A Thousand Peacocks, Thirty-Six Pounds of Gold, and Not One Ear Fit to Hold Her
Margaret Whitmore-Hessian, Editor-in-Chief · luxury / the editor decides
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The Editor-in-Chief is in Dubai for reasons she describes only as "a fitting," and has found the catalogue's business there anyway.
I came to Dubai for a fitting. I will not say what was being fitted. I will say that it was not me, that the tailor's name is Anand, and that Anand has been dressing the women of my family since before my uncle Bertram founded this publication. I had my scarf. It was thirty-one degrees. I still had my scarf.
On Saturday morning Anand's nephew drove me through the Gold District, which is the only part of any city where I feel the shop windows are trying hard enough, and we stopped because there was a crowd, and I do not stop for crowds, and I stopped. In the window of a showroom called Jewel of Joy, behind glass, hung two earrings. I use the word loosely. Each one stood taller than a Burgundy barrel on its end. Gulf News puts them at a metre and a fifth long and nearly seventy centimetres across, which is to say about four feet by twenty-seven inches, and they are made, between them, of sixteen and a half kilograms of twenty-two carat gold. Thirty-six pounds. I have owned automobiles with less gold in them, and one, the Facel Vega, with less dignity.
They are by Joyalukkas, the jewellers, who call the pair Mayura Sahasra, A Thousand Peacocks. Guinness World Records has given them two titles on the same morning: the heaviest pair of gold earrings and the largest pair of gold earrings, the first by more than five times the old record. Fifty-five artisans, by the paper's count, and five thousand eight hundred and forty hours. I once waited five thousand hours for the viscount to finish a sentence. I got less for it.
Now. The boys will want this ruled on shape and not on price, and the boys are right, which I tell them rarely so that it keeps. Bart and the other one remind me weekly that the catalogue does not care how big a thing is. It cares where the curve goes. So I looked where the curve goes. A jhumka, for the uninitiated, is the bell. A dome at the top, then the flare, then the hem, a full skirt of gold flaring out and swinging, the shape a bell makes when it has been asked to ring and intends to. These two do it at four feet. There is nothing straight on either of them below the hook. They do not hang. They settle.
And here is the part that makes them catalogue-eligible at all, because the publication covers objects and never the people near them: no one will ever wear these. There is no ear in the Emirates or anywhere else built to the task. They will hang in that window, seven days a week, ten in the morning to ten at night, free to look at, and they will be admired the way a cathedral bell is admired, for what they are and not for whom. I find that restful. Phillipa, my sommelier in Reims, says a pair should count as two entries. Phillipa has never owned a pair of anything she did not lose one of.
The ruling: Thiccc, bell first, and ruled so from the top. Two bells of solid gold, flared at the hem, too heavy for anyone and therefore entirely for the catalogue. The pair is admitted as one entry because I said so. Filed under Domestic Goods, Precious, Unwearable. Bart may appeal in writing. Bart knows where to find me, which is to say he does not.
Margaret Whitmore-Hessian, Editor-in-Chief, filing from the back of Anand's nephew's car, in continuous operation since my uncle Bertram founded this publication, the year of which is a fitting matter and not a public one.