[Caitlin]

City of Pearls Part 6
With his right hand he loops the bowstring sideways around the pencil-thin shaft that he holds upright in his left hand, and then he places the bit in position. Slowly he saws the bow back and forth, gently allowing the bit to penetrate the nacre without pressure. Keeping a steady rhythm, on every third stroke he dips his little finger into a water dish and flicks a drop onto the pearl. By wetting the dust that mounds around the hole, he avoids binding up the bit before it exits cleanly from the bottom of the pearl.
Pearls of such small size take no more than a minute to pierce, but Manshi's concentration remains intense until the entire set has been finished. As he works, the soft and liquid sounds of the sorters' shop-talk in Telugu fade away: They know that a drillmaster, or barnalgaru, is at work.
To increase output, Watan has recently switched to electric drilling for low-end stock, and already 20-year-old Muhammad Shafiq has learned to run the motorized press like a seasoned machinist. His workroom sounds and smells like a dentist's office, with the same high whine of a drill and the same acrid odor of burnt calcium—pearl dust, in this case, rather than tooth enamel.
Since before anyone can remember, this pearl dust has been popular among Hyderabadis as a medicine, called moti podi. Professor Hakeem Syed Mahmood Najmi is a follower of the yunani system of pharmacology, developed by the ancient Greeks and then translated and expanded by the Arabs in the Middle Ages. (See Aramco World, May/June 1997.)
Najmi buys pearl dust from the drillers for $3.00 a kilogram ($1.36/lb), reduces it to a talc-fine powder in mortar and pestle, and mixes it in a three-percent concentration with lime paste and oil. "Intestinal fevers, cardiac distress, nerves—all these ailments respond to the pearl," explains the white-haired professor. "We used to grind down whole pearls, but that has become too expensive."
Yunani medicine is just one example of the heterogeneous cultural treasure that history's waves have washed into Hyderabad. With the coming of Islam to the Deccan in the 14th century, the court languages of Urdu and Persian joined the Dravidian tongues of the Hindu peasantry. Added to those are the more recent arrivals, Hindi and English, and what results today is a rich polyglot heard on every street corner.
The last 50 years have brought extensive demographic changes to Hyderabad. The Urdu-speaking Muslim inhabitants—once the overwhelming urban majority—have been overwhelmed in turn by Hindi-speaking migrants from the north and by Telugu-speaking villagers from the surrounding state of Andhra Pradesh, many of whom have now found jobs in the lower levels of the pearl trade.
What had been near-universal literacy in Urdu was set back when the local university adopted English as its language of instruction and primary schools stopped recruiting Urdu-qualified teachers. The very survival of Urdu in the Deccan was in doubt until recently, when a multifaceted recovery effort began to bear fruit.