[Caitlin]

City of Pearls part 2
From his office next to Mahboob's table, Das explains how his family came to Hyderabad. "Two hundred years ago my forefathers fled the Mughals and sought calm and quiet in the south. Under the nizams there was always peace and always a strong demand for gems. I should know—I appraised the last nizam's personal collection. Even after years of sales and dispersal to relatives, the things I saw in that room could scarcely be believed."
Not 20 kilometers (12 mi) from where Das and Mahboob sit lie the ruins of Golconda Fort, whose nearby mines gave the world the Hope and Koh-i-nur diamonds, now in the Smithsonian Institution and the British coronation crown respectively. Diamonds aplenty there once were, but it is pearls that have, over time, left the boldest mark on Hyderabadi culture and trade, and today it is the city's pearl dealers who are champions of the jewelry market.
According to Sanskrit texts on gemology—a metaphysical genre known as ratnapariksa, or "appreciation of gems"—pearls join diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires as the five "god-given" stones, or maharatni. The millennia-old Vedic prayer of Atharvan invokes their special power: "Born of the wind and the air / Born of flashing lightning and starlight / May this shell and in it this pearl protect us from danger."
The 13th-century ratnapariksa of Thakkura Pheru, assaymaster of Sultan Alauddin Khalji of Delhi, who ruled from 1296 to 1315, describes in mythological language the fable of the demon Bala, who supposedly offered himself as a sacrifice to the Vedic god Indra. In reward, Indra transformed his teeth into pearls, his bones into diamonds, and his eyes into sapphires. The pearls were thought to grow in cloudbanks, cobra hoods, fish mouths, elephant temples, boar tusks, right-whorled conch shells, the nodes of bamboo stalks and oyster shells—but in each of these places but one they remained invisible to humans.
Sultan Alauddin himself was no stranger to pearls. The Khalji court poet Amir Khusrau described those plundered in the sultan's 1310 conquest of the Kakatiya Empire, which opened South India to six centuries of Muslim rule. "As for the pearls, you will not find the like of them even if you kept diving for all eternity. They gleam so bright that clouds must rain for many years before such pearls again reach the fastness of the sea."
Once retrieved from the fastness of the sea, pearls in those days reached India in two ways: from the Gulf of Mannar in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) via the south Indian city of Madurai, and from the Arabian Gulf via the port of Goa. The French jeweler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who made four sales trips to India in the late 17th century, preferred to do business in Goa—then controlled by the Portuguese—because it was a free market. Elsewhere, whoever ruled generally had first choice in the market and the last word on price.