The Mystery of Buddha's Earring

A tale from the Temple of the Tooth

Many years ago, back in the 1930s, I had visited the great Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka. It was the time of the Perahera, the festival when the sacred tooth of the Buddha, preserved in the temple, is taken out in a magnificent procession of caparisoned elephants, accompanied by hundreds of drummers and whirling Kandyan dancers.

I was taken into the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, where a huge marble image of the Buddha is seated. The chamber was crowded with saffron-robed monks, and thick with incense smoke. I stood there, transfixed by the serene smile of the deity. In one ear it wore a huge and fabulous sapphire earring, the likes of which I had never seen. But the other ear, I noticed, was bare.

Later our Sri Lankan host explained to me that the idol had originally worn a pair of priceless earrings, wrought from the finest sapphires ever quarried at Sri Lanka's famed Ratnapura mines. But somewhere over the passage of years, one of the earrings had mysteriously disappeared. And nobody knew exactly how or where.

After that visit to Sri Lanka, I returned home to Hyderabad. But I never forgot the faboulous sapphire earring of the Buddha, nor the mystery of its missing twin.

A few years later, a strange thing happened. Wakefield, an Englishman who lived in Hyderabad at the time, happened to walk into the office of his assistant, a certain Riaz Ahmed, and there on his desk he saw a large, dazzling, beautiful, blue paperweight.

Picking it up, Wakefield remarked to Ahmed that it looked far too beautiful, and too valuable, for its humble function. Asked where he had got it from, Ahmed replied that he didn't know very much about it. It had been gathering dust in a cupboard at home for many years, so he thought he might as well bring it to the office to use as a desk ornament.

When Wakefield probed him further, he recalled that it had apparently been in his family for many generations, and it was rumoured that it had been presented to his ancestor, who had been a courtier to Tipu Sultan, by the great Tipu himself.

Wakefield told Ahmed that he suspected that the paperweight was extremely valuable, and advised him to get it valued by an expert. So Ahmed had it photographed, so that he could send it to a leading Bombay jeweller of the time for his assessment.

And that is where, entirely by coincidence, I came into the picture. Just around that time, I happened to visit a relative of Ahmed. She casually mentioned this incident to me, and asked whether I would like to see the photograph. More out of politeness than anything else, I said yes.

When I saw the photograph, I was stunned. For there in front of me was the missing twin of Buddha's fabulous sapphire earring I had seen at the Temple of the Tooth.

I believe Ahmed's paperweight was finally sold to the Bombay jeweller. He received what he considered to be a handsome amount for it. But I suspect, it was just a tiny fraction of its actual value.

Over the years I have often wondered how the earring found its way from the Temple of the Tooth into the court of Tipu Sultan. But more than that, I wonder whose hands the earring finally ended up in. And I wish I could meet that person and tell him the history of the earring... a history that, by strange coincidence, I am the only person in the world who knows of.

Al Kahef
Banjara Hills
Hyderabad