[Caitlin]

City of Pearls part 5

Emeralds and rubies aside, however, Hyderabad does seem an odd city to be at the top of the pearl trade. The ocean is some 325 kilometers (200 mi) distant, and, commercially speaking, the city is a relative backwater compared to booming Bombay and Bangalore. (See Aramco World, November/December 1997.) Aleem Uddin, owner of Watan Jewellry, says without hesitation that Hyderabad's commercial position is due to "the high quality and low cost of labor." A visit to his processing center confirms that behind almost every door in Patthargatti there are pearl sorters, drillers and stringers, each with hundreds of years of family experience.
Aleem buys his Chinese pearls in bulk, and his first task is to sort them. Young female sorters sit around a table draped in red cloth, a color that allows them to best discern the tonal nuances of each pearl's outer layer of nacre, called its "orient." A two-kilogram (4½-lb) mound of pearls is in the middle of the cloth. The women sort in iterative steps, first separating by color—pink, peach, white and gray—and then by shade—light pink from dark pink, milk white from cream white, and so on.
Because demand is highest for the white pearls commonly used in mixed gem settings, entire lots are often bleached in boiling water for up to five days, depending on the intended shade. Pearls may also be brightened in a bath of hydrogen peroxide, which does not change their color.
Yet the sorting is not yet finished, for the pearls must also be separated by shape. They may be symmetrical—round, flat or "button" (one flat side)—or assymetrical, with shapes called flower, potato, rice, seed or baroque. The only way to be sure of a pearl's true shape is to roll it between finger and thumb or finger and tabletop, to feel as well as to see it. While pearls may look nearly uniform in a mass, what were once subtle differences of color and shape become quite ugly when the pearls are strung singly, one beside another, on a necklace. Perfect matching is necessary.
The art of drilling pearls is second only to diamond cutting among the exacting, unforgiving steps toward the creation of a fine jewel. By skewing the way it hangs on a string, just a small slip of the drill can disqualify even the most lustrous specimen from ever adorning a neck or an ear.
For that reason, Randrala Manshi uses a hand-powered bow drill, and takes great care in his work on a matched set of top-quality two-millimeter (¼") pearls. He examines each one carefully to select the best pathway for drilling a hole whose diameter measures 0.3 millimeters (1/64"), fixes one in the wooden vise on his workbench, and sharpens the iron bit's flat edge.