as they crossed a border, but not a local. Other items, too, could be exchanged for profit, such as brand-name clothing, furs, and simple things that were not illegal but were simply not as available. Alternatively, there were the drug runs, but that was plain stupid. Instant death if you were caught bringing drugs into or out of Thailand.
So, rubies were not a big deal.
“Aren is not an English name,” he suggested.
“No, it’s Armenian,” I replied.
“Well Armenians know jewellery, so I will take you to my factory,” Somchai offered, and that was when he hailed the tuk-tuk to take me away from the traveller comforts of Banglamphu, to his headquarters in the Bang Rak district.
***
Somchai’s factory was clean, large, open plan—white walls and tables with magnifying glasses and gems laid out on lint cloths. Everyone was Thai, no foreigners, for it was truly a factory, without even a shop front.
He introduced me to one of his assistants, a young woman, light-skinned but with thick black hair, and she laid out a row of rubies for me to view. She picked one. “This one no good,” she suggested in a gentle, high-pitched, inflected accent, then she pointed at another from the row. “This okay.”
Somchai described how you could get three to four times the price in Hong Kong that you would get in Bangkok as long as you have the right ruby. Take four or five rubies, and you would make enough for your stay.
I hovered over the stand as the assistant held the red stone underneath the magnifying glass. She nestled it in the delicate palm of her hand, head and heart lines enlarged. Her stiff black hair smelled of musk. She pinched the fragile bead between the index finger and thumb of her other hand and brought it closer.
“See cloudy?” she informed me with a gracious smile. I nodded. She pulled another from the row and another until each was analysed as a candidate.
“Which you want?” she asked, and I looked again at the line-up before selecting the four largest.
We took a tour of the factory and drank tea with the workers on their break, and I listened to their limited English and the rattle of China cup lids, before Somchai suggested we wrap the rubies and get going. It was late in the day, and we were far from my hostel, but he agreed to drop me back and pay him there. It was the least he could do.
He ordered a black limousine to take us, and we drove back to Khao San Road, where I knew there was a money exchange. These were not the days of credit cards, unless it was an emergency, so the exchange was to be through travellers’ checks. We arrived at the western end of the street, the starting point of my arrival in Bangkok, and out I stepped from the limousine.
Backpackers were hanging around street-side trestle tables, rummaging through boxes of tie-dye head scarves or new tees, or picking out bootleg Paul Simon or Woodstock from rows of cassettes, the onward journey in mind. Bars and cafes were lighting up, and grills were steaming with satay-skewered chicken, pork and charred octopus.
I walked up to a small white box that was the kiosk and pulled out fifteen traveller checks in one hundred US denominations.
“I would like to cash these, please,” I asked the agent in the box and I held up the checks for her to see. Somchai and his assistant remained at the limousine. They did not pressure me.
I looked around nervously at the greasy-haired backpackers in faded jeans walking by, as I slipped each signed check under the glass partition.
Then I remembered what Bertie—the woman who had deserted me for Asia two years ago—had said about gold runs.
After she left, I’d consoled myself with a trip to Egypt, but Bertie was now finally back from Asia. We were sitting in her living room in Ealing and, at first, I thought we were reconciled. As she flicked through her photos, I asked about the people she met, and where she’d gone.
“Did you do a gold run?” I’d pressed her.
Did transporting rubies constitute a gold run?
“What was your route?” I yearned to go where she had gone.
Bertie, whose formal name was Beatrice Tomashevsky, had a black, centre-parted fringe which framed an angelic face dotted with light brown freckles under hazel eyes, and I loved her, even though she did not believe it.
Bertie scooched closer on the couch and spread out a pitted and crusty map on the coffee table in front of us.
However, instead of being distracted by Bertie, I was now distracted by her stories of Thailand, China, and Japan, and a new thought dawned on me: not only could you travel, you could travel indefinitely. Travel was the focus, and work was wherever you wished it to be. Bertie had done gold runs between Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Couldn’t I?
“Aim high,” she’d suggested with a cheeky grin, “It will be okay.”
“And Thailand’s always been on my bucket list,” I muttered. Immediately, I knew it was a weak comment, but Bertie jumped on it anyway.
“You’re telling me you’re half dead? Nonsense!” she spat. “It’s not about bucket lists! You want to really travel? Then go with your gut, buy a one-way ticket, and ignore the naysayers!”
She pulled her head back in disgust, before adding, “Even the naysayers in your head, Ren.”
While Bertie had been subsidising her wanderlust teaching English in Tokyo and Taipei, I had been grinding a data entry job in a business park north of London with a two-hour commute from a soot stained sublet in Elephant and Castle. And now she had thrown down the gauntlet.
The following week, I quit.
I phoned my parents to tell them that I would be travelling for a year, and they must have sensed my restlessness, because they didn’t kick up a fuss—All my mum said was “Aman, aman, aman!” which is what most Armenian mothers say whenever there is a catastrophe.[1] I told my sister about Bertie’s challenge over coffee in Soho, and she smirked and gave me a hug.
Then I threw my bucket list away and booked the flight to Bangkok.
So here I was, on day three, aiming high with Somchai, and on my first gold run. Except it meant parting with hundreds of hard-earned pounds.
I looked over my shoulder at the backpackers picking through second-hand books in boxes. I belong to that group, I thought, I’m unshaven just like them, T-shirted, with cargo pants and flip flops, just like them, instead of a group dealing in rubies. I mean, what the fuck do I know about rubies?
My T-shirt felt wet against my chest and burning beads of sweat dripped in my eyes.
“Do not cash them just yet!” I implored. “Give them back, please!”
The agent paused her counting.
“Can I get them back?” I repeated.
She looked up before handing back the slips. “No problem,” she affirmed. “You come back later.”
I looked behind me, at Somchai. He was propped against the door of the limousine.
He peeked back, through the gap in the stalls. “Is something the matter?” he asked, in his calm English tone.
“I cannot do it,” I stuttered.
“You cannot pay?” he replied.
“I know nothing about rubies, I’m sorry.” He had spent a full afternoon with me, taking me around his factory floor, showing me the worth of rubies and the good ones versus the not so good, teaching me how to sell them in Hong Kong, and telling me about his contact there. I felt bad. I was an idiot. But it was no good. This was way beyond my league. I did not belong in the gem trade. “I’m sorry,” I repeated as I put the checks back in my pocket.
“No problem,” Somchai replied. The limousine door opened, and he got back in.
Somchai disappeared behind the limousine’s darkened glass as he settled into the back seat. Should I have doubted Somchai, after all? I wondered, as the limousine drove off.
[1] In Armenian Աման, pronounced “Aman”, is a colloquialism for “Oh my God!”
THE END
Author Bio: An engineer by trade, a Tai Chi sword practitioner for fun, Mel Christie returned to writing short stories after thirty years working and traveling in Asia, Europe and North America. Originally from London, he is now settled in the D.C. metro area, but regularly escapes to find new subjects to write about—when not hosting the Bethesda Memoirs Meetup or attending writer workshops and public events at the Bethesda Writer's Center. His debut short story collection, in development, is viewable here: https://flyingcormorant.com.