Back in the day The Evergreen Hotel was a bit of a vibe.
A lot of foreign travellers who were in Jaipur on gemstone business used to set up camp there over winter and use it as a base to do the season’s buying from.
Sometimes it felt like a mini township – with neighbours in and out of each others rooms all day and half the night. Checking out eachothers finds and newest jewellery designs, inspecting bags of beads and stones, doing trades, smoking dope, and gossiping about new stuff arriving to the market or the latest scandelous scammers in town. Everyone was hoping to get lucky, make some money, and it gave a bit of a buzz to the place, a sort of simmering just below the surface.
Jaipur is the biggest city in Rajasthan and has been the hub of India’s gem trade for centuries. A key trading post for Rubies, Saphires, jewel-cutters, silver-workers, and goldsmiths for literally hundreds of years.
Serious stone buyers travel there from all over the world. From top European jewellery designers to professional money launderers, you’d spy them in the backs of the tiny jewel shops, with their mircroscopes and special little laser lights and expensive shoes. But The Evergreen was for that other breed of trader a bit lower down the foodchain… grafters and perpetual nomads, people who seem to migrate around the world following the party scene, hustling bits of business everywhere, changing country every six months when the visas run out.
The rooms were arranged in a square pattern on three floors, rows of doors along open landings above a central courtyard. A bit like an old fashioned prison, – except with entire families of cats living on the stairs, a permanent fog of dope smoke, and loads of skinny, shirtless Italian men in flip flops lounging about the place with names like Goa Pete, and Om-Shanti Paulo.
I was only in town for one night on my way back to Pushkar, so I’d stopped at The Evergreen for a bit of old times sake.
Inside i met a Dutchman who was also just passing through. He must have been around my age at the time, handsome, early thirties, – with one of those deep chestnut tans of someone who hadn’t seen a winter in years. I can’t remember his name but i do recall taking a bit of a shine to him and we’d started chatting. It turned out that he too was a bit of a roving antiques trader and had recently spent some months in Africa. We discovered that we were into similar types of pieces, – mystical, religious, and spiritual artefacts, objects with ritual or magical purpose.
The Evergreen kitchen was usually pretty good but this particular week the whole thing had been pulled out along with three tons of pipes and rubble, and was heaped in the middle of the courtyard for ‘refurbishments’. Every surface was covered in a thick chalky layer of dust that dried your throat out and sat on your toungue. Even the stairwell cats billowed up great powdery clouds of white when you stroked them.
Walking into town to get away from the dust and find some dinner my new favorite dutchman told me a story. About an experience he’d had buying an old boar tusk talisman from a dealer in Camaroon. How while they were trying to tie up the deal it was like they both suddenly took leave of their senses and had become obsessed with this object. He said before he knew what happened they’d gone from a friendly conversation between dealers to finding themselves yelling and fighting over it, caught in a rage that sprang out of nowhere, like in a flash this tusk became most important thing in the whole world.
He said it freaked him out when he’d realized,
how some of these objects are powerful.